[ad_1]
By John & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute
February 21, 2024
“The treatment is worse than the illness.”—Francis Bacon
The federal government by no means cedes energy willingly.
Neither ought to we.
If the COVID-19 debacle taught us one factor it’s that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict dangers leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties simply as hole.”
Sadly, we nonetheless haven’t realized.
We’re nonetheless permitting ourselves to be totally distracted by circus politics and a relentless barrage of dangerous information screaming for consideration.
Three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave world governments (together with our personal) a handy excuse for increasing their powers, abusing their authority, and additional oppressing their constituents, there’s one thing being concocted within the dens of energy.
The hazard of martial legislation persists.
Any authorities so keen to weaponize one nationwide disaster after one other to be able to broaden its powers and justify all method of presidency tyranny within the so-called identify of nationwide safety is not going to hesitate to override the Structure and lockdown the nation once more.
You’d higher prepare, as a result of that so-called disaster may very well be something: civil unrest, nationwide emergencies, “unexpected financial collapse, lack of functioning political and authorized order, purposeful home resistance or insurgency, pervasive public well being emergencies, and catastrophic pure and human disasters.”
COVID-19 was a check to see how rapidly the populace would march in lockstep with the federal government’s dictates, no questions requested, and the way little resistance the citizenry would supply as much as the federal government’s energy grabs when made within the identify of nationwide safety.
“We the individuals” failed that check spectacularly.
Characterised by Supreme Court docket Justice Neil Gorsuch as “the best intrusions on civil liberties within the peacetime historical past of this nation,” the federal government’s COVID-19 response to the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the proper of particular person sovereignty over one’s life, self and personal property.
In an announcement hooked up to the Supreme Court docket’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether or not the federal government may proceed to make use of it pandemic powers even after declaring the general public well being emergency over, Gorsuch offered a catalog of the various methods during which the federal government used COVID-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties:
“Govt officers throughout the nation issued emergency decrees on a wide ranging scale. Governors and native leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing individuals to stay of their houses. They shuttered companies and faculties, private and non-private. They closed church buildings whilst they allowed casinos and different favored companies to hold on. They threatened violators not simply with civil penalties however with felony sanctions too. They surveilled church parking heaps, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even out of doors providers satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene necessities may quantity to felony conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, pressured people to struggle for his or her freedoms in courtroom on emergency timetables, after which modified their color-coded schemes when defeat in courtroom appeared imminent.”
Actually, the federal government’s (federal and state) dealing with of the COVID-19 pandemic delivered a knockout blow to our civil liberties, empowering the police state to flex its powers by the use of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing packages, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, and so on.
What began off as an experiment in social distancing to be able to flatten the curve of an unknown virus (and never overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose probably the most susceptible to unavoidable lack of life eventualities) rapidly turned strongly worded options for residents to voluntarily keep at house and strong-armed home arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.
Day by day introduced a drastic new set of restrictions by authorities our bodies (most have been delivered by the use of government orders) on the native, state and federal stage that have been wanting to flex their muscle mass for the so-called “good” of the populace.
There was discuss of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance to be able to perform contact tracing, immunity passports to permit those that have recovered from the virus to maneuver round extra freely, snitch tip strains for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for individuals who dared to enterprise out with out a masks, congregate in worship with out the federal government’s blessing, or re-open their companies with out the federal government’s say-so.
It was even prompt that authorities officers ought to mandate mass vaccinations and “be certain that individuals with out proof of vaccination wouldn’t be allowed, nicely, anyplace.”
These ways have been already getting used overseas.
In Italy, the unvaccinated have been banned from eating places, bars and public transportation, and confronted suspensions from work and month-to-month fines. Equally, France banned the unvaccinated from most public venues.
In Austria, anybody who had not complied with the vaccine mandate confronted fines as much as $4100. Police have been to be licensed to hold out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as a lot as $685 for failure to take action.
In China, which adopted a zero tolerance, “zero COVID” technique, entire cities—some with populations within the tens of thousands and thousands—have been pressured into house lockdowns for weeks on finish, leading to mass shortages of meals and family provides. Reviews surfaced of residents “buying and selling cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of greens. One resident traded a Nintendo Swap console for a packet of instantaneous noodles and two steamed buns.”
For these unlucky sufficient to contract COVID-19, China constructed “quarantine camps” all through the nation: huge complexes boasting hundreds of small, steel bins containing little greater than a mattress and a rest room. Detainees—together with kids, pregnant ladies and the aged— have been reportedly ordered to depart their houses in the course of the evening, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.
If this final situation sounds chillingly acquainted, it ought to.
Eighty years in the past, one other authoritarian regime established greater than 44,000 quarantine camps for these perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable or just noncompliant.
Whereas the vast majority of these imprisoned within the Nazi focus camps, pressured labor camps, incarceration websites and ghettos have been Jews, there have been additionally Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.
Culturally, we have now change into so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the truth that the aim of those focus camps have been initially supposed to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural actions that the Nazis perceived to be a menace to the survival of the regime.”
How do you get from there to right here, from Auschwitz focus camps to COVID quarantine facilities?
You don’t should be a conspiracy theorist to attach the dots.
You simply have to acknowledge the reality within the warning: energy corrupts, and absolute energy corrupts completely.
That is about what occurs when good, usually respectable individuals—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and combating that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to be aware of the looming hazard that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.
It’s about what occurs when any authorities is empowered to undertake a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that’s enforced by means of mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention facilities, martial legislation, and a disregard for the rights of the person.
That is the slippery slope: a authorities empowered to limit actions, restrict particular person liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to stop the unfold of a illness is a authorities that has the ability to lockdown a rustic, label entire segments of the inhabitants a hazard to nationwide safety, and drive these undesirables—a.ok.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, and so on.—into isolation so that they don’t contaminate the remainder of the populace.
The slippery slope begins with propaganda campaigns concerning the public good being extra vital than particular person liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and focus camps.
As I clarify in my ebook Battlefield America: The Struggle on the American Folks and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the hazard indicators are in all places.
COVID-19 was merely one disaster in a protracted collection of crises that the federal government has shamelessly exploited to be able to justify its energy grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial legislation disguised as emergency powers.
Every little thing I’ve warned about for years—authorities overreach, invasive surveillance, martial legislation, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized expertise used to trace and management the citizenry, and so forth—has change into a part of the federal government’s arsenal of terrifying lockdown powers ought to the necessity come up.
What we needs to be bracing for is: what comes subsequent?
[ad_2]