Posts Tagged → rights
Tomorrow is PA Primary Election Day
Candidates Josh Prince and Patricia McCullough are the key votes you can cast in tomorrow’s primary election, and you should vote for them. Josh is running for Commonwealth Court, and Patricia is running for Supreme Court. They each face a PAGOP-endorsed insider establishment opponent who is either not qualified at all or not nearly as qualified as Josh and Patricia.
Running against Patricia is GOPe-supported Carolyn Carluccio, a Montgomery County trial court judge, who, I am told by attorneys who have argued cases in front of her, cannot point to a single case where she she has upheld the constitutional rights of We The People. Carluccio + RINO = spineless jellyfish = The People Lose Again.
McCullough is the opposite, having spent her time on the bench doing what judges are supposed to do, which is protect the rights of The People.
Josh Prince is a well-known attorney in Pennsylvania, who has devoted himself to protecting our individual rights. We wrote about him earlier. He has been my guardian angel battling a lawless Harrisburg City’s illegal anti-gun ordinances. Incredibly, his opponent has never even argued a case in a court room. How does the political establishment even come up with candidates like this? So lame.
Please vote for Prince and McCullough tomorrow, Tuesday May 16th. You will not be sorry.
Everything covid-climate-elections is settled, OK?
The dominant theme emerging from just about everything associated with one political party and its leftist allies is that everything they demand and want and pass and promote requires me and you to give up our rights, our freedoms, our choices, our privacy, our money. I cannot think of one Democrat Party legislative bill that isn’t prying into my private life and into my bank account, and taking things away from me. All with massive government coercive force and harsh penalties for even trying to resist or even question their government enforcers.
The other theme that has emerged from the blatantly stolen elections in 2020 and in Pennsylvania and Arizona in 2022 is the same theme we have been told by the Left about Covid and human caused “climate change” – the “science” is settled, the votes are settled, and the questions about any of these are settled. Now sit the hell down and do what we tell you.
Questioning elections, lockdowns, climate change is not permitted. That is the official message government employees tell us and that the mainstream establishment legacy media repeat unquestioningly like parrots.
Even while more and more evidence is being presented through non-traditional channels about how the American government response to Covid, with the destructive lockdowns, silly useless masks, and the murderous injections, was not guided by science of any sort. Rather, government’s response to Covid was to use it to implement a destructive political agenda of control, control, control. No science at all. But Dr. Mengele Fauci kept telling us to trust the science and that his ever changing decisions were the science. The unassailable technocratic science that we should all bow down to, and that we now see was absolute rubbish.
Climate change has been stuck in the same static claim of “the science is settled” since the 1980s, when there was literally zero science about climate. That was just a political agenda claim, not a scientific one. And since the 1980s a pile of work has been done on climate, but most of it has been political narrative, and bullying, and censorship, not real scientific work and progress. What science has been done has been mostly statistical, and based on blatantly manipulated data sets from the poorest possible data sources. E.g. the laughable “sea ice is melting” data even as ships cannot get through the intense sea ice that has in fact not melted, and the easily disprovable “increasingly catastrophic storms” lie. In other words, climate change is still not science two and three decades later, after the original “the science is settled” hoax.
But we are supposed to accept it and shut up.
Now we see elections across America fraught with incredible and blatant fraud. Ballots dumped into counting centers that don’t pass the basic ballot verifications, like matching signature checks, and the ballots all have blatantly mismatched signatures. Hundreds of thousands of these fraudulent ballots in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Mail in ballots are a huge path to election fraud and it is how so many elections are being claimed by….who else but Democrat Party candidates. And don’t you dare challenge them! The science of vote counting is settled and you had better just shut up!
Now we learn from the Twitter Files expose that the federal government, namely the FBI and the DHS, illegally mis-spent millions of our own tax dollars to pay Twitter staff to censor Americans who were telling the truth about Covid, about climate change, and about fraudulent elections. Our own American government has been spending boatloads of our own taxpayer money to promote outright lies and to prevent the truth from even being told. Yes this horrible behavior is illegal and evil and corrupt and unimaginable in a democratic nation. But because it benefited just one political party and its ideological allies, the mainstream media is almost silent about it.
