Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Recently, former Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. tweeted that he’s received his first Moderna vaccination. He then urged those he knows to follow his example in rather unique fashion:

“Please get vaccinated so our nutcase of a governor will have less reasons for mindless restrictions!”

First of all, “fewer” is the word Falwell seeks.

But more importantly, while white evangelicals and Republican men have reportedly expressed a high degree of reluctance to be vaccinated, Falwell has illuminated what we’ve tried so hard to keep secret — that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is the enemy of freedom, just like N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper, President Joe Biden and the other members of the “Democrat Party” who have been pushing safety precautions — including the liberal mainstream media.

But now it appears Falwell is on to us. We may as well ’fess up.

Wearing masks? Standing 6 feet apart? Closing businesses? Sequestering in safety? And now, the possibility of requiring “vaccine passports”? It’s all been part of a communist or fascist, whatever you want to call it, plot to enforce mindless restrictions. Yep, that’s it, that’s why. Sure, millions of people around the world — more than half a million Americans — have died from the virus, that’s true, but we only used that information to our own advantage to limit freedoms. We love to limit freedoms. For some reason even we don’t understand.

We even tried some of that reverse psychology, urging people to get vaccinated while knowing that freedom-lovers would rebel against the conventional wisdom. And it worked: Fewer vaccinations, more mindless restrictions.

But now, Falwell has revealed the truth. Evangelicals and Republicans can defeat our liberal agenda by getting vaccinated. If some 90% or 95% of the population is vaccinated and the population achieves herd immunity, we’ll have no more excuses; we’ll just have to let everything open up again and life will return to normal.

Of course, we were afraid that vaccinations would become more popular among conservatives when it was revealed that former President Trump and former first lady Melania Trump had been vaccinated back in January. Fortunately, for their own reasons, they kept that info on the downlow.

Then, in February, when Trump spoke at CPAC and said, “Everybody, go get your shot,” we expected droves to follow his advice. We were afraid we’d lost. And in March, when he told Fox News, “It is a safe vaccine and it is something that works,” we were sure that the game was over. But fortunately, he was more concerned with his lost election than with the life-saving power of the vaccines and that detail was lost. Swamped.

We were also shaking in our Birkenstocks on April 5 when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged Republican men specifically to be vaccinated. “I saw on some program last week that Republican men, curiously enough, might be reluctant to take the vaccine,” he said. “I’m a Republican man and I want to say to everyone, we need to take this vaccine.”

Fortunately, for whatever reason, he didn’t point to the best, truest, most American motive for vaccination — that it would allow Republicans to own the libs.

But now that Falwell has revealed the truth, we have no more excuses. The way out of this horror has now been revealed to all.

Go ahead, get vaccinated and beat us. We’ll just have to look for other ways to help keep people alive.

That is, we mean, to restrict freedoms.

— Winston-Salem Journal