Chambana Sun

The reverberations from Champaign Mayor Deborah Frank Feinen recently being granted the power to do everything from ration food to seize private property and limit gun sales continues to echo in the face of the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

Even as Feinen is quick to point out her administration has yet to act on any of her newfound powers and has no intentions of doing so, conservatives have been just as quick to cast a disdainful eye, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune.

Within hours of the county's declaration becoming public, the National Rifle Association (NRA) had sounded the alarm to the tune of a “national alert” charging “anti-gun extremists” were moving “to undermine our firearms freedom.”

Suspicions about government overreach and abuses of power haven’t ended there.

An NBC New-Wall Street Journal poll found well over half of all Republicans worry that the government will go too far in its policing in the battle against the coronavirus, compared with just over three out of every Democrats.

Around the same time as the declaration, Illinois became one of several states to enact shelter-in-place orders, effectively shuttering all businesses not deemed essential by Gov. J.B. Pritzker and closing such institutions as schools, government facilities and state parks.

Such actions have brought the conspiracy theorists out in mass, with evangelical mega-church Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne saying, “they are using the World Health Organization to come in and take over the control of nations. There’s going to be forced vaccines to kill off many people.”

In Champaign, Feinen struggles to understand how things came to this when she insists all she was concerned with was safeguarding people from the spread of the disease by establishing the city’s legal authority to manage staffing and buy supplies like face masks.

“I wasn’t trying to give myself a crown,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “There is currently no firearm ban and no intent to seize property or close businesses.”