Have you heard about these Twitter Files? You know, the internal documents and communications that reveal Twitter to be a corrupt FBI front organization designed to tell misinformation and lies to the American people, and to manipulate our votes and the information our votes are based on? Truly evil shit.
And it’s not just Twitter, but YouTube, Google, and Facebook, and Instagram.
No one has a crystal ball and no one can predict how human events will unfold and play out. But a lot of Americans are now beginning to have their eyes opened up. The consequences of all the government staffers engaged in criminal behavior and criminal acts have yet to be revealed, but there must be consequences for what we already now know. If no FBI staff are fired and put in jail over this, if no DHS staff are fired and jailed over this, then America as a free country run by The People – you and me – is dead. It is over. Voting is a meaningless charade.
Because the federal employees engaged in these criminal acts are not being held accountable, and then the rule of law is over and the government is despotic. The opposite of how and why America was founded.
And then We, The People have only our own Declaration of Independence remaining to guide our next actions:
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness…”
…and there is more about a long train of government abuses of The People, government usurpations of the People’s powers, government employee despotism against citizens like the J6ers being held in the Washington DC gulag, etc.
In other words, if there is no accountability, then The People of America can and should, even must rise up and take back their own government from usurpers and thieves. No matter what this takes, by any means necessary, whatever the cost.
Google and YouTube are trying their darnedest to censor and suppress this newspaper. But under Elon Musk’s ownership Twitter is allowing it to be debated, and read. Pfizer and the Democrat Party knowingly killed a lot of innocent, vulnerable people for financial gain…
Voting for Fetterman is voting for child molesters & violent criminals
While it is a cold, sad, but irrefutable fact that voting for senate candidate John Fetterman here in Pennsylvania is a vote for child molesters and violent criminals, and failed schools, it is also a sad fact that voting for just about any if not every Democrat Party candidate these days means the same thing.
So extreme has the Democrat Party become that I cannot think of one single Democrat Party candidate running for office anywhere who has disavowed or will disavow the teachers’ unions violent blitzkrieg attack against American children, against kids’ innocence, against American families, against American parents and their parental rights, and for child molesters and pedophiles.
When we consider that the Democrat Party has universally across America produced candidates like John Fetterman who are also totally pro-violent criminals (Fetterman says that violent criminals are actually victims) and anti-police (instead of recognizing there are a lot of great police who keep us safe and only a handful of bad cops), you have to wonder why the hell would any normal American vote for a single Democrat anywhere?
I ask this question as a former Democrat Party member who was active in many Pennsylvania Democrat Party campaigns to the point of serving as the 1988 Al Gore for President campaign’s central Pennsylvania director. But recall that in 1988 Al Gore was endorsed by the National Rifle Association and various pro-life groups. It is not that I left the Democrat Party but that Al Gore and the Democrat Party left me with their extreme positions. They are now so extreme and destructive that only the incurious and the happily unthinking vote for them.
Do not vote for John Fetterman. If you vote for him, you are also voting for child molesters and violent criminals, both of whom Fetterman believes should be roaming your neighborhood at will, without repercussion. Normal people do not believe these things or vote for these things.
Celebrate Independence Day with A Month of Defiant Acts
Today is July 4th, America’s Independence Day, founded immediately upon the heels of the United States’ successful civil war with Great Britain, from 1775 to 1781. What we call the Revolutionary War was actually a civil war between American colonists loyal to the British monarch, King George III, and his Redcoat soldiers on the one hand, and American colonists loyal to a new idea of democracy and representative self-government, on the other hand.
As we celebrated today, individual freedom, individual liberty, and individual choice won out against and over King George’s tyranny. As a result, America has enjoyed roughly 245 years of unparalleled prosperity and opportunity for even the poorest and least educated human beings from around the planet.
