Lockdowns for thee, not for me
It was sadly no surprise that lockdowns were at times selectively enforced.
Freedom of assembly and of religion are both constitutionally protected in the U.S. and are also supposed to enjoy such guarantees in many other countries. Lockdowns clearly violated free assembly. Some have argued that lockdowns did not truly violate freedom of worship, as religious bodies are more than just a building. Yet that argument ultimately doesn’t hold up. After all, limits on many other types of assembly were clearly unconstitutional, so why wouldn’t it be the same for religion? At the same time, would allowing houses of worship to remain open while everything else is banned give unfair privileges to religion? If limits on in-person religious services are unconstitutional, then limits on other activities should be ruled unconstitutional too. It’s only fair.
In any case, it didn’t take long before it became clear that gatherings—religious or otherwise—should not have been restricted to fight COVID. Let there be no doubt about that.
However, some stay-at-home orders exempted religious services. This was largely political. Public officials were afraid of alienating religious conservatives who felt their faith was being singled out. I wasn’t clamoring for limits on religious services, but this exemption shows how lockdowns were selectively applied. In some jurisdictions, you could pack into a megachurch with thousands of other worshipers at the height of the pandemic, but you couldn’t go for a stroll in the park alone. Yet both of these activities should have been permitted.
Despite the growing historical negationism surrounding lockdowns, people were indeed punished just for leaving their home. A man was arrested in Brighton, Colorado, just for playing softball with his family at a park. He was handcuffed and shoved into a police car in full view of his six-year-old daughter. A Twitter commenter said her son was picked up by police just for playing football at a Sacramento park. A self-described Marxist organization in Australia noted that people in New South Wales faced heavy fines and jail just for leaving their homes or meeting in groups of more than two. The piece said people would be inclined to follow voluntary guidelines if the reasoning for it was clearly explained. Instead, the country’s right-wing Prime Minister Scott Morrison boasted of introducing tough COVID measures just after he talked about attending a sporting event with tens of thousands of fans. Workers in industries deemed essential still had to show up for work—often at jobs that served the privileged—but were barred from recreation on their own time.
However adamant one may be that houses of worship should not receive special privileges, we should all agree that there is no justification for what took place in Hillview, Kentucky, on Easter Sunday in 2020. The Courier-Journal reported that when a church conducted an Easter service despite the lockdown, state troopers jotted down worshipers’ license plate numbers. Piles of nails were also found on the driveway.
If there’s one thing that did get special privileges, it’s junk mail. Just before the U.S. had stay-at-home orders, public events were already being canceled, but I kept receiving junk mail from WellCare—which had a monopoly on healthcare management in Kentucky. I received more and more WellCare waste as both the virus’s case counts and lockdowns worsened. If we were trying to minimize the spread of germs, why was junk mail allowed? Junk mail was actually defended by the same people who cheered lockdowns, as they said paper was a poor vector for this virus. It was later shown that paper was indeed not a big carrier of this virus, but the hypocrisy only got worse. Those who had claimed junk mail did not spread the virus cheered when schools did not allow children to share paper and books. (And please stop leaving telemarketing calls on my voicemail, WellCare. I blocked your numbers for a reason.)
As activities were divided into “essential” and “nonessential”, special privileges were also enjoyed by powerful capital interests, or authorities looked the other way when these interests ignored the rules. In our area, construction of a huge luxury development was not halted, and it continued creating nuisances for the community. Other activities with a lot of money behind them were deemed essential—even as necessary outdoor activities were not. Construction of a soccer stadium in Cincinnati that displaced residents continued unabated.
While those projects continued, people in Spain had to spend months without working kitchens or bathrooms, because remodeling was suspended as building crews were not allowed to work.
For months before the pandemic was declared, I had planned an event for May 30 drawing out-of-town visitors. I stood my ground and did not cancel it. It’s hard to imagine now, but America’s biggest spike in cases prior to May took place way back in March, and known cases dropped for months thereafter, so canceling a May event seemed absurd. Despite later official figures, COVID deaths in the U.S. probably peaked in April. Deaths appear to have fallen to less than half that by May 30. How do we count cases and deaths? I compiled a spreadsheet document that averages each day’s number of new U.S. cases reported by Worldometer and Corona Scanner—with Corona Scanner later being replaced by numbers reported by the New York Times. The document divides this by the number of tests reported that day—at first by a website run by the Atlantic but later gathered on a private individual’s Twitter feed. New cases divided by tests administered is the positive rate. For this report, I use a seven-day running total because some days of the week had more reporting than others. The seven-day positive rate in the U.S. peaked way back on April 3, 2020, when it was 22.52 percent. Positive rates were compiled well into 2021, and it never got higher than that. On May 30, it was down to 5.47 percent. Even in the winter of 2020-21, the peak was only 14.14 percent. Although there were many more reported cases then, the real prevalence almost certainly was lower, as testing was more widely available then, and there are serious lingering questions about some reported cases.
