Just when you thought that our political moment could not become any more fraught or unreal, the ringleader of the right-wing militia takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has now popped up in Idaho, declaring the state’s stay-at-home order to be unconstitutional and urging armed defiance if necessary. To rally the troops to his cause, Ammon Bundy called a meeting that incidentally demonstrated his own personal disregard for social distancing, as “dozens of people [sat] elbow to elbow” and “[greeted] each other with hugs.” According to Boise State Public Radio, “Bundy is threatening to lead a march on the homes of Idaho Governor Brad Little and the director of the state’s Department of Health and Welfare. He also says he’d like to form a human cordon around businesses staying open in defiance of the order.” As with the Oregon standoff, Bundy appears ever eager to embark on a campaign of violence, remarking, “If it gets bad enough, and our rights are infringed upon enough, we can physically stand in defense in whatever way we need to. But we hope we don’t have to get there.”
Tragically, not just Bundy but others in Idaho are standing up to the idea that the government can order quarantines to protect the public health, choosing to make this into a fight over a governmental assault on liberty instead. As the New York Times reports, some state lawmakers and even a sheriff have taken up the cause. All this, as Idaho now has more cases of coronavirus per capita than California, with Blaine County home to the highest per capita rate of coronavirus in the entire country.
While it’s not entirely surprising that anti-government types might take offense at a shelter-in-place order, what stands out is the way they’ve decontextualized the mandate. It’s gone hand-in-hand with unfounded assertions that the coronavirus is no worse than the flu — Bundy declared he’d like to get Covid-19 and be done with it — as a way to paint the state order as illegitimate. And beyond this, absent is any well-merited criticism of the Trump administration’s documented, unforgivable failure to protect the country from a pandemic that has made such extreme measures as state-wide quarantines necessary in the first place.
And beyond Idaho, across a range of states, GOP governors seem to be burnishing their conservative bona fides by taking a stand against. . . taking a stand against the virus, instead suggesting that it’s not going to hit their states hard or that business interests need to weigh more heavily against protection of public health. The total lack of interest in how we might have gotten to this point, and how the government may have failed us all, gives way to an ordinate interest in standing up for freedom of movement in the face of pointy-headed medical bureaucrats or, perhaps more to the point, in the name of embracing a denialism pioneered by the president himself. The message that individuals are on their own, and the accompanying disregard for social solidarity, may find its armed incarnation in the western militia movement, but it’s also discernible in watered-down form when GOP politicians signal that individual Americans should not look to collective action to face down crisis.