As it became clear Mitt Romney would be the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, the Obama campaign fired up its Chicago-style machine to attack the incumbent president’s election foe. Team Obama identified several Romney donors to smear publicly; one was a wealthy businessman from Idaho.

A former Democrat Senate staffer, according to a 2012 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, contacted an Idaho courthouse seeking the divorce records of Frank VanderSloot, who had donated $1 million to Romney’s campaign. The operative was traced to a professional opposition research shop based in Washington, D.C.

The name of the outfit? Fusion GPS.

In the response to the coronavirus pandemic, leftists see a model for the future.

“Not only will America need a massive dose of big government to get out of this crisis,” one wrote, “but we will need big, and wise, government more than ever in its aftermath.” As a conservative, I’m going to argue the opposite.

What has happened in this crisis so far is not an indicator of the future. A new era of big government in the economy is unlikely, undesirable and far from inevitable.  Here’s why this doesn’t herald a new age of big government.

Bethany Mandel, one of the editors at Ricochet, on Wednesday (5]07) shared a thread on Twitter about the Wuhan coronavirus and the need to "flatten the curve."

From the start of this pandemic, Americans were told to practice social distancing, wash their hands and stay at home as much as possible. At first we were told to do this for 15 days... then 30. Now it's beginning to seem like a never-ending cycle. Now she says, “I am done.”

It's as though these government officials fail to remember what the term "flatten the curve" means. The goal was to keep the virus from spreading as much as possible.  Bethany says “I am done” with that.

But people are out of work. Businesses are going under. People are losing their livelihoods. Millions have filed for unemployment. What they want – and need – isn't a government handout in exchange for a lockdown but the ability to go back to work.

Bethany Mandel did an excellent job of explaining that sentiment:

China border gate with Russia at Suifenhe

Suifenhe is a county-level city on the eastern edge of China’s 4,300-kilometer/2,500 mile border with Russia. It is 2,000 km away from Wuhan, where the COVID-19 crisis began late last year, and until recently, the epidemic may have felt quite distant.

Locally, Suifenhe is best known for a series of increasingly extravagant national gates in its land port, which are designed to project China’s progress over recent decades, in the face of Russia’s simultaneous decline.

Right now, it is the focus of the huge problemsbetween Russia and China due to the China flu virus.

The more we learn about the evils done to Michael Flynn, and they increase day by day, the more the FBI comes to resemble the KGB.

Or is it the earlier version, the NKVD, whose leader, Lavrentiy Beria, famously declared, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

James Comey—the head of the FBI during this period of extraordinary moral turpitude—never said anything anywhere near that pithy or memorable, but he did Beria one better.

Comey, with then-agent Peter Strzok, didn’t just find a crime, they invented one.  So. What was really going on with what was essentially the “forced confession” of Flynn?

It’s a legitimate question. For the truth is, the media exists in name only but not in fact.  If we lived in a fair and just world, most of the current media would simply go away and try something else.

The problem is not that reporters are human and therefore sometimes err. The rub is not even that they are poorly educated or rarely write well.

The crisis instead is that they are now almost always wrong, and predictably wrong because they are lazy and biased—and they deny it to the point of self-delusion. The result is that, for all practical purposes, journalists no longer exist for the general public as sources of news.

Nowhere has the media nadir been clearer than in the case of ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.  It’s the latest evidence the walls really are closing in on a vanishing media.

One of the Left's standard attacks on the president is that he doesn't listen to the science!  Sadly, he did listen to the so-called experts who predicted wildly hyperbolic death and destruction, and he agreed to the economic shutdown.

The president surely realizes by now that he should have operated on his gut instincts, which rarely fail him.  Dr. Fauci, for example, sees no patients.  He looks at computer models, all of which were wrong.  Dr. Birx probably has more hands-on experience, but she too recommended closing up the nation. They were both wrong.

At every press briefing on the pandemic, the scientists to whom Trump has been listening have presented their data upon which the president has relied.  But the numbers extrapolated from their models were all wrong.  And now this mass hysteria that has brought the American economy to a full stop is devastating millions and millions of Americans.

