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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s handling of the COVID-19 lockdown has stood out as one of the most severe and arbitrary in the US. Michiganders are unable to purchase gardening supplies but lottery tickets are fine. They can travel to Walmart but not to their cabins in the countryside. They can paddle a canoe but can’t ride a jet ski.

Many officials and citizens have had enough. A group of county sheriffs announced Wednesday that they will not enforce some of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s lockdown orders. At the same time, thousands of Michiganders gathered at the state capitol to protest her actions in a rally they dubbed “Operation Gridlock.”

Sheriffs from four contiguous counties in the northwest corner of the lower peninsula are placing their constitutional duties above the governor’s mandates.

Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your state.

Acosta: Trump Is ‘Baghdad Bob’ on Coronavirus, Attacking China, WHO Is ‘Distraction’

Seth Meyers on Trump: ‘He’s so shallow he barely exists in the third dimension’  The Guardian.

Trump and Kushner could reap a pandemic windfall  Washington Post.

Trump’s comments ‘a full retreat,’ CNN’s analysts say  As of course they would.

On MSNBC, Reza Aslan Likens White Evangelicals to ‘Doomsday Cult’

‘Cover-Up’: Media Dust Off Trump Impeachment Playbook for Virus Crisis

Rep. Maxine Waters Claims Trump ‘Is Slow Walking America To Dictatorship’

Joe Scarborough: ‘You Can’t Be Conservative and Support Donald Trump’  Obviously, Scarborough things ‘conservative’ is a synonym for ‘sellout’, as his own career amply illustrates.

CNN Fact-Checker Ignores Biden Flubs Despite Vow to Cover ‘Both Sides’

ABC, CBS Demand CDC Director Trash Trump’s ‘Dangerous’ Funding Cut to WHO

Pelosi Says Trump’s Decision To Cut Off Funding For WHO Is ‘Illegal’ — Vows It Will Be ‘Swiftly Challenged’

BBC Touts Medical Editor Charging Trump with ‘Crime Against Humanity’ on WHO

Celebs in Lock-Down: Reiner & Co. Call Trump ‘Mentally Ill,’ ‘Dictator’ and Joke That He’s a Pedophile

Cardi B Slams ’45’ And Bernie Sanders Calls Trump The ‘Most Dangerous President In Modern History’ In Livestream Rant

‘Trump Is Killing Us’ Message Projected Onto Washington, D.C. Buildings

Stacey Abrams’s Group Will Target Democrat Who Endorsed President Trump

Senior Officials Reject Washington Post’s Claim That Trump’s Name Appearing On Stimulus Checks ‘Reeks Of Partisanship’

‘A Weak Person, A Poor Leader’ — Nancy Pelosi Explodes On Trump

Salon Fever: Trump and White Christian Nationalist Using Virus to Undermine Democracy

Meet “Anonymous” – And Here’s How Trump Aides Outed Her

MSNBC Spends Two Hours Siding with Pro-China WHO Over U.S. Since Trump Is ‘Worse’

How The Green New Deal’s Renewable Energy Mining Would Harm Humans And The Environment

Amazon Fires Employee Climate Warrior Leaders

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If it wasn’t already clear before the coronavirus outbreak, China is particularly aggressive in how it tries to control the spread of information, not just in regard to its own citizens, but people around the globe.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put these efforts on overdrive.

One eye-opener came when President Donald Trump got aggressive last week with a reporter from Phoenix Television, who first stated that Chinese companies such as Huawei and Alibaba have donated supplies to the U.S.

Then she asked the president: “Are you cooperating with China?”

Trump responded by asking if she worked for China or if her company is owned by the Chinese state.

Despite her denial, the answer essentially is “yes.”

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Of course. Who wouldn’t want to vote for an ugly black female race pimp to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency?  I guess Al Sharpton is regretting his choice of gender identity….

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The medical experts at The View Wednesday, sneered at Surgeon General Jerome Adams after he warned minority communities to stop dangerous lifestyle choices, such as smoking, that greatly increase one’s risk for dying from coronavirus at last Friday’s task force briefing. As data continues to show how black communities have been impacted disproportionately by COVID-19, co-host Sunny Hostin invited the show’s guest, Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to spurn the Surgeon General’s common sense advice and insist that we needed socialism to combat “systemic racism” instead.