In 1818, then-past-President John Adams wrote that the actual revolution had already occurred among the American citizens and frontier colonists, years before the actual fighting began in 1775. The people’s then-revolutionary views on power sharing among humans, governmental legitimacy through consent of the governed, government transparency and accountability, and a kind of loose and very broadly defined Christian brotherhood united by loyalty to ideas and shared values had already taken hold on the frontier, united more than enough individuals to stand up against what was then the greatest military power in the world.
Today there is without question a formal tyranny afoot in North America. Both Canada (Trudeau) and America (Biden) are presently run by people who are openly and aggressively at odds with the fundamental rights and freedoms the peoples here have lived by for a very long time. It is an effort to consolidate official power over The People that knows no bounds, and official malfeasance and abuse of official positions against innocent but uppity citizens are now daily occurrences in both Canada and America.
Here in America the Department of Justice and the FBI have set land speed records for false accusations and the corrupt detonation of individual due process rights, whereby the criminal prosecutorial process is in and of itself the punishment. Even if an innocent individual is eventually cleared of wrongdoing, the government will have bankrupted them, destroyed their good name, and perhaps destroyed their family, their career, and taken their home, too.
These public employees and agents are pretty much double dog daring everyone to try to hold them accountable within the realm of America’s legal system. And they have access to just enough corrupt and politically partisan activist judges to get the Crackerjack Box search and seizure warrants they need to spread fear and political retaliation under color of official law. But we citizens have a duty to resist this tyranny.
In the spirit of Independence Day, let us all engage in a month of defiant acts against this political corruption and destruction of our rights. You know, live up to those 1970s bumper stickers that said “Question Authority,” which at that time were aimed at the many traditional institutions the Left had not yet captured, corrupted, or destroyed. Of course, if we begin to question the authority of our Usurper in Chief and his minions, they will immediately recoil in horror: “No, don’t question THAT authority! OUR authority you must unquestionably obey!”
If the Left did not have double standards, they would have no standards at all.
Some acts of defiance and questioning authority that you should do:
- Write a letter to your county sheriff, and ask him or her to begin assembling a significant number of armed deputies, to be able to resist illegal invasions or lawless acts in the county by federal troops or agents.
- Write a letter to your county sheriff, and ask him or her to formally communicate with the Department of Justice and the FBI that their partisan corruption is now so great, they are no longer welcome in the county, and their agents encountered in the county will be arrested and held without bail.
- Write a letter to your state Attorney General, and ask him or her to formally communicate with the Department of Justice and the FBI that their partisan corruption is now so great, they are no longer welcome in the state, and their agents encountered in the state will be arrested and held without bail.
- Write a letter to your governor, asking about the possibility of re-assembling the state’s Home Guard, or some similar armed civilian force, that is capable of quickly reacting to and resisting federal troops and agents.
- Write a letter to your state Attorney General, and ask him or her to issue and execute arrest warrants against individual federal agents who have clearly broken state (and federal) laws against illegal searches and seizures, illegal search warrants obtained under false statements by said agents, etc. Most state constitutions have similar limits on government action and safeguards of individual liberties as the US Constitution, so this is not just a federal issue.
- Buy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and then return it to the store for a refund, because it tasted “off.” Or you can remove the pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from its freezer at the store, and then kindly leave it in the chips and pretzels aisle. Yes, it will melt and be lost there. But that’s not your problem. What is your problem is a Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream that is actively working overtime with its corporate influence to deprive you of your individual liberties and rights. Show them you don’t care for their anti-democracy meddling.
- Write a letter to your local school board and demand they issue a clear statement that you and other concerned taxpaying parents of school children are not domestic terrorists.
- Etc. Just stand up and be heard for the next thirty days, in the spirit of July 4th Independence Day. Be a naturally defiant American who is naturally suspicious about official authority, who sees himself or herself as part of a citizen brotherhood united against corrupt power, and resist Biden’s tyranny, even in small ways.
