COVID-19 bringing devastating groupthink consequences

by | May 7, 2020

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The most damaging and lasting effects of COVID-19 on America won’t be so much ones of physical or medical as they will be mental.

How so?

Where Americans once thought for themselves, the government has taken control. Where Americans once decided on their own, bureaucrats have seized the reins.

What’s worse is the government has successfully turned those who want to think for themselves into Public Enemy Number One.

Don’t want shut down your business, live off the taxpayer-funded stimulus dime, stay in your home, safely out of social distancing violators’ way? You’re selfish. You’re putting lives in danger. You have blood on your hands.

How dare you.

“Dallas salon owner jailed for reopening in violation of court order,” Dallas News just reported, about a woman, Shelley Luther, who defied local and state orders, judge’s restraining order, to open her Salon a la Mode to business this week.

She was also fined $7,000.

She was also treated to a sanctimonious scolding by the judge, who called her “selfish” for — well, for what? Trying to provide for her home and family?

Such is where COVID-19 madness has gone. 

Kudos to Luther, for responding to the judge with this brief statement: “Feeding my kids is not selfish. I have hair stylists that are going hungry because they’d rather feed their kids,” she said.

But where’s the rest of America on this? Sure, the governor of Texas wrote the judge demanding Luther’s immediate release. Thank goodness on that.

Sure, there are pockets of freedom fighters out there. You see them outside the capitol in Michigan, in the streets of Boston, on the sidewalks of New York City, some social distancing, some not; some wearing face masks, some not; some exercising their Second Amendment rights; some not.

You see them at the beaches in California, defying executive orders — in the communities of New Hampshire, calling for a reopening of the economy. You see them with their “LIBERATE” hashtags on social media, their “don’t take our freedom” signs in spots from Virginia to New Hampshire to Colorado to Washington.

And that’s all well and good.

But this is what they’re getting in return: “Coronavirus protesters turn the American flag into a symbol of selfishness,” read one recent Los Angeles Times headline.

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.”

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Author

  • Cheryl K. Chumley

    Cheryl Chumley is online opinion editor for The Washington Times, the author of “The Devil in DC: Winning Back the Country From the Beast in Washington” and of "Police State USA: How Orwell’s Nightmare is Becoming Our Reality," and a 2008-2009 Robert Novak journalism fellow with The Fund for American Studies.