Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins wrote a piece this week for the Atlantic titled, “Why didn’t facing a common enemy bring us together?” The article is worth reading, but the real answer to the question posed by Collins is simple: Politicians and bureaucrats and their enablers in the press saw an opportunity to wield power over the public, and they took it. 

Unlike in World War II, which saw the armies of President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill join forces with Joseph Stalin’s Red Army to defeat Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, our leaders lost focus on defeating the external threat posed by COVID-19 and turned their guns inward toward their constituents.