Having lived through the Great Recession and now the mass unemployment associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, I can verify that when a lot of people are out of work, they tend to go insane. At the moment, I feel like both the left and the right in this country have lost their minds. A prime example came on July 4, at the Gettysburg battlefield, where right-wing militias showed up en masse to defend against a fictional antifa flag-burning party.

On Saturday, hours before the planned flag-burning protest, hundreds of bikers, militia members and self-described patriots began gathering outside the Gettysburg Cemetery and at nearby sites with Confederate memorials. Some waved Confederate flags. Many gripped assault rifles slung from their shoulders. One carried a baseball bat.

Steve Eicholtz, a 59-year-old from Biglerville, Pa., said he had seen enough of images of looting and rioting. It wasn’t going to happen here, he said.

“These people are acting like savages,” he told his fellow patriots, while holding an AR-15 rifle.

“We’ve been letting them get by with it for too long, but that changes now,” said Don Kretzer, 52, of Chambersburg, Pa.

When the antifa protesters didn’t show up, these clowns had nothing to do. They milled around Robert E. Lee’s statue and pretended not to be cucks, but then they found their chance to be patriots.

Suddenly, by the statue of Lee, a biker shouted that he had gotten an alarming call. Someone was preparing to burn a flag, after all, he said. Scores of people jumped on their bikes and roared toward the cemetery.

There, they learned it was not the threat they imagined.

A man had entered the cemetery wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt. The man, Trent Somes, later told The Post he was visiting the grave of an ancestor, not protesting. A seminarian and associate pastor at First United Methodist Church in Hanover, Pa., Somes said a crowd of about 50 people surrounded him and aggressively questioned him about his shirt.

“I didn’t do anything to them,” he said.

Police arrived and encouraged Somes to leave.

“For his own safety, federal law enforcement made the decision to remove him, and he was escorted out of the cemetery,” Jason Martz, acting public affairs officer for Gettysburg National Military Park, later said.

So, an internet hoax caused people to drive hundreds of miles to Gettysburg where all they managed to do is get a black pastor who was trying to visit the grave an ancestor thrown out of the park by federal law enforcement.

Their assholery is exceeded only by their stupidity, but at least they didn’t commit any acts of violence.

And at least they didn’t topple any Union general statues.

I just hope that this outbreak of stupidity subsides as quickly as it arose. Our survival as a species probably depends upon it.