Sometimes I will, then again I think I won't Sometimes I do, then again I think I don't

-- Chuck Berry, Reelin’ and Rockin’ 1957

Am I the only one who finds this "surprise" an amazing coincidence when taken in conjunction with Joe Biden's declining candidacy?

Additionally, Michelle has been popping up all over the place.  Yes, surprise, surprise.

Communist New York Mayor De Blasio issues another fascist edict

All my life, I have dismissed fear on the right (“America is headed to communism”) and the left (“It can happen here”—referring to fascism). It’s not that I’ve ever believed liberty was guaranteed. Being familiar with history and a pessimist regarding the human condition, I never believed that.

But the ease with which police state tactics have been employed and the equal ease with which most Americans have accepted them have been breathtaking.

People will argue that a temporary police state has been justified because of the allegedly unique threat to life posed by the new coronavirus. I do not believe the data will bear that out. Regardless, let us at least agree that we are closer to a police state than ever in American history.

We are presently living with all four of the key hallmarks of a police state.  Here they are.

Plans for a new Baltic–Black Sea waterway, passing through Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, have the potential to revolutionize the geopolitics of Europe’s East as well as exacerbate East-West tensions.

The transit project would not only help the economies of all three participating countries and their neighbors.  It would also promote trilateral cooperation on other issues, including security, and make each one of them more attractive partners for the West.

Not surprisingly, such prospects are gaining support in the US and part of the EU but generating ever more opposition in Moscow. Russia rightfully views E40 as a threat to its influence in the region and even, according to some analysts, as an existential threat to Russia itself.

With the latest reports of plummeting death rates from all causes, this crisis is over.

The pandemic of doom erupted as a panic of pols and is now a comedy of Mash-minded med admins and stooges, covering their ifs ands and butts with ever more morbid and distorted statistics.

The crisis now will hit the politicians and political Doctor Fauci who gullibly accepted and trumpeted what statistician William Briggs calls “the most colossal and costly blown forecast of all time.”

Flattening the curve was always a fool’s errand that widened the damage.

How many times did we sing that, never thinking about those simple, precious words?  Yet if history teaches us anything it is that liberty is elusive.  Precious.  It can slip away like a shadow, with hardly a whisper.  Before you know it it’s gone and once gone it is not so easy for the people to get back.  The powerful do not readily let it go.  It has to be ripped from their hands.  Fought for.

Two hundred and forty-four years ago, the founders of the United States began a long and bloody war to wrest liberty for us from the hands of King George  and secure it for posterity.

Yet, like the frog that will jump out of a pot of boiling water but swim contentedly until he becomes cuisses de grenouilles in water that is gradually warming, we have stood by in modern America and watched as our liberties have been eroded.  Now, today, we are suddenly in dire jeopardy of them being gone forever.

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts.

Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

The hysteria drummed up by the mainstream media over COVID-19 China Flu, in conjunction with the draconian lockdown measures being employed by many governors, is costing thousands of American lives.

As a result of the crashing economy, hospitals and medical facilities have furloughed doctors and staff, and people who want to seek treatment simply don't have the option.

Aside from suicide, cancer, and heart attacks, coronavirus hysteria and irrational stay-at-home orders are causing an increase in substance abuse.  The lady’s sign above is right: the “cure” is deadlier – literally – than the disease.

We often ascribe a basic level of humanity to even the cruelest leaders, but People’s Republic of China leader Xi Jinping’s actions have forced us to rethink this assumption.

Although the emergence of the novel coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2 was possibly not due to China’s actions, the emphasis that its authoritarian system places on hiding bad news  gave the disease a sizable head start infecting the world.

Most ominously, China’s obsession with image and Machtpolitik raises serious questions about its lack of moral limits.  It may be there are none.

A hostile foreign power openly meddles in U.S. electoral politics, working to cast discord generally and specifically to smear one of the two remaining candidates for our highest office.

If Democrats were consistent about the paranoia they fomented over the laughably small efforts of Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, they would now demand immediate action to counter this nefarious foreign threat.

Only, this time, the adversary is China, and the declared target of their open election interference is the incumbent President Donald J. Trump – with China’s declared favorite Joe “Beijing” Biden.”

