It seems that nearly every community, especially those that surround our big cities, has been plagued by panic-buying amid the mass hysteria the media have whipped up around the Wuhan flu.

People are frantically buying toilet paper, for example, as though the companies that produce such items are about to be shuttered.  They are not, but people are stocking up anyway.  Are they all fearful of catching this flu?  Maybe some of them are, which is why we are seeing face masks on people in lines to get into grocery stores.  But the shelves are full by morning, thanks to the truckers who deliver the goods and the employees who work through the night to stock them.

But by afternoon, they are stripped bare — meat, produce, milk and eggs, all gone.  It all seems so desperate until, as in New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut, the governors of those states have shut their states down!  They've ordered all sit-down restaurants closed and all other non-essential businesses closed.  Many of these establishments cannot survive even two weeks without customers.  They've put millions of their own citizens out of work with a snap of their fingers.  They've ordered people to "shelter in place," to stay home, cloistered away from all other human contact but close family.

Now all this planning and hoarding seems very smart.  Each of these states has a Democrat governor.  These are the states with the most homelessness and the most ridiculous policies with regard to crime and the people who commit them; they are kind to criminals and thus cruel to their law-abiding citizens.  Shutting everything down is just one more example of their inner authoritarianism. 

Where else are we seeing long lines?  At gun stores.  For at least a week now, there have been long lines at every gun store in California.  Why?  Probably because these states are releasing felons from prisons in the name of the virus and announcing that they would not be arresting anyone who commits a non-violent crime.  San Francisco has been operating on this premise for a long time now, which is why its citizens suffer from car break-ins by the minute.  Many of those suffering from Covid-19 in that city are homeless - drug addicts and the mentally ill with a host of other health conditions.  So it stands to reason that people who have never before thought they needed a means of defense at home believe they may need a weapon now.  Not so dumb and not at all deranged.  They are citizens who know their rights and do not trust those governing their states.

It's a safe bet that they are all Trump-supporters or about to be.  It is enough to make one wonder whether these Democrat governors have ordered businesses closed because they want the gun stores closed.  There are easily 300 million privately owned guns in the U.S.  No matter how much Democrats like Joe Biden want them all confiscated, just as Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot confiscated the guns from their populations before killing them, American gun-owners will never give them up without a firefight.

It is quite likely that millions of previously Democratic voters are wising up to their party's big agenda.  Perhaps they've been listening to Joe Biden, the presumptive nominee for the office of the presidency.  He is vowing to confiscate guns, to stop all fracking, to get cars off the roads, to legislate open borders, etc.  He is promising to be a one-man liberty- and economy-destroyer, or his handlers are; old Joe is way past his sell-by date.  No sentient person will vote for this man.  This black swan pandemic may actually mean the end of the progressive left.

If this virus episode has proven anything, it is the proof of the terrible damage "progressivism" has done to this nation.  Watching the crisis unfold in Italy and the rest of Europe should put to bed forever the notion that socialized medicine can work anywhere. It cannot. Like socialism itself, it has failed everywhere it has been tried.  China's perhaps purposeful imposition of this virus on the rest of the world should be the last nail in the coffin of the Democrats' "Medicare for all."  It is only because of President Trump's assembling a team of virologists and experts in logistics and recruiting massive help from private industry that this virus will be conquered sooner than any pandemic of the past.  He has dispensed with a long list of ridiculous federal regulations that initially hampered the production of test kits, which has has sped up the fight against this particular flu, which still has not killed nearly as many people as the regular flu did in 2018–2019.  Everything on the left's agenda exacerbates an epidemic: mass transit; urban, small space living; climate alarmism (viruses like cold weather, not hot). People are not individuals to the left, they are merely an inconvenience they must suffer to retain political power. They have no more respect for their own supporters than they do their opposition. But we natives are getting restless. This destruction of our economy must stop for it is playing right into the hands of communist China. 

It was national treasure Mark Levin who on his Friday radio program discussed this aspect of what has been called panic-buying and hoarding but may actually be a recognition of the authoritarian stupidity of their own governors. Not one of these wealthy men in power will suffer an iota of discomfort or lack of any supplies or income but they are patting themselves on the back for their state-wide shut-down orders which is entirely unnecessary. With men like this having power over us, we need to step up our resistance to this Democrat power grab and show our support for President Trump. The Democrats and their media have spent three years calling him 'Hitler' and now they are angry that he has not commandeered the national government like a dictator. He is leaving the states to their elected governors, perhaps to demonstrate that we should be more careful who we elect to run them. None of us should need to hoard anything but now it seems that planning ahead to survive the idiocy of our leftist governors is a very smart move.

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near one." —JRR Tolkien

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.