An acquaintance of mine recently suggested to me, rather plaintively, that if we vote for Joe Biden, maybe the left will stop the violence. “Oh, like Democrat Mayors and Governors have protected their Democrat voters in the cities and states they control?” I tartly responded.

The Democrats have unleashed the ravenous beast that is rampaging across the country, rioting, looting, assaulting and murdering all that stand in its path, but they do not control it. If Donald Trump wins, the left will try to destroy the country. If Biden wins, the left will try to destroy the country. These are the people who have no goal except to watch the world burn. I will vote for the guy who will fight back. It’s our best chance. Just ask the McCloskeys – the formerly liberal Democrat couple who were charged for defending their home in St. Louis from violent rioters, while the rioters were left unmolested by the District Attorney charged with protecting ordinary people.

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David Daleiden released a new video Monday morning, showing Planned Parenthood (PP) officials admitting under oath what they furiously deny when they are not under oath. It is a powerful video, using these abortionists’ own testimony to expose who they are and what they have done. Of course, the leftstream media does not cover it at all, collaborating with Planned Parenthood to just parrot the lies told when abortion officials are not under oath.

Several people here asked about the $600,000 performance bond San Francisco Judge William Orrick ordered Daleiden to pony up a week ago. Yes, it’s real, and the money must be raised for it. Over a decade ago, California ruled that monetary damages cannot be awarded for allegations that prove to be accurate. They didn’t tell us about the exception when the true allegations are against Planned Parenthood. California also ruled long ago that journalists, including citizen journalists, have immunity for undercover work when they have the reasonable belief that a crime is being committed (that is a bit of an oversimplification, but not much). Again, they did not tell us about the exception when the journalist is investigating Planned Parenthood’s crimes. (Note that I say crimes, not “alleged” crimes – for PP officials have admitted to multiple crimes under oath). So who is being prosecuted and harassed by the state? The fellow who exposed the crimes. Shoot, when she was the California Attorney General, Kamala Harris (who is now the Democrats’ VP nominee) collaborated with PP officials to persecute, prosecute and harass Daleiden for having the temerity to investigate the crimes of abortionists, even staging a Roger Stone-style raid on Daleiden’s home in the early morning hours.

Fortunately, Daleiden and his team have been prepared for all of this. They never expected officials in California to follow the law or give him a fair shake, only to try to destroy him and bankrupt him, no matter how many laws and rights they have to trample on to do it. Frankly, when this is done, there cannot be a no harm, no foul resolution letting his persecutors off the hook. Judge Orrick, Kamala Harris, and all who participated in the conspiracy to deprive Daleiden of his civil rights and railroad him need to be tried and sent to prison. Kamala Harris would not look great in orange, but she wouldn’t look any worse than she already does.

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“Safety” is the new lever with which the left seeks to overturn the Constitutional order and put an end to human liberty. That is at the heart of why I have been so adamantly opposed to the Covid restrictions. Oh, I took the virus seriously. In mid-March, there were enough unknowns about it that I was willing to accept the two-week drastic restrictions, though I was very dubious about the idea of quarantining the healthy. Basically, viruses that are easily transmittable are rarely deadly and viruses that are deadly are rarely easily transmittable. The big concern, at the start, was that this might be a bio-engineered virus that was both easily transmittable and deadly.

By the end of March, we knew what segments of the population were most vulnerable. There were still a lot of unknowns, but the data was obscured by the panic porn the media so loves to foster. Amazingly, we forced many of the most vulnerable into deadly environments, while locking down the healthy. By mid-April, the data, even in bowdlerized form, showed who was seriously vulnerable and who was not – and what treatment regimens were effective. For anyone who is not obese, diabetic, or over 78, this virus is more innocuous than the common flu. For those who are vulnerable, a regimen of chloroquine, zinc and zithromycin at the onset of symptoms contains it almost every time. Yes, the media love to give the anecdotal cases of people in the non-vulnerable segments of the population getting a bad case and dying from it, but for every such anecdotal case they give on Covid you could give 70 for the flu. Meantime, instead of just spreading the panic porn, the left has actively tried to suppress the treatment that is effective almost all the time.

Now we have mandatory masking. I will confess to a personal issue on this matter. My lungs process oxygen very efficiently. Ironically, this creates a problem for me with masks. My expirations are unusually carbon dioxide-rich. Masks reduce oxygen intake by 15-20 percent from the start. When I wear one, I get progressively dizzier and dizzier because of the carbon dioxide buildup. I fainted once and have since worn the mask, when I have to, below my nose, so I can get the oxygen I need. I have read many of the objective studies on masks. There is evidence that they do slow the rate of infection. But they only slow it, not stop it. The reality is that Covid will grow in a population until it reaches a rate between 15 and 20 percent infected – and then it begins to recede. These numbers are constant whatever restrictions you take, whether next to nothing like Sweden or full lockdown. That does not mean that masks are never justified. When in a mixed group that includes some of the most vulnerable, slowing the rate of infection can be a big boon to them. Yet unless they are so compromised that a common cold would do them in, the chloroquine regimen will almost certainly stabilize them. Some of the researchers are worried about the long-term effects of masking, for sustained oxygen deprivation kills some cells permanently. I don’t know quite how to take that, as many medical personnel use masks almost all day and there has not been a report of some spike in long-term damage related to it, so I note these minority concerns but don’t entirely believe them. For me, if I wear a mask over my nose, the light-headedness begins within minutes. So if it is enforced in a place, I just can’t stay there.