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” ― Abraham Lincoln

The American Democrat party has moved so far left that it can truthfully be called Marxist… and Marxism is totalitarianism.  As Thomas Sowell observed long ago, “…totalitarianism recognizes no moral limits on the state.  It’s the most convenient ideology for aspiring tyrants....”

As state governors like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are discovering, citizens in her state (both chambers of the state legislature are Republican) will not accept being told what they can buy, where they can go, and if they can or cannot drive to their cabins on the lakeshore.

Every day you’re hearing an updated tally of the number of Americans who’ve “died” of COVID-19.  Supposedly, as of late this afternoon (4/15), we have 637,196 cases in the US and 27,866 deaths, for a mortality of 4.37%.

But if you want to understand a Chinese virus, you better start listening to a Chinese philosopher: As Confucius said, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.”

And, it’s time everyone wised up about those daily COVID-19 fatality reports. They don’t represent the number of people it's killed. They represent the number of death certificates listing it as a cause. And those two things are most definitely NOT the same.

Anti-Lockdown protest in Columbus, Ohio April 13

On the federal level, emergency measures—no matter how necessary—always pose a danger to freedom. A state’s exercise of its police power in a time of crisis can be very frightening, too. I find our current lockdowns particularly chilling.

They effectuate a sweeping deprivation of civil liberties and, in my opinion, many of the current lockdowns far exceed the uncontroverted evidence necessary to justify them.

That’s why we need a widespread  -- and loud – public outcry against them.  This is happening in Ohio and Michigan and it needs to happen wherever lockdowns are draconian.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen celebrates her reelection Jan. 11, 2020

As we move cautiously to the post-CCP virus phase, many are necessarily considering how to do so. Most obviously, how to revive the economy without jeopardizing our people or, worse, rekindling the pandemic.

Of almost equal importance is how to deal with the country that instigated the worldwide epidemic in the first place - Communist China—how to impress upon it that next time it has a viral outbreak, the regime must be honest, indeed, totally transparent about what occurred, even if that means revealing information that is embarrassing to the regime.

One way to do so: the United States should abandon the one-China policy that has been in place for decades and recognize Taiwan [aka the Republic of China – but as the Republic of Taiwan would be much better --JW).

There has been controversy recently about what to call the virus that has unleashed a worldwide pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prefers “novel coronavirus.” Others have referred to it as the “Wuhan virus,” after its place of origin, as is common in naming diseases.

It is here proposed that a more accurate name is the “CCP virus,” and calls upon others to join in adopting this name.

The name holds the CCP accountable for its wanton disregard of human life and consequent spawning of a pandemic that has put untold numbers in countries around the world at risk, while creating widespread fear and devastating the economies of nations trying to cope with this disease.

Why do we still believe this guy?

The Chinese Communist Party coronavirus – the CCP virus for short – is  a tragedy, especially for those directly affected, but statistically speaking, it’s a drop in the proverbial bucket. Our response, on the other hand, has been over the top.

The United States and many other countries have shut down huge parts of their economies, billions of people have been quarantined against their will, police states are running rampant, and businesses have been shuttered, all while government prints trillions to attempt to “relieve” the dire economic situation.

While Leftists seem thrilled about the coming Great Depression and the rampant police states full of governors and public officials living out their tin-pot dictator fantasies and seem perfectly happy being confined to their mom’s basements, many conservatives are now questioning the necessity of the current state of affairs.

Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I of Austria (1678-1711)

As countries around the world frantically erect barriers against the spread of the novel coronavirus, it might be helpful to look at one of the most successful quarantine systems ever created.

In 1710 Emperor Joseph I decided to block the chronic spread of diseases from the Balkans by creating a continuous “sanitary cordon” along the Habsburg monarchy’s southern frontier with the Ottoman Empire. It defended against Turkish raids and illegal immigration, and protected Christian refugees fleeing Ottoman Islamic rule.

A sense of the scale of this operation can be seen by comparing it with the American border today. Whereas we rely on 21,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents stretched tenuously across the long Mexican and Canadian frontiers, as many as 100,000 fierce, colorfully clad Serb and Croat infantrymen were available to guard a southern Habsburg border zone that was typically dozens of miles deep.