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We often ascribe a basic level of humanity to even the cruelest leaders, but People’s Republic of China leader Xi Jinping’s actions have forced us to rethink this assumption. Although the emergence of the novel coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2 was probably not due to China’s actions, the emphasis that its authoritarian system places on hiding bad news likely gave the disease a sizable head start infecting the world. But most ominously, China’s obsession with image and Machtpolitik raises serious questions about its lack of moral limits.

At some point the Chinese Communist Party learned of the epidemic and made a decision to hide its existence, hoping it went away. Exposés in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post and the Chinese mainland’s Caixin show that the information that did flow out of China early in the crisis did so only because of the courage of individual Chinese people in the face of government repression. People in the Wuhan epicenter, however, began to get wise — and scared (here and here) — by the end of December 2019, forcing their government to say something. The authorities gave the impression of a nontransmissible disease already under containment. We know now this was entirely false, likely designed more to ease civil unrest than protect the people.

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Because they’ve done such a great job so far.

One of the first things they teach you in business school (or used to) is that when somebody screws up you don’t give them a promotion and a bigger budget.

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We have to have paper attestations filled out: name, address, date of birth, and only one of five allowed reasons to travel can be selected, one person in the car, and then the form is signed and dated. Six days ago, that was revamped to be signed by the date and the time stated, as outings can be for no longer than one hour. Just to be clear, when Steve cycles to the village early for the bread he must have this with him. We have moved to the app that the police can scan, but again it needs to be altered to reflect the time, etc., each time you go out.

Shopping is a nightmare, as I am supposed to stay here. I am allegedly high-risk, so we tried the web-serviced “Drive” collection system operated by French supermarkets. There are now no delivery systems here and, actually, the dreadful website for the collection system would have had you tearing out your hair – I think we are barely sane. Using it was a nightmare as the search engine was not very good and who ever coded up the products should have been fired.

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Obeying government diktats is for thee but not for me.

ZMan lays out politics.

If the starting point for a political philosophy is a set of universal truths about the human condition, then it is necessary that those truths be based in reality. Marxism has been a bloody disaster, because it assumes things about man that are contrary to the reality of the human condition. Marxists tried to remedy this by killing off the inconvenient, but it turned out that you just can’t kill enough people to make it work. Transforming society into an abattoir lowers productivity, rather than producing plenty.

Similarly, but without the bloodshed, libertarianism has been a complete failure as a political movement, because homo economicus is not real. Material self-interest is certainly part of the puzzle, but humans are motivated by all sorts of things. More important, the assumption that people will deal with one another in good faith, once the monopoly of the state is removed, is false. Every society has some portion motivated to rule over the rest. Someone will always be in charge.

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An odd pattern has emerged in San Francisco as the city responds to the Covid-19 pandemic. The world of the well-off has become tightly restricted by public quarantine orders, and the world of the poor increasingly resembles that of Mad Max—lawless, crime-ridden, and devoid of functioning authority.

Over just a few weeks, San Francisco has instituted a policy that can be described as “decarcerate, decriminalize, and depolice.” Reducing the jail population, permitting public camping and other forms of disorder, and scaling back police presence in low-income neighborhoods have always been the favored policies of San Francisco’s progressive activists. In the past, residents and business groups could restrain the most extreme impulses of the political class. Now, with the coronavirus providing cover, city leaders have pushed forward their agenda with new vigor.

Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your city.

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Notice that the first four bullet points in the article are devoted to enforcing Union Rules, i.e. “No, you can’t have it until we’ve wasted months in clinical trials’. They don’t start actually talking about the drug until bullet point 5.

The Cathedral will not let you think for yourself lest you dash your foot against a stone.

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On Monday’s installment of MTP Daily host Katy Tur finally discovered Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against her former boss and presumptive Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden. Unfortunately for viewers who may have been previously unaware of the allegations due to the media going radio silent on the issue, Tur waited until just moments before President Trump’s daily COVID-19 press conference to talk about the allegations, meaning viewers were not able to get the complete story.

The Crust takes care of its own.

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Police in Tasmania are using a surveillance helicopter to track down people camping in remote locations in violation of coronavirus lockdown laws.

Welcome to the new police state.

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Joseph Edwards Williams, 26, was arrested Monday in Tampa on charges of second-degree murder in connection with a March 20 homicide. He also faces charges of felony firearm possession, heroin possession and resisting arrest.

Hillsborough County arrest records show that Williams was released from jail on March 19 after a week in custody on charges of possession of heroin and drug paraphernalia.

Have We Won?