I hear all sorts of nonsense. Some say we can’t go back to normal until the virus is eradicated. To my knowledge (and someone else may know of another), the only virus we have ever eradicated is smallpox. We don’t eradicate viruses, we learn to manage them. The media loves to cite infection rates as if they are death rates. Infection rates are largely irrelevant – only significant if a virus is unusually deadly and there is no palliative. Again, the most communicable viruses are rarely deadly – and so the infection rate for a normal virus should be high. We get new flu-like viruses every few years and they are generally lumped into the seasonal flu statistics. Vaccinations are adapted every year to what is expected to be prevalent that season. The flu shot you got last year is not the same as the one you got five years ago.

The bottom line is that this is within the range of what we would expect from a normal heavy flu season. Covid adds a few significant twists – more serious for an identifiable subset of the population and practically innocuous for most – with an effective palliative for all.

That is why I have been so adamant about the draconian restrictions. In this nation, serious long-term policy is to be decided by the people, not the bureaucrats. Elected officials have genuine authority for short-term emergency measures, but long-term significant policy changes must pass muster with the sovereign, the electorate. If we cede our sovereignty to bureaucrats, submitting to their suspension of basic civil liberties such as movement, assembly, speech, and religious worship because of the dangers of a virus that is substantially within the normal range of toxicity, then we have permanently ceded those liberties anytime a bureaucrat justifies his diktat in the name of safety. We will see new diktats against driving, gun ownership, hiking – or just about any human endeavor, because almost everything involves some level of risk. It’s about power, not safety.

I have been utterly flummoxed at how many health professionals clearly do not know how to read data sets, for even by the CDC’s own bowdlerized data, this virus does not justify extreme measures. I have heard many health professionals mouth government pieties and then get completely lost when I start discussing actual data with them. One nurse told me a few weeks ago that this is deadly to people under 30, as well, for she had personally treated five who had died. I told her she needed to call the CDC right away, for she had treated all the people in that demographic who had died in Colorado at that time plus a few that they must have shipped in from other states to die at her hands – at least according to the CDC website, which I had perused two days previously. She glared at me and stormed away. (A young woman behind the desk, with twinkling eyes, gave me a thumbs-up after Nurse Ratched left.)

The determining factor in what is allowed and what is restricted is almost always political and ideological. Small business owners are shut down; big businesses are largely unmolested. Rioting and looting are accepted and encouraged; religious worship is heavily restricted. Last weekend in Limon, Colorado, which had just effectively shut down our conference of religious and conservative activists, there was a big community festival. As long as your gathering is not a serious threat to leftist ideologues, you can have at it. If it conceivably can be, then you have to be shut down for reasons of “health.”

I think an initiative I am going to emphasize next year, if we are in any simulacrum of normalcy, is to file lawsuits against governors, mayors and public health departments that have enacted these draconian regulations – for they have not followed the science (instead trying to obscure actual data) and have usurped authority over us at a level they don’t have even in a legitimate emergency.

I long for the days of a normal, decent society. We can all choose to be considerate of each other. It does not offend me in the least to wear a mask or physically distance from someone who is scared, whether legitimately or not. But when a transient government takes it upon itself to tell me what I must do in all circumstances, Constitutional liberty be damned, I won’t buy into it.

Scott Morefield of Townhall said that he thinks Covid fascism could be the existential fight of our generation. I think he is right – and that it may well become the trigger that sets off ultimate revolt. A weird political realignment is in its nascent stage right now. Many Democrats who take individual liberty seriously, who believe that rioting is not honest protest, and genuinely believe in God, are moving to the Republican Party. Meanwhile, many like me are disgusted with the Republican Party for its routine fecklessness and refusal to stand for liberty. When the dust settles, I think Americans need a party that is honestly conservative and willing to fight for it AND a party that is honestly liberal without being insane and violent.

I saw one fellow on Facebook suggest that all Trump supporters should get the chloroquine regimen if they get sick and all Democrats should get the Bill Gates vaccination. I laughed out loud. That would be one way to thin the ranks of the opposition.

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Robert Royal, who is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, is a gifted and insightful writer on religious matters – and the juxtaposition of the spiritual in public affairs. He is one of my favorites – and he published a magnificent piece on “How it All Ends,” a few days ago. It gets to the heart of what we deal with in these tumultuous times. I thought it apropos to end today with this meditation on how it all ends.