The pro-COVID Republicans want to protest Governor Roy Cooper taking away their freedom to infect people with the coronavirus. They’ve sent a letter to him demanding that he loosen restrictions on mass protests. One UNC-Wilmington professor suggested that protesters use their Second Amendment rights to defend the First Amendment.
The group calls itself ReOpenNC and is similar to groups that have been protesting in other states. It claims to have begun in April of this year, but its Twitter account began in April of last year. They’re a farsighted group, predicting a pandemic and its repercussions a year in advance. The Facebook page where the protest supposedly began is private so nobody knows who organized the group. They like the First Amendment but they’re not so hot on transparency.
ReOpenNC says that it wants Cooper to lift the ban on commerce and get the state back to work by May 1. That’s a random date that includes no criteria for containing the virus or limiting its impact. I suspect many, if not most, of the ReOpenNC crowd gets its news from Fox News so they believe the response to the pandemic is overblown. A month and 40,000 deaths ago, they would have told you the whole thing was a hoax designed to hurt the president. Now that the measures taken have limited the impact, they’re sure that the measures were unnecessary in the first place.
Ironically, I agree with them, for the most part, about free assembly. I don’t think the governor or local officials can constitutionally limit their ability to protest. And I don’t think they can constitutionally keep churches or synagogues or mosques closed. I do, however, think the government can require people to identify themselves as having attended mass gatherings and allow stores and other public places to limit their access to prevent them from spreading the virus. I’m for big stickers or buttons that say, “I attended church” or “I attended a mass protest.” I don’t think the government should protect you from your own stupidity but I believe it should allow the rest of us to protect ourselves.
I disagree about opening the state on some random date because it’s the first day of the month. I think we should get commerce going as soon as possible but with the precautions necessary to limit the spread of the disease and protections for the most vulnerable. We should listen to the epidemiologists and experts before we reopen. We need to see a sustained decrease in cases, we need to dramatically increase our testing, we need to increase our hospital capacity and we need to have metrics in place to determine if it’s necessary shut down again to protect lives. The disease has been limited in North Carolina because we acted early and what we did worked, not because it’s less deadly or contagious as originally thought.
When this is all over, we will likely learn that ReOpenNC is nothing more than right-wing front group funded by conservative billionaires and millionaires. The purpose is to politicize the virus as much as possible and shift blame from Trump to the governors for the slow response nationally. They want to focus more on the economic impact than the health of our citizens. They are the pro-COVID Republicans.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
If not for the fact that the out of state agitators would put people at risk who ARE listening to good sense, I would happily let natural selection do it’s job. The gene pool could use a good shocking, and these fools seem to want to line up to be the chlorine. So the question then becomes how to limit the collateral damage while the lemmings run off the cliff. The Red Badge of Stupid is a pretty good idea, if not entirely practicable. Maybe a scarlet “S” on the forehead or something. Better still, maybe track down the originators of the plot and get them on the picket line. Tell ‘em to put their mouth where their money is.