TONE DEAF: CNN Cheers Cleaner Air Caused By Corona Pandemic

Green New Deal goes viral, and fails

CNN Personalities Unite On Twitter To Admire Their Network’s Editorial Trump Press Briefing Chyrons  Bias? What bias?

Trump, Fauci Express Frustration With How Media Covers COVID-19 Response

‘American Despotism’: Jesse Watters Says Media Would Have Trashed Trump If He Had Closed Things Earlier

ABC Manipulates Video of Fauci Defending Trump, Insists He Killed People

Trump’s latest coronavirus press briefing featured one of his most memorable meltdowns yet  Vox.

Trump’s latest rage-fest is one of his most absurd and dangerous yet  Washington Post.

‘You’re a Fake’; CBS’s Reid Melts Down in Angry Battle with Trump, Sadly Channeling Acosta  It’s not about getting news, it’s about bashing Trump. Doesn’t he get that?

Trump Horrifies CNN By Playing Clips Of CNN

CNN UNHINGED: Trump and ‘Conservative Media’ ‘Created’ This ‘Mess’

CNN’s Chris Cuomo: TV Job Not ‘Worth My Time’  Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

Scarborough: Mika Worries Trump is an Authoritarian—I Worry He’s Nuts  I worry they’re actually getting paid for this.

‘Comedy Skit’: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Says Trump’s Coronavirus Press Conferences Are ‘Infuriating And Offensive’  Boy, that gratitude didn’t last long.

Sports Illustrated Podcast Interview With Former ESPN Anchor Ley Refers to ‘Criminally Negligent’ Trump

UNHINGED Cuomo Blasts ‘Full of Sh**’ Trump, Admits: ‘I Don’t Like What I Do’

Eye Roll: Now CNN Calls Trump’s Travel Restrictions on China a ‘Good Decision’

WATCH: CNN Insists WH Video Using Media’s Own Words Is Chinese ‘Propaganda’

CIA Secretly Told Staff COVID-19 Drug Touted By Trump Might Cause “Sudden Death”

Sen. Lindsey Graham: Media Campaign ‘To Destroy Trump … Is Pissing A Lot Of People Off’

Trump Holds Media Accountable, Media React With Childish Tantrums

Brian Williams Finds It Exhausting Watching Corona Briefings: Quite an ‘Undertaking’  Poor iddle baby.

Joy Behar Suggests WH Reporters Pull Bizarre Stunts in Briefings When Trump Lies  How about when the reporters lie?

This Reporter Is Uncovering Mountains Of New FISA Info While The Rest Of The Media Complains About Trump’s Coronavirus Briefings

Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao Bashes Trump: ‘We Can Measure His Failures in Deaths’

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You can’t believe the government.

You can’t believe the news media.

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I guess some targets are more equal than others.

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The Raleigh Police Department said Tuesday that protesting is “a non-essential activity,” as they attempted to disperse a crowd of protesters who gathered to demand businesses in the state be allowed to reopen.

North Carolina is one of 43 states currently under a stay at home order over the coronavirus pandemic, and protesters gathered at the state capital in Raleigh Tuesday in opposition to those restrictions. At least one person at the rally was arrested, according to local investigative reporter Jonah Kaplan, who estimated that over 100 people attended the rally in total.

Welcome to the new police state.

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In the early part of the digital age the résumé—newly permanent, accessible, and social-media ready—took on added weight. We downloaded the right templates. We kept databases of the appropriate verbiage. We learned to match the way we presented ourselves online to the flowery language of college brochures fervently and indiscriminately distributed by our school guidance counselor.

In one way or another, then, we were indoctrinated in the art of self-promotion—not the collection of qualifications in an objective, matter-of-fact kind of way, but the arbitrary fusion of our subjective identity with algorithmically desirable qualities and credentials. No good deed went unpublished.

…

In America, unmoored liberalism (social and economic) frees us from all convention. It leaves us with no past and no future, no beginnings or ends. The present-day American is, by and large rootless historically, geographically, spiritually. Broad deracination primes the individual for isolation, relational anxiety, and, ultimately, desperate conformity. As a result, all is dissolved into the same manic desire for recognition, manifested perfectly in the fetishism of the résumé.

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Parts is parts.

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The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has deployed the first high-energy laser weapon system overseas to combat drones for a 12-month field assessment.

During the field assessment, ARFL will evaluate if the directed energy weapon system can be a game-changing capability to defend high-value assets from drone swarms or drone attacks.