The seven-day average of deaths in the U.S. in the initial pandemic wave peaked at 2,253 per day on April 21. Official death counts from a few later waves are worse, but these figures have major irregularities. One of the most serious flaws in this data is that more deaths were being counted of people with COVID, not from COVID. In other words, while they were infected at the time of death, COVID was not the cause of death. On the other hand, deaths very early in the pandemic may have been undercounted, because it was a generally unfamiliar virus then. But that stage didn’t last long.
There clearly were actual COVID deaths well after the apparent peak of deaths. However, it is deceptive to count deaths with COVID as being from COVID. To give you an idea of how deceitful health authorities were, they counted the victim of a motorcycle crash as a COVID death. It wasn’t just the U.S., as British media reported that a builder who fell from a ladder was counted as a COVID fatality.
The case counts reported above predated the time frame marked by the Omicron variant and its progeny. While that variant was more easily transmissible, it was certainly less deadly, as official numbers continued to be plagued by irregularities that were used to justify more restrictions. This is not an unfounded theory but rather something that is clear from any in-depth analysis.
Despite the apparent April 2020 peak and the December 2020 release of a vaccine, there were major outdoor events in the U.S. and elsewhere that had ridiculous COVID-19 protocols for long after. These events had strict capacity limits and even a requirement that attendees wear masks (as if anyone had any patience left with either rule). In other words, I was able to go on with an event the month after the pandemic apparently peaked in the U.S., but some jurisdictions tried keeping the pandemic going full throttle two years after that! Nothing after May 2020 should have been canceled. Nothing! Some countries and regions canceled very few if any events, and their death rate went on to become less than the U.S. average.
In May 2021, five months after the vaccine was introduced, it was announced that a festival in England the following Christmas would be canceled—though it was still seven months away. This was the second year in a row it was canceled over COVID. The 2021 event was canceled even though the U.K. as of May was one of the most heavily vaccinated countries in the world and was experiencing only a handful of cases at the time.
By July 2021, Gibraltar had long since vaccinated almost its entire adult population, and the number of new COVID cases was almost down to zero. Only one patient had been hospitalized for the virus in months. Yet the territory canceled fairs and festivals that weren’t coming up until August or September. Months later, Gibraltar canceled official Christmas celebrations, even though only four deaths had been reported in eight months.
Some changes are permanent. For the 2020 season, city swimming pools in Cincinnati became open by reservation only, and only for brief time slots. The city reportedly planned to make these changes permanent, and they were in force in 2021 as well. The real purpose of this was to keep some patrons away and reserve the pool for those with more stable schedules and who also had access to other facilities. This shows that COVID is—not surprisingly—being used as an excuse for societal changes that disenfranchise people more. One observer said it was a means of enforcing racial segregation. (It is perhaps not surprising that the city would mishandle the pool situation, considering the city’s penchant for giving free money to luxury housing developers and soccer team owners.) This change proved so disastrous that the pools were reportedly open on a normal schedule in 2022, but—believe it or not—the failed reservation system started creeping back in 2023.
Pools in Portland, Oregon, reportedly did not open for any use other than organized events even in 2021. Baltimore reportedly made its changes to city swimming pools permanent. (Baltimore did not open many of its pools in 2023 anyway, because city officials were too incompetent to properly maintain them. This caused many children to climb over fences and into the closed pools. WBAL radio ran a racist report portraying the children as criminals.)
There was never any introspection. In 2023, CNN ran a piece about the decline of public pools that had been taking place across America for decades. Yet CNN had egged on the COVID maximalism that had helped fuel the recent restrictions on pools and beaches.
