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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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:

[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.