Covid Response at Five Years: The Covid Caste System [Article from 6/3/25]

In normal times, Americans would hear Daniel 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. People might have different approaches to getting him help – rehab, a social support system, family intervention – but nobody would treat him as a public policy advocate. But 2020’s Ides of March were not normal times, however, so lunacy elevated Uhlfelder to adoring media coverage and a political platform. 

Beginning in March 2020, Uhfelder, a Florida attorney, dedicated himself to shaming parents who brought their children to local beaches. He dressed as the Grim Reaper, covered head to toe in a black cloak with a scythe in his hand. Instead of questioning his sanity or explaining that sunlight killed the virus, liberal news outlets celebrated the unhinged lawyer.

“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 his signature costume. He handed out body bags and warned beachgoers that venturing outside would kill them and their loved ones. “You are inviting death and disease to walk amongst you,” he scolded them. Saturday Night Live, Vice News, and the Daily Show covered 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?’’ 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 open the Make My Day PAC, a political action committee supporting pro-lockdown Democrats. Later that year, he launched an unsuccessful campaign for Florida Attorney General, receiving 400,000 votes.

Despite his anti-science hysteria, the media gave Uhlfelder far more favorable coverage than Ron DeSantis could ever hope to receive. The New Yorker published his Holocaust invocation without any blowback. Months later, the press called Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “anti-Semitic” and “offensive” for mentioning Nazi Germany in a speech decrying totalitarianism. By July, CNN welcomed Uhlfelder as a commentator on mask mandates. “Unfortunately, when I started this work in March, I had a bad belief that this was going to get really bad,” he said. “[DeSantis] needs to issue a mask order because masks work.”

But there was a notable carveout to Uhlfelder’s attitude toward public gatherings. 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. 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.

A country with 330 million people will always have narcissistic, hypocritical lunatics like Uhfelder; more alarming, however, was how he represented the country’s ruling class in those months. 

Equality of law was overturned 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. Small businesses shuttered amid “nonessential” decrees while Planned Parenthood remained open. Protests against lockdowns resulted in arrests while governors joined thousands in “anti-racism” marches. Common citizens couldn’t eat in a restaurant or get their hair cut, but the powerful remained immune from the orders of the Covid regime. 

There were at least three factors that demarcated the two-tiered system of law that infected the United States in 2020: profession, ideology, and power. First, CISA divided the workforce into “essential” and “nonessential” categories that allowed the world’s most powerful corporations to continue their operations while small businesses and churches were subject to lockdowns. Second, the architects of lockdowns based their enforcement on whether groups held proper political beliefs. Socially political movements like Black Lives Matter earned an exemption from their totalitarianism. Third, governors, bureaucrats, and mayors flouted their own regulations and enjoyed the freedoms that they denied to their fellow citizens. 

Read More – Covid Response at Five Years: The Covid Caste System [Article from 6/3/25]