In another permanent change, the University of Oregon—though a public university—decided in May 2021 to allow students to be punished for behavior that takes place off campus and is not connected in any way with school. This applies not only to COVID rules but also other rules. Surprisingly, this wasn’t entirely new. An Associated Press story from way back in 2008 said the University of Washington had extended its code of conduct to apply off campus for activity unrelated to school.
Chicago permanently barred off-premises alcohol sales after midnight.
A shuttle route operated by northern Kentucky’s bus system closed for almost 2½ years because of COVID panic. The popular cave exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center was also closed for nearly 2½ years. When it first closed, it had just been part of a renovation costing $213 million.
The passenger train route between New York City and Montreal was closed for three years.
Amarillo, Texas, closed restrooms at city parks even longer, not opening them until July 2023.
The National Zoo in Washington, D.C., began requiring advance visitor passes during the pandemic. In January 2023, the Washington Post reported that this was to be made permanent. The city’s congressional representative Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton raised concerns about this, because of the difficulty in accessing the zoo’s website. Yet zoo administrators ignored all of the Democrat’s concerns. This policy had mission creep, as the zoo moved away from the COVID rationale and said it was to reduce traffic congestion. A commenter on the Post’s website said the passes were an effort to discriminate against Black people.
“Two weeks to flatten the curve” has indeed become a permanent “new normal.”
The Democrats ran an absolutely terrible election campaign in the fall of 2020. If I had known the Democrats would someday act in such bad faith, I never would have voted for them when I was 18 or joined the local Young Democrats in college, because I wouldn’t have wanted to encourage such a bad campaign almost 30 years later. It was so bad that it’s easy to forget that the Trump administration contributed to pandemic failures. In addition to Trump’s plan to suspend habeas corpus, it was also the botched rollout of tests. Plus, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx were part of Trump’s White House. None of this excuses Democrats for weaponizing this crisis, or threatening or cheering violence against those who challenged official propaganda. The Democrats’ behavior was absolutely despicable—even criminal. I mean that literally. Some of them should be in prison. The Democrats are controlled opposition. Still, I wrote bitterly in early spring about what I saw as right-wing failures. Some of it had to do with rules not applying to certain people or organizations while everyone else was forced to follow these rules. Many states had ordered elective medical procedures to be delayed, and some medically necessary procedures were postponed as well—with disastrous consequences. Yet, outrageously, abusive “treatment” centers for teenagers were permitted to stay open—even though they were elective and were more likely to spread viruses than most other places were. Then again, they practiced quackery instead of real medicine, so they were not actually medical.
In my long-running spirit of progressive populism, I also noted that the media was often more concerned with how the pandemic would affect the stock market than with anything else. On one of the darkest days of March 2020, ABC’s top story was how COVID-19 would affect the market. In addition, ABC’s Cincinnati affiliate WCPO-TV went on for minutes as its news team smirked and grinned about how those who have major investments in the market could protect their billions of dollars from virus-related economic woes. If the pandemic was bad enough to force everyone to stay home, why was the media’s biggest worry the stock market?
Media dissent against lockdowns was rare indeed. But—also in March—a well-written op-ed by Samuel Miller McDonald appeared in the Guardian that warned that COVID might be followed by just as much authoritarianism as the 9/11 terrorist attacks were. The 9/11 events were followed by an expansion of executive power, and this piece warned that the pandemic might result in the same. The pandemic response was likened to the hated Patriot Act and wars that cost huge amounts of life and money. It was also compared to the wealth transfer that followed the late 2000s recession. The op-ed said “leftists and liberals” should reject authoritarian COVID responses, noting that such measures are “not easily rolled back.” Instead of authoritarian responses, the piece urged universal healthcare, criminal justice reform, and providing a basic income to all.
John W. Whitehead wrote a piece that appeared in the left-leaning CounterPunch that similarly warned of a severe erosion of civil liberties. The article noted that Washington, D.C., residents could face 90 days in jail and a $5,000 fine if they dared to leave their homes. In Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington state, it was a year and $5,000. In Alaska, the fine was $25,000. The piece said Kentucky had already ordered residents to not travel outside the state. New Jersey, Ohio, and Oregon had banned gatherings of any size—which unambiguously violated constitutional protections of freedom of assembly. In Ohio, the penalty for violating this ban was a $750 fine and 90 days in the slammer. The situation seemed to be nothing short of martial law. An article on the Revolutionary United Front’s website noted that California Gov. Gavin Newsom even threatened to impose actual martial law. Newsom of course was the first governor of any of the 50 U.S. states to enact a stay-at-home order, and he showed his incompetence throughout the crisis.