The American mainstream media are the most dangerous enemy of America.

There can no longer be any doubt about that fact.  For nearly four years, they have worked hand in hand with the Democrat party to do whatever harm they can to this country if it will take Trump down and out.

The Left has trouble learning from its mistakes.  From moment one, every calculated smear Leftists threw at the president made him more popular, not less.  They time-released all the dirt they thought they had on him for maximum damage — the Billy Bush tape, emoluments, Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, Russia collusion, Ukraine.

And now the Chicom flu.

As the coronavirus outbreak begins to reach its zenith, it remains unclear whether the measures taken to stem its tide will prove sufficient, insufficient, or an overreaction.

What is certain, however, is that a number of individuals and entities have behaved shamefully and demonstrated no capacity for leadership or usefulness in this moment.

Key among them are Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and the Media.

Over the past two years, China’s economy has been collapsing.  You could feel it and there were many signs of China’s pending economic collapse.  Was their response an Act of War?

The BBC reported in January that official China figures are out and the news is scary.

President Trump had the US in the position that it could only win in a deal with China and this was the case. The US economy was on fire – more Americans were working than ever before, unemployment was at 50 year lows, wages were way up and the stock market was at record highs.

But China was moving in the opposite direction.

The deeper we get into the pandemic, the more our country becomes locked down and socially distant: schools closed, shops closed, restaurants and theaters shut, churches reduced to services in parking lots, sporting events suspended, and recreational venues roped off.

The longer this continues with no real end in sight, only guesses by experts with ever-changing “models,” the more it becomes inevitable we must ask the question… Should we postpone the presidential election?

Or do we want some virtual election that would be so distant from a traditional American election it would more closely resemble a computer game while at the same time being fraught with myriad new possibilities for fraud and manipulation such as we have never seen before?

The Japanese bit the proverbial bullet and weeks ago postponed their Olympics until 2021. Should we do the same with our yet more important event, electing the person who will lead the free world?

President Donald Trump has courted endless controversies for promoting nonconventional policies and entertaining contrarian views.

Certainly, candidate and then President Trump’s strident distrust of China was annoying to the American establishment. Trump certainly distrusted globalization. He has waged a veritable multifront war against the overreach of transnational organizations, whether that be the European Union or the various agencies of the United Nations.

Even relatively uncontroversial steps, such as greenlighting experimental drugs and off-label uses of old medicines for terminal patients drew the ire of federal bureaucrats and medical schools as potentially dangerous or irrelevant in cost-benefit analyses.

Yet since the outbreak of the virus, Trump’s idiosyncratic sixth sense has come in handy. Let us count his lessons to us in better preparing us for this plague.

Orwell’s warning

The United States and much of the western world, by utilizing the most draconian of tactics, is plunging many nations into potential economic and societal chaos as they attempt to stem the tide of the Chinese Coronavirus.

Relying on dubious and error-prone projections, politicians and bureaucrats constitutionally or statutorily limited in their power, are now exercising near-dictatorial authority in their edicts, which are effectively suspending or terminating numerous freedoms under the guise of protecting their respective nations.

When societies lose their freedom, it is not ordinarily because autocrats or tyrants have forcibly taken it away.  It is usually the result of the population willingly surrendering their freedom in return for protection against an external threat.  While the threat is oftentimes real, it is invariably exaggerated.

This is what we in the United States are experiencing.

Thankfully as a nation this crisis is causing us to reevaluate our priorities: faith, family, community and freedom.

Journalists are less important than janitors. Our nation’s best athletes are healthcare workers rushing to assist those in need.  The true heroes are not celebrities, but rather farmers, truck drivers, stock clerks, and supermarket cashiers.

Any average hard-working American is worth more today than all those who chase the golden statues of Hollywood; and ultimately if they want to go down the superiority path… well, what they provide is essentially useless.

Line at an emergency room in Brooklyn, NY, March 19

[Note by JW:  Since the outbreak of the China Virus pandemic, TTP has been maintaining that the actual number of those infected is much higher than the reported/confirmed number – meaning the death rate is much lower than the media claim based on the latter.  Here, two eminent infectious disease physicians and professors of medicine at Stanford’s medical school provide convincing evidence this is true.  Their essay was originally published in this morning’s (3/26) Wall Street Journal.]

