In the News
It is time to acknowledge that the Democrat Leftists and their accomplices in the media are busy engendering hysteria in the American people over the COVID-19 outbreak. They take certain COVID-19 numbers reported by governments and push them into the public without giving that data the context necessary to understand what is really going on.
The media and the left imply that Arizona has about 79,000 active cases of COVID-19, but that number is the total number of cases we have had in Arizona since we've started to track these cases.
It has been said that Washington politics is like a NASCAR race, everyone is constantly making left turns. Democrats are turning left at 180 miles per hour while Republicans take the left turns at 120 miles per hour. Republicans need to stop racing. Get off of the track.
Don't like that analogy? How about this one: Stop digging the hole, it is already deep enough. How about this metaphor: Democrats are kicking in the door to Marxist, totalitarian rule, while Republicans are turning the doorknob.
Why do we always fight on the radical left's turf?
It is hard to have a rational discussion when a person rejects the notion of looking at facts. Those who rely solely on feelings insist on denying facts, data, and science. They trust intuition and feelings, not reality. That's why the saying, "My facts don't care about your feeling," has gained traction.
America, and my home state, Arizona, are at a crossroads. We have two roads we can take. One is a return to the path of freedom; the other is totalitarianism. This is not necessarily a partisan issue or even a left/right problem. It is a potential permanent alteration of who we are as a people.
Nothing typifies this more fully than the mandates to wear masks that some governors and mayors are imposing on their citizens. That so many in our country are immediately acquiescent in the broad implementation of mandated masks reveals that we may have lost our way, perhaps irretrievably.
The Left is apoplectic that Arizona and the rest of the country are moving to reopen our society. Gov. Doug Ducey is correct that Arizona needs to be open. We have all have been denied fundamental rights during lockdowns. As Arizona opens, we all must understand and mitigate the risks of the coronavirus. But the numbers simply do not support the hysteria that left-wing pundits and their media allies are attempting to foment. They keep shouting that the number of people who have been detected with the virus is up.
Peaceful protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis have been highjacked by people with malevolent intentions. Protests are acceptable, violent attacks on people and property are not.
Pent-up frustrations from job losses and months of isolation during the coronavirus lockdowns played a role in the riots across the country, according to psychologists and pandemic researchers.
"I do think the pandemic aggravated things," said historian John Berry, who has written books focused on past pandemics.
Tension built up during the lockdowns due to the massive joblessness — especially for those making less than $40,000 a year, African Americans disproportionately getting sick from the virus, and people being shut in the house for months, Berry said.
Nearly every member of Arizona's House delegation is involved in the chamber's historic shift to proxy voting on Wednesday, with Democrats taking advantage of the new rule and Republicans seeking to block it from happening.
Democratic Reps. Raúl Grijalva and Ann Kirkpatrick are among at least four dozen House members who will stay out of the Capitol during the pandemic and still hope to participate in roll call votes.