The edict applicable to the whole country issued on March 16, 2020, said: “indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate should be closed.” So no more Bill of Rights, including the freedom of assembly and worship? Not even one reporter questioned this at the March 16th press conference, perhaps because they were too confused. It’s hard to know.
And for how long? It was pure psyops: 15 Days. For starters. Then it went on for three years in various iterations. Even now, unjabbed travelers cannot enter our shores unless they are given diplomatic clearance. One rule for the ruling elites, another for everyone else. So it has been all this time.
But was this enforceable? Did the president even possess this power? He certainly believed he did. But it was never clear. The courts did nothing to stay such astonishing executive overreach. Instead, all states but South Dakota went along, some with enthusiasm, some out of trust, and some out of sheer fear of what could happen under what felt like a situation of quasi-martial law. And how did South Dakota get away with this defiance? Was it only because it is not among the states that makes the news?
The precise powers that are possible under such a declaration are still uncertain. All anyone knew is that some very powerful people at the very top were demanding actions that seemed very much in contradiction to the Bill of Rights.
Who or what could stop such an overreach was unclear. And did the people have to obey? Certainly the mass media was all in, whipping up a populist compliance movement that would, over the course of two years, denounce anyone who dared disagree as selfish in their desire to exercise their “freedumb.” Plenty of people went to jail merely for exercising their civil rights.
Meanwhile the social fabric was torn asunder again and again until it was in tatters on the floor. Over time, the whole of the public sector gradually step away from the insanity once it became clear that 1) the mitigation efforts were achieving nothing remotely close to the promise, 2) the vaccine had no public-health benefit, 3) everyone got sick of Covid mania, 4) the courts finally started closing in on the whole racket, and 5) the anger of regular people toward their lawmakers finally boiled to the surface.
It only takes a few search terms to introduce one to a new information universe in which one discovers that the whole of civilized life was shattered for no good reason based on the posturing of a handful of government-funded bureaucrats who believed that they had more power than all the laws of the United States and the rights of people everywhere. In so doing, they worked hand-in-glove with Big Tech and Big Media to create the appearance of unity.
It’s a scandal for the ages but all major power centers (media, academia, social media, and corporate America) tried everything in their power to keep it all under wraps for the better part of three years. Congress did not have to act. They chose to act – to wash this disaster out of their hair – because they faced pressure from below.
The journalists who championed the lockdowns have gone on to other things. The academics are busy deleting posts. The pundits are deleting their pro-lockdown tweets. The think tanks that were either complicit or silent (and therefore also complicit) have moved on to pretend nothing happened. The politicians just want to change the subject. There are have precious few apologies and no admissions of wrong doing.
It’s as if the whole of the ruling class wants everyone to forget the horror of the last three years. Meanwhile, the pandemic response of brutal suppression of human liberty is now in the process of being codified as normal in the annals of the World Health Organization, even as Bill Gates argues for a new international bureaucracy to do it all over again. It was too gainful, too delightful, too thrilling, for all those who benefitted from this to pass up a chance to deploy it again.
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