BLM Versus Lockdowns: Four Years Later
Beginning in March 2020, Florida attorney Daniel Uhlfelder dressed as the Grim Reaper to shame parents who brought their children to local beaches. Instead of questioning his sanity or explaining that sunlight killed the virus, liberal news outlets celebrated this unhinged lawyer, his cloak, his scythe, and his ideology.
In normal times, Americans would hear Uhlfelder barking from a street corner about end times. “Just keep walking,” they’d tell their kids as they caught glimpses of his signs predicting rapture. But these were not normal times, so lunacy elevated Uhlfelder to adoring media coverage and a political platform.
“It’s a macabre plea to beachgoers to stay home,” CNN wrote alongside a picture of Uhlfelder standing in front of a beach umbrella covered in a black cloak. He handed out body bags to families playing near the ocean. Saturday Night Live, Vice News, and The Daily Show hosted him, celebrating rather than mocking his efforts. “If we don’t take measures to control things, this virus is going to get really, really out of control,” he warned.
The New Yorker published a glowing profile on the Sunshine State’s Grim Reaper. “I’m not a liberal,” he said. “I’m logical.” He compared his publicity tour to his family’s experience in the Holocaust. “My grandfather escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager. His whole family was incinerated in gas chambers,” he said. “It was always ingrained in my head: ‘You can sit around and bitch and whine, but what are you going to do about it?’’ So, to honor the memory of the Holocaust, Uhlfelder responded to national fear by scapegoating political opponents and urging the suspension of their liberties.
Uhlfelder held higher aspirations than terrorizing local families. He used his publicity to launch the Make My Day PAC, a political action committee supporting pro-lockdown Democrats. Later that year, he ran an unsuccessful campaign for Florida Attorney General, receiving 400,000 votes. CNN later welcomed him as a public health expert on mask mandates.
On May 26, 2020, he posted photos of his continued efforts to shame his neighbors into sitting alone inside. He even had multiple costumes, incorporating a hazmat suit into his outfit rotation.
But there was a notable carve-out to Uhlfelder’s attitude toward public gatherings. One week later, he celebrated millions of citizens gathering across the country after the death of George Floyd. He personally attended BLM rallies in Florida and endorsed marches in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. These socially fashionable beliefs apparently warranted a departure from his zealous advocacy for lockdowns.
A country with 300 million people will always have narcissistic, hypocritical lunatics; more alarming, however, was how leading officials in government, media, and medicine were nearly indistinguishable from Uhlfelder.
The Black Lives Matter Exception
Politicians and bureaucrats throughout the country overturned equality of law in favor of a Covid caste system. The lockdowns, the edicts, the house arrests, the arbitrary deprivations of liberty, the capricious assaults on constitutional rights, and the irrational executive orders were all reserved for citizens with the wrong political persuasion.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was one of the country’s most ardent enforcers of lockdowns. Her citizens lost their basic rights to petition government, travel, and assemble. In April, she called protests against her stay-at-home order “racist and misogynistic.” She threatened that resistance would make it “likelier” that the lockdowns would continue.
But Whitmer’s tune changed when BLM...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE, FREE, HERE).