For ‘Open Up Kansas’ protesters, the real threat isn’t COVID-19, but communism
On my planet, the enemy is this cruel and capricious novel coronavirus, which has hit hardest among those for whom we trouble ourselves least — the elderly and the incarcerated, the non-white and the already medically vulnerable. Could it be any coincidence that the low-paid and often immigrant workers in nursing homes and meatpacking plants are absorbing more than their share of the risk?
COVID-19 is putting our sins up on billboards.
But for members of the protest group, “Open Up Kansas,” those billboards lie. For them, the real enemy is the shadow just behind the phony “PlanDemic,” and there’s nothing novel about it: “This is communism taking over the state of Kansas without firing a shot dictating every facet of our lives,” wrote Kansas state Rep. Trevor Jacobs, a 43-year-old welder and radio preacher from Fort Scott.
“Collectively as a whole we can practice civil disobedience against a tyrannical government,” he urged in a long letter that former Kansas GOP executive director Kris Van Meteren posted with Jacobs’ permission on the closed Facebook page for the protest group, which as of Friday had 7,892 members.
The true problem isn’t the “Chinese flu,” Jacobs wrote, but “communist dictators threatening free people to shut down their private businesses. ... They have gone too far with this so-called crisis, blowing up numbers, falsifying files, creating panic to further their socialist, globalist, anti-American agenda.”
The conspiracy-minded group is organizing another protest at the Capitol on Saturday. And Jacobs isn’t their only supporter inside the building. Kansas Senate President and U.S. Senate candidate Susan Wagle, who has posted well wishes on their page, shares at least some of their views on the pandemic: “Kansas can’t wait for a vaccine!” she tweeted this week. “In other states, people have risen up to rein in an out of control Governor. Sadly, the time has now come for us here in Kansas to do the same. I am working on legislation right now” to address Kansans’ concerns when the Legislature returns for one day, on May 21. Funny, she doesn’t look sad.
Some of the protesters are also anti-vaxxers, and none, judging by the comments on their page, seem to put a lot of stock in science, which they see as made-up and all part of a coordinated effort to wreck the economy and turn Americans into serfs.
For the protesters, a mask is not a democratically low-cost piece of cloth that allows us to move around in the world somewhat more safely, but a symbol and symptom of the ever more overreaching oppression of power-mad Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly.
“I refused to comply” by wearing one, one woman wrote. “First masks, then what? Muslim burkas?”
Why would you refuse to do something so simple to help keep others safe? And help make commerce more possible, too?
Van Meteren told me on the phone that that’s because the science of mask-wearing is unclear: “People say masks will save lives, but will they, or will they make things worse?”
No reputable scientist disputes that asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers shed less of the virus through a mask.
On his Facebook page, Van Meteren says that “the Wicked Witch” — Laura Kelly, of course — “is already signaling she may pull out and use additional draconian lockdowns from her book of spells and curses if she deems them appropriate in the future.”
When I asked him what there was to protest with businesses opening back up anyway, he said Kansans don’t need any “nannying or mommying.”
“Our government fosters resentment, and that generates protests.”
And when I asked Rep. Jacobs what sort of civil disobedience he had in mind, he responded in an email that said it could be anything from protesting to “spending time with family and friends even though it’s against the law” to “quietly reopening up your livelihood” in this “time of hostility against the small business person in Kansas.” In the subject line of his email, he asked, “Is exercising the 1st Amendment civil disobedience?”
Nope. And if lives weren’t at stake, I could afford to be amused by the extent to which the left and right have traded slogans and switched places in their skepticism of authority and embrace of civil disobedience.
Originally, gun control was a right-wing response to the Black Panthers. And “If it feels good, do it,” was what hippies said. Now, lefties are the rule-followers and the right has improbably repackaged “Do as you please” as a Christian directive.
If Jesus ever said, “Take crazy chances because freedom,” or “Who cares if you make some stranger sick?” that didn’t make it into the Bible.
Yet since our faces were made in Christ’s image, masks are clearly for the godless, see?
For the party that politicized the french fry — Remember post 9/11 “freedom fries”? — the rebranding of common sense as communism and mild, centrist Laura Kelly as the second coming of Mao is not out of nowhere.
But it’s taking precautions that will allow us the freedom to get back to work, and marching around bare-faced that will assure further shutdowns.
Disobedience is a lot of fun, or so I’ve been told. And in this case, it does have a purpose, which is to keep us fighting each other instead of this virus.
Democratic state Rep. Cindy Holscher says she’s now almost as worried about the danger posed by armed protesters as she is about COVID-19, which worries her plenty. And I’m pretty sure her GOP colleague Rep. Jacobs would count that as a win.
This story was originally published May 8, 2020 at 12:12 PM.
