I wrote this commentary in February 2014, but never posted it anywhere till now.

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Consider one aspect of the biology of the virus, namely, that a virus has no principle of self-regulation. The virus’ sole concern is its existence. It serves no master, not even its host. Its only reason for being is its own existence. (Unlike the healthy cells of organs, cancer cells share this trait of serving nothing but themselves, which is how and why they kill.) Evil has also this character. Abandoning self-regulation, a person or a system bent to evil has no purpose other than immediate attention to the propagation of itself.

People–even news magazines–often say that a virus learns to evade or outsmart the drugs designed to kill it. This is a false attribution of intention and intelligence. Viruses have neither. They have one program: more of myself! They have evolved an easily described tactic toward that end: mutate frequently, even randomly. They do not “choose” to mutate when confronted by a threatening drug; rather, mutation is their constant behavior in every situation, and because of it, some of their replicants do not succumb to drugs designed to kill their forebears.

Evil bears a woeful similarity to random mutation, because those ensnared in evil also practice a constant behavior in every situation: in order to maintain more of “me,” they lie about everything they do. The act of always-lying actually alters the liar’s aims, for he has no fixed idea of what he wants to happen other than to expand more of himself. Some of the lies that land in the soil of listeners’ ears produce a vile response, which excites the liar to push toward that response, to intensify it. Thus, the viral effects of a powerful liar.

The North Carolina governor and legislature give astonishing dimension to this viral effect. They abandon the pretense of principles of service to the people or to justice or to God, in order to make more of themselves. In order to hoard power—yet to no end. Their motto might be: “Liberty and just us for . . . just us.” They are a virus pandemic in the body politic.
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That was February 2014, when Rev. William Barber was leading the “moral Mondays” marches against the evils of Gov. Patrick McCrory and other No. Carolina electeds.   Here late in 2020, the virus of evil is trumping democracy. The only vaccine is a hundred million votes against evil.