When Trump cultists and various tea-party types took to the streets in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Kentucky to protest the Covoid-19 lockdowns that are designed to keep us safe, I flashed on some stray lyrics written by virus victim John Prine:

“The dark and distant drumming / The pounding of the hooves… / The coming of the caravan of fools.”

And what fools they are – a subspecies of human known as ignoramus Americanus – parading in their MAGA caps, storming state houses, blocking traffic so badly that an ambulance couldn’t get through (that says it all). This was surely inevitable – given the fact that many Americans insist on the unbridled “freedom” to do whatever they want regardless of the consequences to others; that Fox News on a daily basis pumps sewage into their heads; that a fake president lies and dithers and disrespects science – and we’re likely to see this backlash metastasize.

Melissa Ackinson, a conservative Ohio state Senate candidate, joined the protest in her state capital and brought her 10-year-old son. She denounced her state’s stay-at-home order as government overreach. (Ohio’s governor, who issued the order to safeguard public health, is a Republican.) She said that the order “enrages something inside of you.” She said she has “no fear whatsoever” of getting the virus, and she dismissed it as hype.

Seriously, what is wrong with these people?

I know it sounds “elitist” to call them stupid, but no better adjective comes to mind. It’s a willful form of stupidity. It’s fed by the fantasy that Trump will reopen the land by flicking a switch on May 1, and it’s abetted by a caravan of crackpots. Take “Dr.” Phil, for instance. He surfaced yesterday on Fox News (natch), and told Laura Ingraham (natch) that there’s no reason to shut down the nation for Covoid-19, because, after all, we don’t shut down for car accident deaths, cigarette deaths, or swimming pool deaths…

None of which are contagious.

It would’ve been nice if Laura had told “Dr.” Phil that fatal car deaths have never spiraled from 1 to 35,000 during a six-week span, but saying so would’ve been the inverse of stupid. Fox News is truly a health hazard.

Then you have Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV personality, who said Tuesday on Sean Hannity’s show that maybe we should send the kids back to class: “Schools are a very appetizing opportunity…the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3 percent, in terms of total mortality. Any life is a life lost, but that might be a tradeoff some folks would consider.” (2 to 3 percent is millions more deaths.)

Then you have Rush Limbaugh, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, agitating against the lockdowns, which, in his words, “are treating every human being as identical, every human being as the same…That’s a scary thought because that is a model for socialism and communism governments, that with the use of force, they can require everybody to behave identically – and if you don’t, then you go to reeducation camp or something worse. And that is not a scare tactic, and that is not an exaggeration…We are not the same. We are not equal. We never will be equal. There is no sameness. There is only forced sameness, which is very punitive.”

And then you have Trump, who said yesterday that the anti-lockdown protesters are very fine people: “They’re suffering… they want to get back (to normal). I think they listen to me. They seem to be protesters that like me.” Which, of course, is all that matters. And today he tweeted aid and comfort to the dummies who clogged traffic in Michigan: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

Perhaps some of those protestors would have a grip on sanity if they truly understood that safely reopening the country can’t happen until there is nationwide mass testing – to ensure, for starters, that people returning to work are not infected, that it’s safe to resume interpersonal activity, that the virus can be speedily tracked wherever it flares. As Dr. Anthony Fauci said the other day, “We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on – and we’re not there yet.”

But these protesters, and millions more just like them, don’t listen to Fauci. They listen to Trump; he’s their font of disinformation. He’s fueling them full of false hope (“our country,” he said this week, “has to get open…and hopefully quickly”), he exudes no empathy for the 35,000 dead, he refuses to acknowledge that nationwide mass testing doesn’t exist (thanks to his dithering ineptitude), and yesterday he punted the entire test issue to the governors.

By the way, these John Prine lyrics remind me of Trump: “Some humans ain’t human/ Some people ain’t kind/ You open up their hearts/ Amd here’s what you’ll find / A few frozen pizzas/ Some ice cubes with hair / A broken Popsicle/ You don’t want to go there.”

So what we’ve seen in recent days is likely a harbinger of what’s to come. Some of it is highly organized – the Michigan protests were orchestrated by conservative groups with close ties to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; a leading Oklahoma protester was co-chair of the state’s 2016 Trump campaign – and it looks like Pennsylvania is next. A new group that calls itself Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine released a statement yesterday: “The government mandating healthy citizens to stay home, forcing businesses and churches to close, is called tyranny.”

Speaking of churches: A prominent Virginia pastor, the bishop and founder of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church, for weeks had defied science and government warnings about the danger of conducting services during the pandemic. He’d declared: “I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus.” He’d vowed to stay open “unless I’m in jail or the hospital.”

Well, now he’s in the morgue.

He died the other day after contracting the virus. His wife has since tested positive. A church elder, after hearing of the pastor’s death, said: “The first thing I asked God, is ‘Why’?”

I can answer that: Because willful stupidity is tragically fatal.

As John Prine sardonically warned, “Don’t play by anybody’s rules / With your carousel of horses / And your unforeseen forces / You’re running with the caravan of fools.“