Op-Ed: Bob Ehrlich: There Is Common Ground Between Right and Left – The Rejection of Authoritarian Censorship

The right half of a divided America continues in a state of frustration. It has been a year since its world was turned upside-down in what can now, in retrospect, be classified as the recipe for a perfect storm.

Take a polarized America, sprinkle in one unorthodox tweet-happy president in an election year, toss in the daily death toll and terror of a worldwide pandemic, add a heavy pour of blood-in-the-water politicizing after a real-time live video death in Minneapolis that incorporated race and police, and top it off with a protest-turned deadly riot in the halls of our Capitol building — and there you have it.

One year ago, few experts foresaw the dramatic impact of COVID-19. Indeed, the expert class spent the first months of the pandemic soft-peddling the risk. Recall the WHO’s early announcement that the Chinese communists had everything under control, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s early firm assurances that masks would not be necessary and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s late February plea for tourists to visit San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Of course, these and other similar assurances were made to disappear from public consciousness during the course of the 2020 campaign. Mr. Trump simply had to go — and the establishment media would do everything in its power to ensure that a “negligent” response to COVID, irrespective of its reasonability and inarguable successes, would be its dominant narrative all the way through to Nov. 3.

The death of George Floyd was the second dramatic event, as large and sometimes riotous protests broke out in a number of America’s largest cities. Demands to “defund the police” were heard, sometimes uttered and later denied by elected officials. Yet the political class was largely silent, taken aback by the vehemence of the protests and the breadth of a re-energized indictment of an allegedly “racist” country.

But the anger was nothing like “Occupy Wall Street” — the last social protest movement to gain cultural traction. This time, Wall Street