If you ever see Gavin Newsom walking down the street, go up to him and say, “Hey, you were great when you played Al Bundy!” It will really piss him off! Newsom also reminds me of the principal of a Catholic high school I attended who was positively one of the most despicable people I’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting.
The limits in Kentucky resulted in a federal lawsuit against Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron. Beshear had been elected in 2019 as voters were so eager to oust a bumbling Republican incumbent that they were willing to overlook the fact that Beshear could barely form a complete sentence. The plaintiff in this suit said Kentucky’s extreme limits on movement kept her from visiting family in Ohio and exercising at Ohio state parks. U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, ruled that the ban on Kentuckians visiting other states was indeed unconstitutional, because it infringed upon the “firmly established and recognized” right of interstate travel.
As bad as the situation in Kentucky was, it was mild compared to many other states at the time. Unlike some other states and countries, it’s hard to find a situation in which Kentucky actually punished stay-at-home violators. But the lockdown was enough to discourage almost all movement outside the home—which was sufficient to gut our social institutions and anything remotely resembling normal life. State officials had helped create a climate of fear just because they had the power to punish—a power they effectively granted to themselves.
Even with Beshear’s incompetence, authoritarianism, and kookish babblings that worsened as time went on, it was easy to find states that locked down harder. On April 7, 2020, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran a list of 21 people arrested in Hamilton County, Ohio, just for traveling more than a few miles from home or otherwise violating the stay-at-home order. Some were shooting victims. One was nabbed for “walking at night more than three miles from his residence to conduct non-essential business.” Another was charged for “inciting an illegal gathering.” In another piece, the paper also reported that victims of shootings and drug overdoses were charged with violating the stay-at-home order after they couldn’t provide a “valid” reason for being outside. Addiction experts were outraged. In California, people found their cars ticketed for traveling a few miles, or were interrogated or heavily fined just for leaving their home. It wasn’t just the U.S. but Canada too. A full year later, right-wing Ontario Premier Doug Ford was still at it and issued a new stay-at-home order even though vaccines had been out for months. In May 2021, police in Timmins charged five people for the “crime” of hanging out at a grocery store parking lot. They each faced stiff fines. That came a few weeks after Ontario Provincial Police charged four people for carpooling together.
Also in May 2021, an article revealed that Newark, New Jersey, had been the site of particularly heavy-handed enforcement between March and May 2020. It took a year to uncover these arrests because the city used COVID as an excuse to delay fulfilling an information request. Newark police issued over 1,100 summonses over petty COVID violations. The violations include sitting in a park or on a bench, listening to music at one’s own home, talking to other people, sitting on a milk crate, “standing outside enjoying the weather”, and just plain standing. One of the violations involved encouraging others to not practice social distancing. It wasn’t that the person wasn’t practicing it themselves but that they encouraged someone else not to. Let that sink in. Another violation involved walking down the street without wearing a mask or gloves. Even the increasingly draconian mask orders didn’t require masks outdoors in most cases, and didn’t require gloves at all. A man was charged just for picking up paperwork at a business where he worked. Some of these cases were still active after a year. Even the ACLU took notice. That took a lot, because the ACLU didn’t do a damn thing positive throughout most of the pandemic.
Racially biased law enforcement actions are one of the most serious injustices that the world faces today. Many have resulted in unspeakable tragedy, and Black Lives Matter has fought against this injustice for years. The Newark report indicated that Black and Hispanic people were being disproportionately targeted for COVID-19 enforcement.
Also in Newark, a coalition of civil rights groups organized a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The protest consisted of a motorcade driving around two ICE hotspots. As the event took place entirely by car, social distancing and gathering rules were not broken. Yet participants were ticketed anyway. Meanwhile, ICE kept detaining people in crowded conditions—which is what really spreads viruses.
Some users of Daily Kos—in their growing spirit of champagne “liberalism”—said people with second homes should be exempt from lockdowns. Their argument was that they purchased second homes just so they would still be free if one region locked down. Naturally, these same gasbags adored lockdowns in general. Then again, Daily Kos is the same “liberal” site where users praised the authoritarian COVID-19 response by right-wing politicians like Mike DeWine, Boris Johnson, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, so what did we expect? (A couple years later, the Kos Kids continued shedding crocodile tears over how unfair life is to people with multiple homes, as they fretted that revoking government privileges for big corporations would increase taxes for owners of second homes.)