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Bloomberg News shutdown an investigation into Chinese Communist Party elites, fired the reporter on the beat and then targeted that reporter’s wife to keep her mouth shut, according to a new NPR report.

The Bloomberg reporters involved investigating the wealth of Chinese Communist Party elites had their efforts killed by their company six years ago, which was “fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government,” NPR reported Apr. 14. The outlet continued: “The company [Bloomberg News] successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.”

ZMan calls it.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the great zombie apocalypse of 2020 is not going to live up to the hype. At this stage, the models and their experts said we would have bodies in the streets and chaos at the hospitals. Instead, what we have is a shuttered country and hospitals furloughing staff due to a lack of sick people. The curve benders keep changing their forecasts, but the virus keeps letting them down. The big question now is how will everyone retreat from this debacle.

To his credit, President Trump has sensed the end game from the very beginning and has been talking about “reopening the country” for a while. He knows this cannot go on much longer and his job will soon shift from battling dingbats in the press room over the virus to battling dingbats in the press room over the economy. If he is to continue in his role, he will need the promised V-shape recession. If it is a depression, then he will be replaced with the first Alzheimer-American to run for president.

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Because Science!

Just don’t call it Chinese….

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The difference in alphabets has split the Mongolian people, with three million living in Mongolia and writing in Cyrillic, and nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed Mongolia has been returning to its linguistic roots. A generation has grown up without learning Russian, and in 2003 it was replaced by English as the mandatory foreign language in schools.

And, of course, English is written vertically … oh, wait….

Two steps forward, one step back.

David Cole.

“Stop the coronavirus stigma now!” So screamed the so-called “science” journal Nature on April 7. COVID-19 must not be “associated with Wuhan or China.” Even though COVID is the product of uniquely Chinese customs and practices, and even though COVID only occurred because the Chinese didn’t curb those customs and practices after they gave the world SARS, we must never “associate” COVID with China, because doing so might “stigmatize” the Chinese.

We’ve been down this road before. As Peter Allen used to say, “Everything old is new again.” And speaking of AIDS, we can look to that particular pandemic for an instructive example of what happens when scientists, in league with “identity” advocates, abrogate their responsibilities and put innocent people at risk, prioritizing the fight against stigma over the fight against death.

I’m a sucker for infographics.

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“Karen” is commonly used in the US to refer to a strident middle-class white woman who talks down to people of colour, usually in serving-staff positions. But the term was never just about racial oppression. As Vox wrote in its extremely extensive history of the trope, the comedian Dane Cook was using it in his act in 2005: “Every [friendship] group has a Karen, and she’s always a bag of douche.” The term went more mainstream a few years ago when someone on Reddit wrote so much bile about his ex-wife that his posts got their own subreddit called “r/FuckYouKaren”. One of the most popular ever tweets using the Karen meme was posted a month ago, just before the lockdown: “I’m scared for people who actually need to go to the store & feed their fams but Susan and Karen stocked up for 30 years.” This was liked 1.2m times, because only women shop, apparently (and shop selfishly). This weekend, the Sunday Times defined Karen as “an annoying person in the office”, and you have to admire the use of the genderless word “person” there because I’d love to know how many men out there have been called “a Karen”. I’m gonna guess it’s a feminine, curvaceous zero. “Karens are moms – pushy ones. They share corny inspirational quotes on Facebook, buy merchandise inscribed with ‘Love Life Laugh’ and love to ruin teenage fun,” Elaine Moore wrote in the FT. Moore adds that Karen is her “favourite internet villain”. Pushy mothers: aren’t they THE WORST? Lolz.

‘Commonly used’, in newspaper-speak, means ‘promoted by DemLegHump Media.

The Guardian seems shocked — shocked, I tell you — that an anti-white campaign has turned ugly.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Kentucky Christians who attended drive-in services on Easter — despite warnings from the governor to stay home over the coronavirus pandemic — were met by police presence and nails dumped in the road, the pastor of a Kentucky church said.

Democratic Kentucky Andy Beshear had announced that the state would enforce a stay-at-home measure by recording the license plates of any person attending Easter services. Americans in other states, such as in Nevada, Colorado, California, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, similarly gathered to observe the Christian holiday through drive-in church services.

The second-most-dangerous contagion in America: Conservative irrationality  Washington Post.

Trump’s Good Friday tweet shows his ignorance about Christianity  Washington Post.