If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.

But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high [i.e., 100 times or even 1000 times too high].  Here is why.

High Water Mark for the Left?

Covid-19 and the Democrat presidential primaries, the two biggest stories of the year so far, reflect a common theme: the death of the progressive Left.

Looking back, historians may well see late 2019 and very early 2020 as a kind of high-water mark for American progressivism.

It wasn’t so long ago that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were commanding most of the attention in the presidential campaign, especially among intellectuals. Right before Super Tuesday, Sanders was a clear favorite in the prediction markets.

Yet the actual voting showed the strength of Joe Biden, a (relative) centrist; Warren attracted very little support, and Sanders failed to reach the same vote totals he achieved four years ago.

And a big comeback for the Left four years from now seems unlikely. Democrat Party success is likely to come from other directions. I am not suggesting that what follows is correct, but here are some guesses:

Hong Kong Protestors Portray Red China’s Flag Accurately

The Chinese communists are afraid. You might not guess it from the invertebrate and borderline anti-national corporate media parroting Chinese state propaganda, but they are.

Beijing is shaken. Their dream of dominating the globe eventually, with the slow overstretch and collapse of the Pax Americana, was considered a matter of destiny.

Then suddenly, it all was shaken. A combination of incompetence, criminal negligence, and totalitarian suppression of a new devastating virus originating from the raw meat and wet markets of interior China let it rage through the globe.

Many media outlets are trying to hush it, but the people are not idiots. Over 60 percent of Americans support President Trump’s handling of the pandemic, and that includes his saber-rattling against Beijing.

And Beijing is afraid. You can feel that in their intersectional tweets, which are indistinguishable from any random western op-ed in Vice or BuzzFeed or CNN, or the tweets of Alyssa Milano or Jenny Yang.

The Chinese state isn’t a race, it’s a regime, and it is not racist to point out that they torched the globe.

People tend to come together in moments of crisis, most people anyway.

Then there’s always that selfish jerk in a zombie movie interested in grabbing the wads of cash or something else they’d always wanted but couldn’t get before everything went to hell, and it usually costs them.

Democrats are that selfish jerk.

And while it varies what the cost is in the movies – either his life or the life of someone else – in the case of coronavirus, let it be the political lives of every Democrat, because they truly are bad people.

Montecalvo, Lombardy, Italy. As I sit here in my involuntary isolation, it was just reported that overnight 743 more people died and 5.249 new cases have been reported. This brings the total cases of infection to 69,176 and the body count to 6,820. We take relief in knowing that 8,326 people have recovered so far. (Numbers as of 3/24, 8:30pm in Italy.)

Sixty million of us are in lockdown...it is like a war zone here. We are being held prisoner in our own homes by an unseen enemy that sneaked in unnoticed...by most of us. As you will read in just a few more minutes, there were those who knew something like this was coming... or at least they should have.

So who is to blame? With all this craziness swirling like a whirlpool at our feet, I just had to find the blame answer. And so I have spent my free time (of which I have a lot in these days) digging and researching. I was literally shocked to discover how this has come to be.

It has everything to do with communists. Allow me to explain.

The almost empty Oculus hub in New York, March 17

[Note by JW – please see the must-read comment on this editorial by Mark Skousen below]

Financial markets paused their slide Thursday (3/19), but no one should think this rolling economic calamity is over. If this government-ordered shutdown continues for much more than another week or two, the human cost of job losses and bankruptcies will exceed what most Americans imagine.

This won’t be popular to read in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their anti-virus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008-2009.

The costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms.

Want to know why the U.S. economy is in free fall?

Why restaurants and bars are closing, putting millions out of work, and why the airline industry is facing possible bankruptcy? Why schools across the nation are shutting down, leaving students to fall behind and parents without safe places to send their children everyday?

Why the stock market is plummeting, wiping out the retirement and college savings of millions of Americans? Why the elderly are isolated in nursing homes and tens of millions who don’t have the option of teleworking have no idea how they will pay their bills?

Answer: Because China is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.