Happy Independence From Government Tyranny Day!
“Death is healthy, safety is dangerous”…wtf?
Few events have highlighted the sweaty, crusty butt crack separating America’s Left from the Normal people like the few recent US Supreme Court holdings over the past week. These holdings on Second Amendment rights, improper judicial legislating from the bench (Roe v. Wade), and religious liberty fly in the face of decades of Leftist activism and common establishment media narratives, and have elicited wonderfully violent public statements, violent actions, and promises of more violence from the Left and its Sinn Fein, the Democrat Party.
If the Democrat Party can’t control Americans with freedom-crushing iron-fisted laws, then they intend to control us through more murder, destruction, and mayhem.
As a long-ago former member of the Democrat Party, I am mystified how more Americans don’t walk away from this corrupt and morally bankrupt organization. How can it be that people are loyal to this lawless anti-America movement when its leaders:
- cannot tell us what is a woman, but then say that women’s rights have somehow been diminished by allowing the fifty states to determine among themselves when a child can be killed by its mother
- tell us that the death of a living, breathing child is “healthy” or is “healthcare”
- say that a wide-open southern border over which child traffickers and deadly fentanyl pour daily unchecked and undocumented and uncontrolled is “fair”
- catch and release violent criminals back into society, instead of jailing them, so they can continue committing violent crimes against innocent people
- demand civilian disarmament to prevent citizens from keeping legal firearms close to them for protection because armed law-abiding civilians are “dangerous”
- say that the practice of religion by just one person in public is the equivalent of establishing an official religion
We could easily have this list go on and on, but anyone paying attention to what is happening around our homes and families and businesses already knows that there is a significant percentage of Americans who do not identify as Americans, and who are attempting to use our collectively owned government to destroy America from the inside. This is not a what the f*ck (wtf) thing, it is a crystal clear philosophical separation between two different groups of humans.
These two groups could easily be associated with groups from the past, like the Democrat Party slave owners of 1861 and their Republican Party abolitionist (anti slavery) opponents. I think the choices facing Americans today are easily as stark as they were in 1861, except that instead of controlling a few million African slaves like in 1861, the Democrat Party is now trying to enslave all of America. All of us. You and me.
Is Canada now a political gulag for Biden?
Imagine you donated to some conservative causes, some conservative candidates. You have probably left some pro-America comments on-line, including some criticism of “president*” Biden or his administration.
Now imagine you take a summer trip up to Canada. You know, hang out at a remote lake with your friends, catch walleye, pike, bass, and maybe lake trout. Eat well, relax under the stars, and recharge your battery. You have done it off and on for twenty years and you are on a first-name basis with the lodge owner or outfitter who gets you tucked in after you cross the Canadian border.
Only now, something has changed, this week. This is not imagination, it is real. Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau just declared martial law, and his administration is already seizing the private bank accounts, pets, vehicles, passports, etc. of Canadian citizens. These people being victimized by their own formerly democratic government are not lawbreakers. They didn’t set fire to anything, they didn’t vandalize anything, they just protested peacefully or donated to lawful organizations that organize democratically to oppose Trudeau.
But now under Trudeau’s martial law, the rule of law is suspended. There are no objective standards with which law enforcement officers (who have been caught texting their enjoyment of brutalizing peaceful protestors in Ottawa) conduct themselves. Worse, the Trudeau government has a political enemies list of not just Canadians, but also Americans. And they are probably borrowing from the Biden gang’s enemy list, too.
So imagine you arrive in June at the Canadian border to set out on your annual fishing trip, and the next thing you know, you are being handcuffed and spirited away to some remote Canadian prison. You have not been charged with any crime, and because Canada is now under martial law, you have no due process rights. None. You ask to call your family to tell them where you are, and that is declined. Because you are either a political enemy of Biden or Trudeau, you are now completely screwed, because the Biden Administration is not going to weigh in to help out you, their citizen.
