Maine state rep calls governor’s COVID-19 response ‘despotism,’ urges resistance

Republican Maine state Rep. Lawrence Lockman sent a more than 3,000-word screed to his email list on Friday attacking Maine Governor Janet Mills for her efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the email, sent to supporters of his “Maine First Project,” Lockman called Mills’ stay-at-home order “house arrest,” “soft despotism” and “martial law lite,” declaring that “progressives see the pandemic as an opportunity to fundamentally transform Maine and America into a police state where citizens shut up and do what they’re told by the ‘experts.'”

Lockman is well known for a series of extreme public statements, including defending rape in order to argue against abortion and spreading white supremacist conspiracy theories.

The Amherst lawmaker was narrowly re-elected to the House for his fourth term in 2018 and is currently challenging incumbent state Sen. Kim Rosen for her District 8 seat. He has the endorsement of former Maine Governor Paul LePage.

Targeting Dr. Shah

In the email, Lockman specifically targets Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention head Dr. Nirav Shah, whom he calls an “incompetent” who is making too much of the pandemic, insisting that Shah should also be reporting “the number of diagnosed seasonal flu cases in Maine” in his daily briefings.

The idea that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu is a common trope among some on the conservative fringe.

Lockman urges his readers to contact Dr. Shah, providing the email and telephone number of CDC communications director Robert Long and instructing them to ask him to release cell phone data that Lockman claims Shah has that “allows him to monitor how often Mainers leave their homes during the lockdown.”

Lockman also paraphrases a quote from John Adams during the Revolutionary War, calling on his Maine First supporters to “be students of politics and war” in order to resist “the clenched fist of the Nanny State upending our lives and our livelihoods.”

Other attacks on public health officials and the media

The email is Lockman’s latest and longest attack on public health measures instituted to address the COVID-19 pandemic. He has also been railing against public health directives on Facebook for the past several weeks.

Mixed in among a series of posts spreading anti-immigrant and anti-Chinese conspiracy theories, Lockman has called stay-home recommendations unconstitutional and totalitarian, insisted that “CNN is far more of a public health threat than all the bars in all the cities of the country,” called federal National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci “a Deep-State Hillary Clinton–loving stooge” and insisted, as late as Wednesday of last week, that the coronavirus pandemic “could turn out to be more akin to a severe flu season” that was simply “hysteria being stoked by the Fake News media.”

Wide, bipartisan majorities disagree with Lockman

On this issue, as with most of the causes he pursues, Lockman is well outside the societal mainstream. According to national polls, Americans across the political spectrum see current restrictions on commerce and contact as necessary to combat the pandemic.

While Lockman has previously been successful in using his extreme positions to advance his political career, it’s unclear that strategy will work as well in a senate race in a district that is less solidly Republican than his current constituency — particularly on an issue where there is such bipartisan agreement on the need for businesses to close and Americans to stay at home and practice physical distancing.

I would imagine that the rejection of Lockman’s extreme views will only increase as the number of Mainers who have died from the pandemic and the number of Maine health care workers who who have contracted the disease continue to rise.

While no polling has been released on Mainers’ opinion of Mills’ response to the crisis, Dr. Shah has a Facebook fan group with nearly 10,000 members.

Top: Rep. Lockman official photo.