For the last several months we have waged our coronavirus war. In some states we wear the mandated facemasks to enter grocery stores or even to walk through public parks, we maintain safe distances, and we squirt sanitizer on our hands from time to time. Some of our governors kept most businesses running while others shuttered churches, schools, stores, restaurants, and bars, forcing thousands of small businesses into bankruptcy or permanent closure.

Fear, uncertainty, and misinformation have led to a Great Depression – not in the financial markets, but in the hearts and minds of untold millions of Americans. Many of us are sick not from a virus from China, but from weeks upon weeks of social isolation and watching our country fall apart under the guidance of “experts” and the dictates of government officials.

Fortunately, COVID-19 has proven far less deadly than those same experts first predicted. The clown show continues with parts of the economy in lockdown and with our government spending additional trillions of dollars as “pandemic relief,” even as the virus death rate has been dropping since April.

But now a deadlier virus has struck our country.

This virus is not some miniscule microbe that can sicken or kill an individual. Rather than infecting the human body, it infects the body politic, lowering its resistance and destroying such antibodies as liberty, individualism, and human dignity, and leaving its host organism gasping for life.

I am speaking, of course, of the Left and the various names under which it marches: progressivism, socialism, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other more obscure groups. Liberals don’t qualify for this list, because the Left long ago abandoned any right to the title of liberalism.

In the last two months, we have seen some of our cities destroyed, mobs chanting obscenities and calling for the end of our police force. Progressive governors, mayors, and city councils have sympathized with this destruction, refusing to quell the violence, the attacks on our American past, or calls for the overthrow of the United States and its Constitution.

Looking past this madness, we see that the Left has a long history of infecting and destroying anything they touch.

Colleges and Universities

Many professors in higher education are the grandchildren of the 1960s, when progressives denigrating American history and Western Civilization began their march into these institutions. Each generation became more radical, pumping out students with an abysmal knowledge of history and literature, and a belief that America was evil, racist, sexist, and hateful. Those students are now the editors and writers steering publications like The New York Times, the board members and bosses of corporations granting large donations to radical groups and instructing their employees to undergo workshops in “whiteness,” and many of our public officials.

Elementary and Secondary Schools

Because our teachers also attend the indoctrination camps once known as universities, the virus has spread to our public schools. Teacher unions are focused on maintaining the status quo and resist parents who want more charter schools. Student test scores in these schools keep falling while expenses climb.

Once we had a school system that was the envy of the world. Today we have the sort of school system that the Soviet Union might have imposed had it won the Cold War.

Sports

Some of our major league athletes kneel during the National Anthem, a trend now in its fourth year in the National Football League. Transgender women routinely compete in women’s sports, often defeating their female opponents with ease. NASCAR recently attacked its fan base by banning Confederate flags and similar insignia at events. In a particularly humorous incident, the Washington Redskins, under pressure for years to change their name because of its supposed racist connotations, announced that it would temporarily call itself the “Washington Football Team.” Now there’s a winning tag.

Sports were once spectacles bringing people together. Liberal, conservative, black, white, rich or poor: all could be fans of the Carolina Panthers or the Boston Red Sox.

No more.

The Boy Scouts

The Scouts – my dad was an Eagle Scout, I was a Life Scout, and all three of my sons won the coveted rank of Eagle – are going down the tubes. The membership has diminished, and sexual assault lawsuits are bankrupting the organization.

But the Left, with its animosity toward the Scouts and its insistence on allowing gay Scouts and leaders into the organization, also helped kill off an organization that once taught its members outdoor skills, citizenship, and patriotism.

Churches

The Left long ago infiltrated several denominations, taking some over wholesale and causing others to separate into splinter groups. The Left has brought many of these Christians to their knees, not in prayer, but in repentance for their biblical beliefs.

Working to remove this cornerstone of Western civilization, the Left has replaced it with a philosophy that the average American – a plumber, a contractor, a manicurist – would regard as sheer cant.

Silence

A Cato poll this month found 62 percent of Americans are now afraid of sharing their political and cultural views in public. A fear of reprisal extends across demographic groups and includes a majority of “centrist liberals.” Many people believe that expressing their views might cost them their jobs.

This practice of intimidation originates largely from the Left, which uses a variety of tactics – doxing, canceling, or threatening those who offend them – to silence others.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? Many columnists, including me, have written about oppression in places like China, North Korean, and Cuba. In those countries, the governments are the oppressors, crushing their opponents, brainwashing their people, ruling with an iron fist, and strangling liberty.

Here in the United States we need no government to oppress us. Our mob of ignorant, politically correct leftist bullies are doing a fine job all by themselves.

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