Stelter Shellacks Trump, Ignores Biden In Softballs to New York Times Executive Editor

16 Terrible Takes On Trump’s Handling of Coronavirus Crisis

Meacham Sneers: White House Briefings Are Just Trump ‘Infomercials’

Unhinged Trump-Hater Michael Rapaport Calls Melania A ‘Hooker’ On Twitter

Trump Derangement Syndrome Becomes a Threat to Public Health

Watch Live: Dr. Fauci Defies The Media, Says Trump Approved ‘Mitigation’ “The First Time I Recommended It”

FNC’s Baier: WH Reporters Should Want to ‘Advance the Ball’ at Briefings, Not Showboat

Checking Facts? WashPost Whacks Trump with ‘4 Pinocchios’ for Touting POSSIBLE Cures

Country Music Star Sturgill Simpson Slams White House After Testing Positive For Coronavirus  Ungrateful asshole.

Nancy Pelosi Snaps On Trump, Says His Handling Of Coronavirus Is ‘Almost Sinful’

Study suggests the ocean is soaking up twice as much CO2 as we thought

Yet Another Consequence of the Pandemic: More Plastic Waste  Wired ‘Science’.

Fauci-Birx climate models?

Monday Mirthiness – Gleick and Mann cluelessly trash Fred Singer’s NYT obit

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Never let a crisis go to waste in advancing the proglodyte agenda.

They need to hurry up because they can see their window of opportunity shrinking.

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More accurately, 12 Democrat governors want it.

Apparently the trek to socialism isn’t proceeding fast enough.

The Other McCain.

Long before anyone heard of the Wuhan coronavirus, America was already gripped by a pandemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Our news media were particularly hard-hit by that illness, and unless you were immune to TDS, it was not safe to expose yourself to CNN or MSNBC. An irrational desire to blame Trump for this disease from China was a typical symptom of the comorbidity between TDS and COVID-19….

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Foxconn’s Wisconsin offices remain empty a year after the company said it would “correct” statements about them being unoccupied, says a new report today.

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One of India’s leading newspapers has reported that President Trump’s much-touted ‘miracle’ coronavirus drug cocktail hydroxychloroquine, which is produced in large amounts in India, is being used by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to negotiate Indian workers’ continued ability to access employment in the United States.

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We’ve known for a long time that Toyota’s Land Cruisers and Hilux pickup trucks are the go-to vehicles for armed groups of dubious legitimacy. You see them on the news all the time in locations across the Middle East and Africa. But how do these trucks, usually called technicals, make it from Toyota’s factories to the fleets of armed militants?

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The Trump administration’s big strike against the federal bureaucracy is quietly unfolding at the Bureau of Land Management, where its senior managers and scientific staff have been told to pack up their desks in Washington, D.C., and move to its new headquarters in Grand Junction, Colo. and other western offices. Most employees aren’t climbing aboard the wagon train.

I’d love to see Health Y Human Services relocated to Kingsport, Tennessee.

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The New York Times, which tried to sabotage Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s career with months of baseless #MeToo allegations – not only downplayed Joe Biden’s well-documented history of unwanted physical contact with women on Sunday, they cast extreme doubt on a detailed sexual assault allegation by former Biden staffer Tara Reade.

By Any Means Necessary….

Climate Change and Capitalism

Clifford A. Brown: AG Barr: Microbes Are the Real Threat, Not Climate Change

OOPS! CNN Gets Pranked with Question About ‘Stage-4 TDS’ Allowed on Screen

Happy Easter: ABC Resurrects Fake News Trump Warned of Virus in November

Hysterics on CNN: ‘People Are Dying’ Because Trump ‘Acting a Fool’

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I used to know, but I forgot.

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Part of the developing liberal media narrative about COVID-19 pandemic is that black people are disproportionately impacted by the disease. The usual explanation for this is that black people have more “underlying conditions” — heart disease, Type II diabetes, etc. — that so often make the difference between having a mild case of coronavirus and having a serious case that might kill you. What goes unmentioned in such explanations is that black people are also disproportionately likely to live in high-density urban areas and to use public transportation. Why do you think New York City became such a death trap in this pandemic? Millions of people ride the subway there every day, and the city’s population density is the highest in America. Because urban life is also highly correlated with voting Democrat, the Chinese virus also has a partisan bias. Republican voters tend to live in suburbs, small towns and rural areas, regions where the COVID-19 infection rate is lower. A “stay-at-home” order will help reduce the spread of a contagious disease far more effectively if you live in a single-family home than if you live in a crowded apartment complex, and so the residential patterns of Democrats are part of the risk patterns that have political consequences.