Nope, the Biden Administration is going to thank Trudeau for locking up their political enemies for them. And God only knows where you will be in a month or a year.
This is where we stand right now. By all indications, Canada is America’s new gulag, where political prisoners will be either sent or caught at the border and stored out of sight and out of reach. Zero civil liberties and zero human rights.
If I were an American who had exercised any of our constitutional rights here on American soil in the past two years, I would not step foot anywhere near the Canadian border. I would stay far away from Canada. Because it is probably a trap that will destroy your life. Treat Canada like a dangerous No-Go Zone (and the same can be said for Washington, DC, and many lawless leftist cities around America, where conservatives have zero civil rights or even human rights).
All around the world democracy is suddenly under assault, from within the democratic countries, not from without. New Zealand, Australia, Europe, Canada, and America are all being attacked by anti-democracy forces from within our own governments. Why this lawlessness is happening all at once is anyone’s guess. It certainly does appear to be coordinated, and all of these inside-job political hijackers are ruthless.
Unless you are an illegal alien from some other country…who might prove useful in displacing and oppressing the native people here in America, or Canada…
US Supreme Court in neon: “We are irrelevant to Americans”
After first saying they would hear it last week, late yesterday the US Supreme Court then declined to hear Texas’ lawsuit alleging that the failure of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia to abide by the elementary practices of democratic voting law had violated the voting rights of Texas voters.
This was a potential landmark case, because America is a union of states all bound together by the equality of each state’s laws. Over two hundred years of hard work has resulted in a United States of states that all give full faith and credit to one another’s state government apparatuses. Texas voters expect other states to follow the same basic rules and safeguards in their own elections, so that the votes of one state are not rendered meaningless by the cheating and sloppiness in another state’s elections. There really is no greater test of the ties that bind us Americans all together in unity than the symmetry of our voting on Election Day.
What the hell is the point of voting in one state, if a few other states allow corrupt voting that negates how your own state votes?
Yes, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case for the simple reason that five of the nine justices want to see President Donald Trump gone from the Oval Office, and they will do anything to further that end. Even if it costs the Court its credibility and standing among half the nation.
By declining to hear the case, as they did last week with the Pennsylvania Kelly/Parnell lawsuit, these five justices block the compelling arguments from being officially made in court, and thereby raised amongst the citizenry. If the case is not heard in court, then these justices’ ideological allies in the mainstream media do not have to report on it, and can continue to scoff and mock those who are terrified at how quickly America’s government fell to the coordinated leftist attack.
But the real message of the US Supreme Court in all of this, and likely in all the other cases working their way to the US Supreme Court, is that the Court is no longer relevant to the lives of American citizens.
The five US Supreme Court justices who have done this incredible, unbelievable act are so ideologically blinded that they either do not realize or do not care what fallout is resulting. Their DC Beltway elitist opposition to President Donald Trump and his voters is simply about raw power and political control, and in this case, trying to block the populist president from rightfully returning to the White House and implementing the political agenda the American voters chose him to do. Even worse, these five rogue justices are simultaneously attempting to help usher in to the White House an illegal and un-elected candidate, Joe Biden.
Instead of becoming a solution of any sort to the greatest threat to the Union since the first Civil War, and instead of becoming even a simple sounding board for the legal arguments about our relationships with one another as law-abiding American citizens in different states, the Court has blocked that process and also removed itself from the entire discussion. These five rogue justices say that neither will America have a legal resolution, nor will it have healing.
If the eighty million voters who support President Donald Trump can learn anything from the five rogue justices yesterday, it is that we citizens are completely on our own. Literally every single organ and institution of government that is designed to protect the rights and core interests of the American citizen has failed, been overthrown, or been made irrelevant in the greatest struggle of our lives. The FBI and DOJ are sitting on their hands, doing absolutely nothing about all of the reports of vote fraud last month. The US Supreme Court is just the very last institution to have made it clear that Americans are now caught in a life-altering tug-of-war between liberty and slavery, and we have only ourselves to rely upon for a fair resolution in our interests.
