Over the last couple of weeks right-wing anti-lockdown protests have occurred throughout the country. The protesters' basic demand is the lifting of shelter-in-place orders against the recommendations of public health officials. In order to understand the nature of these protests, it is essential to analyze a few somewhat contradictory aspects of these demonstrations not typically covered in mass media and social media.

On Monday, on the heels of coordinated police action against worker solidarity rallies in NYC, Mayor De Blasio announced a ban on all public protests in New York . A day after May Day rallies, the police broke up a protest against Samaritan’s Purse for its anti-gay anti-Muslim stands.

Multiple demonstrations were held in New York City’s outer boroughs, starting in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in commemoration of May Day—international workers' day. Several of the protests converged on Governor Cuomo’s Manhattan office. However, police attempted to block the demonstrations, causing protests to break up at times, and forcing organizers to take alternate routes.

In an article on the detention of Chinese dissident real estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang, the Times wrote that President Xi Jinping “declared that all Chinese news media had to serve the party. No Chinese leader since Mao Zedong had made that obligation so explicit.

The COVID-19 virus has continued to spread globally as the United States claims the highest amount of confirmed cases. With 2.5 million+ confirmed cases and over 170,000 deaths worldwide, and 800,000+ confirmed cases and almost 45,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, it does not look like the pandemic is ending anytime soon.

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, universities all across the country have closed down, leading to the eviction of students from on-campus housing and a transition from face-to-face courses to an online format. Across the country at universities like Columbia University, University of Arizona, University of California Irvine, Lehigh University, Yale and others, students have been demanding refunds for tuition, housing, and unused meal plans and have cast doubts about the effectiveness of online courses.

U.S. coronavirus cases have surpassed 200,000 and the official federal Coronavirus Task Force is already estimating 100,000-240,000 deaths. But even in the face of an increasingly severe pandemic at home, the U.S. is continuing to saber-rattle and escalate tensions abroad with Iran.

In the final weeks of March, as New York City became the epicenter of the global Coronavirus pandemic, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo emerged as a key figure in the national “war” against the Coronavirus. He has called for vigilant state preparation based on “science and data”, including mandatory state-wide shutdowns and social distancing to flatten the curve of transmission; federal aid to increase the number of hospital beds and ventilators, and a 90-day moratorium on evictions during a period in which unemployment applications in NY State surged 500%.

As the Coronavirus crisis intensifies globally, the U.S. elite are growing increasingly concerned about the impact that this pandemic will have on the economy and their wealth. Last week James Bullard, President of the St. Louis Fed, said that GDP could contract up to 50% in Q2 2020, and that unemployment could reach 30%.

With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping across the globe, there has been an uptick in the amount of people looking to provide relief beyond the established medical and social service provided by the state. These systems have been gutted for decades by neoliberal austerity measures, and were already inadequate before this crisis hit.