The toll is now 38.6 M Americans unemployed due not to Covid-19 as claimed by most media coverage but due to state governors’ executive order shutdowns. Meanwhile, not one governor is out of a paycheck.
Peggy Noonan noted, “On Tuesday Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf said in a press briefing that those pushing against the shutdown are cowards. Local officials who ‘cave in to this coronavirus’ will pay a price in state funding. ‘These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy. In the middle of a war.’ He said he’ll pull state certificates such as liquor licenses for any businesses that open. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer called anti-lockdown demonstrations ‘racist and misogynistic.’ She called the entire movement ‘political.’
Maybe some protestors fit Governor Whitmer's description, but not most and this is not the message most protestors were trying to convey. They were saying they are worried and facing very real financial catastrophe. Meanwhile, she plays the victim, changes the goalpost of what she says she’s trying to accomplish via her executive orders, and continues to hold tight to the reins. While people have no job, no paycheck as a direct offshoot of her shutdown polices, she still has a job and collects her check.
Protestors are also portrayed as anti-American rabble: “But this is what they’re getting in return: ‘Coronavirus protesters turn the American flag into a symbol of selfishness.’ In other words: Fight for freedom — fight for a return to saner times — fight for the Constitution, for self-sufficiency, for any of the rights that have been long-cherished, long-held in this country as God-given — and that’s ‘selfish.’”
Jobs are purportedly the concern of both the Left and the Right, but state governors have willingly deep-sixed consideration of the ripple effects of their shutdown polices in the name of public health. Now that so many governors have taken such extreme positions it’s making it harder for any of them to backtrack because, in their minds, it makes it look like they are backing down, or worse, that they were wrong all along.
Without yielding to cynicism, it seems likely the shutdowns would not have lasted as long as they have and would not yet be in place if governors had also lost their jobs and paychecks.
History is going to judge these statewide lockdowns harshly.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
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