Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an extension to her stay-at-home order that now bans visiting friends and relatives in the state.
The extension, which goes into effect Saturday until the end of the month, bans travel between two Michigan residences except for purposes such as caring for a relative or pet or complying with a court order related to child custody, the Detroit Free Press reported.
"All public and private gatherings of any size are prohibited," Whitmer said at a news conference Thursday. "People can still leave the house for outdoor activities. Recreational activities are still permitted as long as they’re taking place outside of six feet from anyone else."
The executive order also shuts down "non-essential" sections in big box stores such as Home Depot and Lowes, including flooring, garden centers and plant nurseries.
Some Michigan lawmakers have criticized the order, arguing it hurts businesses that may have to shut down for good. They argue some can safely abide by social distancing guidelines, such as landscapers and greenhouses.
"If you're not buying food or medicine or other essential items, you should not be going to the store," said Whitmer.
Michigan state Rep. Steven Johnson, who opposes the order, told FOX 17 in Grand Rapids, Michigan he's received more calls from constituents on the issue than any other during his time in office.
"Let's get away from essential and non-essential, because every job is really essential, and let's talk about safety," he said. "What can we do safely. You talk about people who are working outside, landscapers who are by themselves, well they can do that safely."
He pointed to double standards such as lawn crews being allowed to work at public parks while home builders cannot work on houses.
Last month, Whitmer restricted access to the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Former Congressman Ron Paul has called on President Trump to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration’s senior scientific advisor on the coronavirus task force.
Paul, who has regularly expressed his reservations over allowing the government to enforce a lockdown, says Fauci needs to be stopped before he is given “total control” over the American people.
“He should be fired, but if you don’t do it in the literal sense, the people have to fire him,” Paul said, adding “They have to fire him by saying ‘he’s a fraud.’”
“The plan that they have is when things are getting back to normal, people can return to their work, and they do things, and go to the golf course if they get a stamp of approval,” Paul continued.
“Your liberties are there if you get a proper stamp from the government. It’s an excuse to have total control over the people,” Paul urged.
Fauci, who has warned that the virus could kill up to 200,000 Americans, previously said that the United States will not come out of lockdown until there are no “new cases” of coronavirus.
It was an about turn from the doctor’s earlier downplaying of the virus, when he initially claimed that COVID-19 was comparable to a bad flu.
Some have warned that Fauci, as well as his task force colleague Dr. Deborah Birx, both have questionable big money conflicts of interest where solutions to the coronavirus pandemic are concerned.
The assault on our civil liberties is in overdrive. Habeas corpus is thrown out the window and the government is asking to be able to indefinitely detain Americans without charge or trial. Constitutional law attorney John Whitehead, President of the Rutherford Institute, joins Liberty Report to discuss these threats...and to let us know what we can do about them!
“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said in a recent interview. “Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression.”
“Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19,” reads a new report from Bloomberg. “People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.”
“World Health Organization executive director Dr. Michael Ryan said surveillance is part of what’s required for life to return to normal in a world without a vaccine. However, civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of power once the immediate threat has passed,” reads a recent VentureBeat article titled “After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal”.
“White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system to give the government a near real-time view of where patients are seeking treatment and for what, and whether hospitals can accommodate them, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions,” reads a recent article by Politico, adding, “But the prospect of compiling a national database of potentially sensitive health information has prompted concerns about its impact on civil liberties well after the coronavirus threat recedes, with some critics comparing it to the Patriot Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks.”
“Mass surveillance methods could save lives around the world, permitting authorities to track and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus with speed and accuracy not possible during prior pandemics,” The Intercept’s Sam Biddle wrote last week, adding, “There’s a glaring problem: We’ve heard all this before. After the September 11 attacks, Americans were told that greater monitoring and data sharing would allow the state to stop terrorism before it started, leading Congress to grant unprecedented surveillance powers that often failed to preempt much of anything. The persistence and expansion of this spying in the nearly two decades since, and the abuses exposed by Snowden and others, remind us that emergency powers can outlive their emergencies.'
As we discussed recently, it’s an established fact that power structures will seize upon opportunities to roll out oppressive authoritarian agendas under the pretense of protecting ordinary people, when in reality they’d been working on advancing those agendas since long before the crisis being offered as the reason for them. It happened with 9/11, and we may be certain that it is happening now.
The reason for this is simple: the powerful are afraid of the public. They always have been. For as long as there has been government power, there has been the fear that the people will realize the power of their numbers and overthrow the government that is in power. And understandably so; it has happened many times throughout history.
This is more the case now than ever. The oppressive, exploitative nature of neoliberalism has created a dissatisfaction that’s converged with humanity’s historically unprecedented ability to network and share information, which has seen anti-government protests and movements arising all around the world. Despite the longstanding media blackout on the Yellow Vests protestsin France, you may be absolutely certain that eyes widened and leaders snapped to attention all around the planet when the words “We’ve chopped off heads for less than this” were scrawled in graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe during the early days of the demonstrations.
On Monday, former FDA chief Scott Gottlieb told CNBC that the US must build a "massive surveillance system" to detect where the virus might be spreading next - and maybe one of the best ways to monitor large swaths of the population could be through the use of pandemic drones across major US metropolitan cities.
