California shows COVID-19 shutdowns are all about politics, power plays

OPINION:

California has just seen an uptick in coronavirus case counts. That’s after the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, spent the past several months issuing some of the country’s toughest crackdowns on freedoms, including executive orders that closed schools, closed churches, closed businesses and required residents to stay home.

So in response to the uptick in coronavirus case counts, the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has — get this — issued more stay-at-home crackdowns. Come again?

Welcome to California; abandon science, all ye who enter here.

In California, all of America has the perfect example of why shutdowns and shutterings of businesses shut-ins of residents don’t do anything to stop or even slow the spread of the coronavirus.

In California, all of America can plainly see that all these government-imposed restrictions on individual freedoms and activities are purely political in nature. There’s nothing scientific about them. There’s nothing fact-based or medically sound to show with them.

“Stay-at-home orders were extended Tuesday for two large parts of California as hospitals have been severely strained by surging Covid-19 cases, health officials said,” NBC News just reported. “Most of the state is under regional stay-at-home orders that have required some businesses, like bars, wineries and hair salons, to close and have reduced capacity in others.”

Well, if the restrictions have worked, if the restrictions do indeed work at all, why the spike in coronavirus case counts?

That’s the common sense questions the Democrats in California can’t seem to answer with any sort of certainty. The best they offer is that residents haven’t abided by the stay-at-home, stay-out-of-work, stay-off-the-streets orders as completely as they should have — so it’s the residents’ own fault that the government has to issue more restrictions. That’s not good enough. That’s not an answer.

That’s not an excuse to strip freedoms and steal constitutional rights.

Either stay at home orders work, or they don’t. And California, like the rest of the states run by leftists who are busily running roughshod over the Constitution and using the coronavirus as cause to exercise their tyrannical tendencies — all these states have had ample time to prove, with science, with truthful numbers, with fact-based statistics analysis, that staying at home is the surefire way to stop the spread of the virus.

Almost a year’s worth of ample time, to be exact.

Californians — all Americans, for that matter — are tired of the government’s feeble excuses and justifications.

“Suffering followed by more suffering continues as too many residents and businesses behave as if we are not living in the most dangerous time of the most devastating pandemic,” said the health director for Los Angeles County, Barbara Ferrer, in NBC.

“We are each other’s keepers,” she added.

No. Nope. That’s a communist China line of thought.

That’s the collectivist way of thinking, the one that argues that since we are all interconnected, we are all members of the same humanity, that we must all equally, identically, collectively behave in the same manner — for the greater good of all — and that we must all subject our individual wills to the demands of government. We must stifle our individual identities, minds, thinking and analytical abilities, instincts, desires and wills for a government that is there, according to communist ideology, to protect citizens from their own harmful selves.

Perhaps at the beginning of this virus, when the unknowns outweighed the knowns, it was logical for Americans to stuff individualism to the side and abide government’s guidance.

But now?

Now when all the signs point to the stupidity of government’s crackdowns, and the hypocrisies of the cracker-downers who violate the very stay-at-home standards they try to impose on their own citizens?

Now these coronavirus-tied orders are being shown for what they are: political tools to buoy politicians’ power.

And neither Californians nor the rest of Americans should abide by these unconstitutional mandates any longer.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.