Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“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 risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties simply as hole.”
Sadly, we nonetheless haven’t discovered.
We’re nonetheless permitting ourselves to be totally distracted by circus politics and a continuing 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 won’t hesitate to override the Structure and lockdown the nation once more.
You’d higher prepare, as a result of that so-called disaster could possibly be something: civil unrest, nationwide emergencies, “unexpected financial collapse, lack of functioning political and authorized order, purposeful home resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic pure and human disasters.”
COVID-19 was a take a look at to see how shortly 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 folks” failed that take a look at spectacularly.
Characterised by Supreme Courtroom Justice Neil Gorsuch as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” the federal government’s COVID-19 response to the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the correct of particular person sovereignty over one’s life, self and personal property.
In a press release connected to the Supreme Courtroom’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether or not the federal government might 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:
“Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and native leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing folks to stay of their properties. 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 prison sanctions too. They surveilled church parking tons, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outside providers satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene necessities might quantity to prison conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, pressured people to battle for his or her freedoms in court docket on emergency timetables, after which modified their color-coded schemes when defeat in court docket 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 means of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing applications, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, and so forth.
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 essentially the most susceptible to unavoidable lack of life situations) shortly turned strongly worded options for residents to voluntarily keep at residence and strong-armed home arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.
Day-after-day introduced a drastic new set of restrictions by authorities our bodies (most have been delivered by means of government orders) on the native, state and federal stage that had been desirous to flex their muscle tissues for the so-called “good” of the populace.
There was speak 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 lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for many 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 recommended that authorities officers ought to mandate mass vaccinations and “ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”
These techniques had been already getting used overseas.
In Italy, the unvaccinated had been banned from restaurants, 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 up to $4100. Police had been to be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much 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—had been forced into home lockdowns for weeks on finish, leading to mass shortages of meals and family provides. Reviews surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Change console for a packet of on the spot noodles and two steamed buns.”
For these unlucky sufficient to contract COVID-19, China constructed “quarantine camps” all through the nation: huge complexes boasting 1000’s of small, metallic bins containing little greater than a mattress and a bathroom. Detainees—together with youngsters, pregnant ladies and the aged— had been reportedly ordered to go away their properties in the midst of the night time, 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 more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable or just noncompliant.
Whereas nearly all of these imprisoned within the Nazi focus camps, pressured labor camps, incarceration websites and ghettos had been Jews, there have been also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.
Culturally, we have now develop 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 had been initially supposed to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a risk 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 first rate folks—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and preventing that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to pay attention to 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 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 facility to lockdown a rustic, label entire segments of the inhabitants a hazard to nationwide safety, and pressure these undesirables—a.okay.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, and so forth.—into isolation so that they don’t contaminate the remainder of the populace.
The slippery slope begins with propaganda campaigns in regards to the public good being extra vital than particular person liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and focus camps.
As I clarify in my e-book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the hazard indicators are in all places.
COVID-19 was merely one disaster in a long series 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 develop into a part of the federal government’s arsenal of terrifying lockdown powers ought to the necessity come up.
What we ought to be bracing for is: what comes subsequent?
Loading…