Going forward, whatever happens (say, for example, if President Trump invokes his 2018 executive order about foreign interference in American elections, which America just experienced, and he invokes the Insurrection Act), the US Supreme Court will have no voice in the matter.
By blocking the Court from even hearing the Pennsylvania and Texas lawsuits, five rogue justices (Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor, Roberts, Kavanaugh) have made the Court irrelevant to all related questions and have completely removed the Court from all related cases that may arise. The Court cannot dodge and hide and deflect and attempt to shape the outcome of Election Day on the one hand, and then turn around and try to block this president from shielding the republic from the coup d’etat under way when he finally decides to act. While I have no crystal ball, it is possible that this president will indeed act, because he will correctly question which is the worse outcome: A fraudulently elected criminal who represents the interests of our greatest foe, China, or a temporary dictator who merely extends his first term until all questions of law are investigated and resolved.
Some people on the right will cheer the Court’s abdication, as the Court’s fifty years of judicial activism and legislating from the bench have already gutted certain areas of the Constitution. And the left will cheer because it provides them with a concrete political result they want right now, the future be damned. But in truth, this failure by the Court is just another sign that America as a constitutional republic is breathing its last breaths at this very moment. And that is sad. Yes, the streets in your neighborhood will still have the same names, but you will not have anywhere near the same personal rights you had on November 2nd, 2020. And only too late will you realize what has truly happened.
Rural & Urban People Experience the Virus Differently
Rural and urban people are experiencing the covid19 CCP virus differently. And this means they each experience the various governors’ approaches to it differently, too. Chinese Flu policies impact rural and urban people differently.
In rural America, like Clinton County and Lycoming County here in Pennsylvania, life is still pretty much going on, not quite like normal, but fairly close to normal. The perceived risk from Wuhan covid19 Flu is low. This is because the rural peoples’ observations are not squaring up with what they are being told from their state capital. Rural people are not seeing up close and personal the disruptive chaos and death that is so pervasive in places like New York City and Philadelphia. So their behavior is different.
For weeks the Lowes in Mill Hall, PA, has been standing-room-only parking on the weekends, as local people shop for gardening supplies. Likewise the other nearby big box stores and small hardware stores are also full of people attending to their needs. Life is going on, albeit with some face masks and people clearly trying to steer clear of one another in shopping aisles. The Wegmans in Williamsport, PA, was full of shoppers the last time I was there, and the shelves were mostly well stocked. Notes about limits per customer are placed in all the usual places – TP, canned tuna, milk, bread. Ladies at the checkout are quite tough and firm about shoppers abiding by these limits, and everyone seems to be getting along just fine.
Elsewhere in rural PA are drive-in church services, food takeout, maybe some bonfires with chairs set apart, but still lots of chairs, nonetheless.
Actual Risk vs. Perceived Risk vs. Government Policy
At the heart of this lifestyle difference between rural and urban people is the difference they have over perceived risk, actual risk, and what the government policy says.
When rural people look around and see none of the catastrophic chaos engulfing New York City, they begin to ask simple and necessary questions about the actual risk of the China Flu to them. The actual risk, not the suggested hype or irrational fear stay-the-f#k-at-home perceived risk that is being breathlessly communicated by the cable outlets every minute. Without bodies stacked high, without lots of people becoming obviously sick from the CCP Chinese Flu, and with local health providers like hospitals and clinics operating as normal, rural people begin to question the value and necessity of the government policy that tells them their Constitutional rights must be suspended.
They then begin to question the value and purpose of their own government.
When we hear about the over-reach in places like Kentucky and Michigan, whose governors are literally demanding that people cower in their homes or else face huge overwhelming coercive force and jail time, it is natural for Americans to ask not just what is the value of these policies, but why can’t we have real policies that are tailored to the realities that each community faces. The potential risks of Wuhan Flu are just not the same everywhere.
