MICHAEL WALSH: America Should Shed the Mask of Zorro.

What began as an admonition, “Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve,” has since morphed into a semi-permanent series of lockdowns, issued in direct violation of the Constitution, especially by various petty tyrants in states like California, New York, and Illinois—the bluest of the left-wing “blue” states.

Dire warnings, and even police action, against Americans who chose not to take a knee before arbitrary tyranny were quickly forgotten, however, when the death of a criminal in Minneapolis police custody, however occasioned, was seized upon by the institutional Left as the pretext for widespread riots and other civil disorder in order to affect the outcome of this fall’s election.

Right on cue, the media temporarily abandoned its self-appointed roles as hall monitors against the kind of traditional Americans they despise and switched to their preferred mode as cheerleaders for “progressivism” of any kind. As the cities went up in flames, statues were ripped down, and hordes of rage-filled protesters filled the streets, shoulder-to-shoulder against “systemic racism,” the New York Times, CNN, and the like cared not one whit about the “social distancing” they were insisting upon just a few days earlier.

Indeed, a recent Times story summed up the media’s hypocrisy: “Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests last spring as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism.”

How about that!

“I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that,” said an epidemiologist at the University of Texas in Houston. “I have a hard time articulating why that is OK.”

The reason should be obvious: your attitude toward the pandemic is directly related to your politics at this divisive moment, and all principles are to be forged accordingly.

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