The COVID-19 outbreak is proving to be the Trojan horse that justifies the ushering in of the surveillance state. We've noted how governments and corporations are quickly deploying big data and spy tools to monitor people during the pandemic.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, and now the war on COVID-19: all start out as legitimate responses but then are used by politicians to increase the surveillance state and erode any freedoms citizens have left.
What's coming to America in the not-too-distant future is a full-blown surveillance state, that could be on par with China's.
In particular, we want to show readers what could be coming down the pipe: That is, "pandemic drones" outfitted with specialized sensor and computer vision system that can fly around cities and detect if people have elevated body temperatures, respiratory rates, as well as to identify if people are sneezing and coughing (all signs of a COVID-19 carrier)
A US-based drone company called Draganfly is spearheading the effort to build a drone network across public areas to detect infected people. The drone network is called the "global early warning system" that would be able to spot the first signs of a pandemic.
Draganfly was recently selected by Vital Intelligence, a healthcare data services and deep learning company in conjunction with the University of South Australia, to "immediately commercialize" pandemic drones to monitor people in public areas.
"Draganfly is honored to work on such an important project given the current pandemic facing the world with COVID-19. Health and respiratory monitoring will be vital for not only detection, but also utilizing the data to understand health trends.
As we move forward, drones and autonomous technology doing detection will be an important part of ensuring public safety," said Andy Card, Director of Draganfly and former Secretary of Transportation and White House Chief of Staff.
As shown below, the pandemic drone can easily detect breathing rate, heart rate, body temperature, and if the person is sneezing and coughing - all signs that could point to a COIVD-19 carrier.
In their latest Big Brother surveillance state proposal, officials are now kicking around the idea of issuing certificates to people who have had COVID-19 and “survived,” thus becoming immune.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, revealed Friday the federal government is considering issuing Americans certificates of immunity from the coronavirus, as the Trump administration works to better identify those who have been infected and restart the U.S. economy in the coming weeks.
Police officers in Greenville, Mississippi fined Christians $500 this week for attending a drive-in church service in a parking lot.
The Christians were parked in their cars with the windows rolled up, but the police fined them for violating the state’s ‘stay-at-home’ order.
“The police in Greenville, MS went to Temple Baptist Church this evening and gave everyone there a ticket for $500 because they had a drive in service,” Charles Hamilton Jr., pastor of King James Bible Baptist Church posted to Facebook earlier this week. “Everyone was in their cars with the windows up listening to pastor Arthur Scott preached on the radio. What is harmful about people being in their cars listening to preaching with their windows up? Christians do you all see what is going on?”
The state of Kentucky is cracking down on Easter weekend worshippers by recording the license plates of people who attend services and forcing them to “self-quarantine” for two weeks afterwards.
The action is to discourage people from attending services.
In a statement provided to the Gateway Pundit, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul slammed the governor’s plan.
“Taking license plates at church? Quarantining someone for being Christian on Easter Sunday? Someone needs to take a step back here,” Senator Paul said.
Democrat Governor Andy Beshear announced the effort on Friday, saying that the state “will be recording the license plates of those who show up to any mass gatherings and provide that information to the local health departments, who will in turn order those individuals to be quarantined for 14 days,” CNN reports.
On Thursday, Dr. Ali Mokdad, a rep for the Bill Gates-funded IHME dodged questions about the low Coronavirus cases in Japan despite not doing “across the country lockdowns” like the U.S.
The University of Washington IHME Center has been putting out numbers on the coronavirus pandemic for several weeks now… Each one was just as sketchy as the last.
It is important to note that the IHME models predicting hundreds of thousands of dead Americans had social distancing and total lockdowns baked into the projections.
Americans were told that if they all stayed home and only went to the grocery store when necessary, over 200,000 would still die.
The IHME keeps revising their models because they have been WAY off — the latest projection model was revised downward from 2,000,000 projected deaths to about 60,000 deaths.
Barack Obama on Friday used the Coronavirus as an excuse to push for ‘vote-by-mail’ in November.
House Democrats have been pushing for vote-by-mail and scheming to legalize ballot harvesting after watching conservative districts in Orange County flip from red to blue in the 2018 midterm election.
The Democrats are using the Coronavirus as a vehicle to push for a nationwide vote-by-mail in an effort to steal the 2020 election.
On Tuesday Nancy Pelosi said on CNN that she was going to push for federally forced vote-by-mail in the 2020 election in the next round of Coronavirus aid.
The election is seven months away.
The Democrats’ plan for federally forced nationwide vote by mail, advocated for by the likes of Elizabeth Warren, where states would send a ballot to every registered voter, including inactive voters, creates a massive opportunity for voter fraud, the RNC said earlier this week.
A few days ago, I found myself sitting on the edge of our half-assembled bed — my stomach tight and nauseous. “What’s wrong?” my wife asked, having noticed my rapidly failing efforts to keep it together.
Since the coronavirus pandemic, I’d been spending mostly sleepless nights pouring over financial statements and spreadsheets. I was stressed, irritable and emotional. But there was no point in holding back anymore.
As a mental health strategist and speaker, my income mostly comes from conferences and corporate training. But in March, over the course of a just a few days, every contract I had lined up through September was cancelled due to the pandemic.
I suddenly went from having a healthy stream of income to absolutely nothing. My first reaction was disbelief. Then came guilt and regret: I should have saved more, I should not have spent so much, I should have seen this coming.
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