Politico cites the usual anonymous sources to give us quotes like, "He doesn’t think anyone should be able to tell him what to do, and he’s going to do whatever he wants," which with a little work could be made into a new Liberty University fight song. They also strongly suggest Falwell and the university have lied outright about everything from which staff is required to be on campus to which "medical professionals" he consulted with to justify his decision.

The short version is that Falwell, like a great number of evangelical grifters, appears to make his decisions according to what would be good for Falwell. And right now, downplaying the dangers of the virus is still advantageous to Falwell, who like Trump imagines himself to be in charge of forces of nature that he is not, and will never be, in charge of.

The odds that COVID-19 will be spreading from Liberty University to surrounding Lynchburg, Virginia, are extraordinarily high, because there is no such thing as a socially isolated dormitory. And there's very little the town can do about it, unless officials want to institute a mandatory quarantine and station the National Guard around the perimeter. There seems no good reason for Falwell to want to reopen; classes remain online, and Falwell's decision does not seem to rest on wanting to provide a place only for those students with nowhere else to go, as have other, more real and less dishonest universities. Countless articles have portrayed Falwell as someone who runs the university as his own fiefdom, for his own personal benefit, and he has reliably tied the university to far-right Republicanism in efforts to maintain himself as something of a Republican kingmaker.

But it also has to be said, yet again, that any so-called "religious" figure who adopts Donald J. Trump as their personal savior is a self-demonstrated fraud. Forget the rest of it: If the tax-dodging law-breaking money-obsessed sociopathic adulterer is the one who will lead your religious sub-sect to worldly power, maybe skip a few steps and just buy the Guyana compound now. Trump will probably even sell you the parcel.

There have been rumors in the past, very small ones, about the Liberty University trustees perhaps losing patience with Falwell turning their institution into a nationwide demonstration of all that is wrong with white evangelicals. Now that he's endangering student lives and the lives of Lynchburg's residents for this new stunt, perhaps the grumblings will become louder. The university does not have to be synonymous with grifting, lying, misinformation, propaganda-peddling, and general political toadying. It's a choice that is being made.