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.

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 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.

The world is changing at a pace not seen in years, and it is no time to become captives of fear despite the real and immediate dangers we face.

The Wuhan virus and the ensuing panic, at least for a few more weeks, have stagnated the economy and scared global financial markets, accompanied by both collateral, and independent and simultaneous, bad news.

Rumor- and panic-mongers predominate; the rational and reasonable are written-off as naïve and out of it. Hundreds may die in the US, but millions who will not are terrified into anxieties and sleeplessness that they will.

Such deaths are terrible, yes, but let us now focus on a number of silver linings emerging from this crisis.

[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.

As nations across the world struggle to contain the Wuhan coronavirus, they should realize it is also long past time to quarantine the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The people of China must understand that their future under the Communist Party is as outcasts, lepers, pariahs – isolated and quarantined by the civilized world. If that is not the future they want, the time to rise up and overthrow the Communists is now.

The future of China is warehouses stuffed full of rotting and decaying goods no one will buy, accounts filled with money they can’t spend, travel instantly blocked at the first sign of pandemic because that’s the only responsible way for the world to handle the Communist Party.

China is far too opaque, far too dismissive of basic human rights, to be welcomed into reputable international organizations as a full member. The CCP corrupts every organization it joins. It should be expelled from all of them, or relegated to observer status only.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed to have a battle; For Tweedledum said Tweedledee Had spoiled his nice new rattle. Just then flew down a monstrous crow, As black as a tar-barrel; Which frightened both the heroes so, They quite forgot their quarrel.

^{—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland}

But these two old codgers are beyond grumpy; they are both tethered to the already done or distant past.

Like Lewis Carroll's Tweedledum and Tweedledee, these two curmudgeons are barely distinguishable from one another but for their sheer idiocy. No American who watched their Sunday night debate will be inclined to vote for either of them.