Another event of concern was elections in Wisconsin on April 7, 2020. At the height of the pandemic, election officials did not allow mail-in voting—even though almost everything else was shut down. How could lockdownists be taken seriously after they forced voters to cram together at polling places? On the other hand, if reports were true that this event did not create a spike in the spread of this virus, wouldn’t other activities be safe too?
Racial disparities in enforcement continued to loom large. A Black man in Cincinnati was charged with violating social distancing rules. A judge had to dismiss this case because the man wasn’t actually violating them. An Ohio-based website said the charge itself constituted selective enforcement, as a white pastor nearby was not even charged even though he conducted a packed service.
ProPublica reported in May 2020 that Black people in parts of Ohio were over four times as likely to be charged with stay-at-home violations as whites. In Toledo, a 19-year-old Black man was arrested for taking a bus from Detroit “without a valid reason.” Cincinnati’s Hamilton County was 27 percent Black, but 61 percent of those charged were Black. The county kept some people jailed overnight—where COVID could have spread more easily. In the predominantly white suburb of Springfield Township, all nine people charged were Black. Columbus’s Franklin County was 23.5 percent Black, but 57 percent of those arrested were Black.
This helps illustrate that enforcement of lockdown orders sadly was not colorblind. Yet even if we sweep this terrifying racial disparity under the rug, things still looked pretty grim in Franklin and Hamilton counties, which each charged more than 100 people. Some insist that lockdowns were never too bad, because nobody was actually charged or punished for breaking them. This statistic shows that simply is not true.
Also in May, Daily Kos staffer Lauren Floyd actually gave a fairly accurate account of police abusing COVID orders to oppress people because of their skin color. New York City officials used stay-at-home orders as a pretext for racial profiling and violent arrests. A video appeared of three white officers brutalizing a Black teenager. Police threatened to arrest a bystander for not wearing a mask.
A Daily Kos diary by Tamar Sarai Davis warned that fines for violating social distancing rules criminalized poverty. Inability to pay these fines could have resulted in arrest—thus recreating the hated debtors’ prisons.
New York City police released data in May 2020 showing that Black and Hispanic people comprised a disproportionate number of COVID-related arrests.
At a time when many were becoming more wary of inequitable policing, inequality resulting from lockdowns was largely shrugged off by others.
During one of the lockdowns in New South Wales, it was declared that luxury brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton were “essential.” The rich were allowed to leave their homes to buy designer handbags, expensive stationery, and the like—while everyone else had to stay home.
As time wore on, there were more and more instances of public officials enacting stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, or other rules only to violate them later. In Williamson County, Texas, Judge Bill Gravell was caught breaking the stay-at-home order he issued. The Republican attended a birthday party while inexplicably wearing firefighter gear he borrowed from the county. The most infamous example of this hypocrisy is Gavin Newsom dining with a large party for a lobbyist at the upscale French Laundry restaurant—even though Newsom had prohibited gatherings and indoor dining.
Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald reported that in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, right-wing Gov. João Doria imposed increasingly strict lockdowns over Christmas and New Year’s, yet was found vacationing in Miami.
Numerous officials who endorsed or enacted mask mandates for schoolchildren partied without masks. While most fans at the Super Bowl and other sporting events were expected to wear masks, most celebrities who attended did not. In fairness, very few fans at Super Bowl LVI in Inglewood, California, in February 2022 obeyed the event’s mask order. Los Angeles County’s much-ridiculed health department tried to require fans to wear bulky N95 respirators and spent an untold amount of tax money buying and distributing 80,000 of these masks to Super Bowl spectators—only to see them go to waste when nobody wore them.
During one of the several shutdowns of businesses in California, a restaurant owner had to close her eatery while a big movie studio was allowed to keep filming right next door. An official from the teachers’ union in Chicago demanded that schools stay closed while she sent out photos of herself vacationing in Puerto Rico. Nancy Pelosi visited her hair salon in San Francisco while that city barred such businesses from opening. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker banned school sports, but he sent his daughter to live in Florida where it was permitted.
On and on it continued.