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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.