You’d think the left would have learned from its boneheaded mistakes after the astounding presidential victory of Donald Trump in 2016. And boy, would you be wrong.
From Kentucky to Oregon, protests have been staged in recent days by angry Americans sick to distraction of corona-lockdown. Wielding placards and scowls, some of them riding safely in cars — and a tiny few brandishing firearms — they’ve converged on state capitals and public spaces from Michigan to Montana and New Hampshire to Pennsylvania, anxious to achieve one common goal: getting back to work.
The reaction from the elite, mainly white, leftist media has been stunning, depressing. And familiar.
“At a string of small ‘reopen America’ protests across the country this week, mask-less citizens proudly flouted social distancing guidance while openly carrying semiautomatic rifles and waving American flags and signs with ‘ironic’ swastikas,” Charlie Warzel wrote in the New York Times Sunday, minimizing all protesters as fringe-players and kooks unworthy of consideration.
“This week’s public displays of defiance — a march for the freedom to be infected — are the logical conclusion of the modern far-right’s donor-funded, shock jock-led liberty movement,” Warzel continued.
The Times is not the only media outlet to bash citizens and public officials who disagree with the paper’s wisdom, branding them as idiotic, gun-loving, Trump-supporting, abortion-hating, racist, sexist, homophoobic, tranphobic and misogynistic numbskulls.
In a Washington Post opinion piece provocatively titled “In Florida, we love our beaches. Thanks to our governor, now we can die for them,” journalist and professor Diane Roberts, an eighth-generation Floridian, accused the the state’s Republican chief executive of encouraging the potential premature deaths of his constituents by opening some beaches for a few hours a day. While sunbathing and sand-sitting is prohibited, and social-distancing is enforced by police, Roberts still believes folks in the Sunshine State haven’t got the brain power to protect themselves and others
“This is the state where alligators regularly invade suburban swimming pools, where people get liquored up and compete to see who can toss a dead mullet the farthest, where pastel retirement communities report alarmingly high rates of sexually transmitted diseases, and sometimes the ground that you relied upon to be terra firma simply collapses under your feet into a sinkhole, swallowing you up,” she wrote. It isn’t clear how these random and unrelated oddities justify calling millions of people ‘gator-bait or reckless do-do heads. As if on cue, #FloridaMorons started trending on Twitter.
“I didn’t vote for DeSantis,” she wrote (shocker) but I hoped that as a Yale grad, he would be smart, intellectually rigorous and committed to helping Florida get through the plague in one piece. I shouldn’t have been such a snob: An Ivy League degree is no guarantor of intelligence or leadership ability, as amply demonstrated by President Trump (Penn ’68).”
Academia has jumped with gusto on the stupid killer-conservative bandwagon. A study by four economists, one each from Harvard, the universities of Chicago, Zurich and Warwick in the U.K., concluded that watching Sean Hannity on Fox News, who downplayed the coronavirus threat early in the known pandemic (as did many others) before changing his tune, “leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths.” Mind you, the pointy-headed professors could not ask victims if they actually watched Hannity or switched to CNN or the Food Network because they are, you know, dead. The paper has not been peer-reviewed or accepted for publication in a journal, but it was the subject of a credulous fake news story posted to Vox.
On Wednesday, Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democratic governor, warned officials in both major parties, “This is no time to act stupidly. Period.” As leaders of states including, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee and South Carolina, Alaska and Oklahoma have either joined Florida in allowing some businesses, nonessential health-care facilities and recreation areas to reopen, or plan to do so in the next week or two, there was no doubt Cuomo was taking them on. He may regret his words.
Most people are not stupid or suicidal. They know the risks of coronavirus and are taking life-saving precautions. But for some folks, including single parents and those who labored near the poverty line, working from home is not an option. People are suffering, going broke, and are sick of being told what to do by elites who don’t share in the economic apocalypse. And as they did in 2016, the elites have reflexively behaved like schoolyard bullies, hurling insults at people they consider inferior.
We all must be careful. But some of us have weighed the risks, and decided that getting back to some semblance of normalcy is preferable to endless lockdown.
This means another thing: four more years of a president they despise, a man eager to see his people start going about their business in a safe way. The left has learned nothing from defeat.
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