Rural areas have more room and space between people, fewer people, less congestion, and a lot lot lot less exposure AND a lot less actual risk. Government policies need to reflect these realities. Blanket one-size-does-not-fit-all policies serve no real health purpose. Instead, no matter how well intentioned the governor may be, these blanket policies that are the same in Philadelphia as they are in Lock Haven, PA, make everyone equally miserable, damage all businesses equally, regardless of the health outcomes.
At the end of the day, government action must both balance risks with costs and benefits, while also safeguarding the citizenry’s sacred Constitutional rights. To date, very few states have done this. Instead, almost every state has treated low-risk rural areas the same as high-risk congested urban areas, and hit them all with the same heavy hammer. This makes the whole covid19 reaction thing seem awfully fishy.
Lotta covid19 pain? Better be lotta gain
For all the pain we are all experiencing from the Chinese covid19 flu “lockdowns,” shutdowns, economic activity coming to a screeching halt, businesses laying off people, orders drying up etc., there had damned well better be a lot of gain when all is said and done.
Meaning, all our sacrifice and loss and crushed civil rights should damned well have happened for a good reason. A lot of people should have lived who were going to die or get very sick. etc.
When the most mild mannered attorney friend texts me out of the blue yesterday “Are you worried about our civil rights?” I knew that the felt pain was cutting deep.
Our text conversation last night was brief, but it covered all the territory a person might expect, given its premise. My friend reports that many of his other friends are starting to get pretty fussy about this government-imposed suspension of civil liberties. He wrote “It is one thing to cooperate and volunteer to move less in public, but to be told we must stay in our homes…?”
This guy who wrote these texts to to me is a solid religious person, a respected family man, a well regarded attorney, pretty staid and non-excitable, perhaps even at times a boring personality (hope he is not reading this). It would take a lot to get him to write something like this civil rights text. And yet by now it is doubtful we can find any American who has not also felt a lot of pain from this covid19 China Flu business, so his texts to me are probably indicative of a lot of other Americans’ restlessness. A chafing at the bit. A natural inborn resistance to being told what to do, as opposed to being asked to volunteer as free people.
Really at the center of all this lockdown/shutdown/ Big Coercive Government vs Smaller and Smaller Citizen are two factors: 1) The philosophy of governance held by the various mayors, governors, and federal disease experts, and 2) a sense of duty to nation and to one another held by Americans.
A natural tension always exists in our republic, between effective government decision making on the one hand, and citizens’ rights on the other hand. Our founding documents (Constitution, Bill of Rights) are all about this tension, and how to strike a balance between the trade-offs of having an effective government and also having a free citizenry. No doubt that Communist China has a really effective government, but on the other hand its citizens have zero freedom. Americans want maximum freedom, so we naturally reject the kind of government it takes to be really effective.
However, many if not almost all of the Washington, DC, careerists are inured to the notion of a strong federal government. An overpoweringly strong and coercive government, need be. And why would they not have this mindset? It makes them maximally relevant and powerful. So enter Washington bureaucrats Fauci and Birx, and their approach to the Wuhan China covid19 flu has been to at first pooh pooh it, and then when it becomes a big issue, to take the opposite tack – everyone lock yourself in your home and do not come out until we experts tell you to.
Back in January and February, Fauci was quoted many times pooh poohing and disavowing the China covid19 flu. Can’t happen, won’t happen, not a big deal. Oops, now it is happening – everyone run and hide, to hell with the economy.
Add to this message coming out of Washington bureaucrats the naturally authoritarian nature of many elected officials around America, and we get some pretty authoritarian abuses of power. In Malibu California the other day, a guy simply paddle boarding out in the surf was actually cut off by two police boats and then arrested for not self-social-distancing. While he was literally all alone out on the water, near no one, hurting no one, putting at risk no one. And of course the ACLU is nowhere to be found for him, because the ACLU is not about civil rights, it is about destroying America.
Here in Pennsylvania, our governor, the mild mannered and generally friendly Tom Wolf, has issued a pretty wild declaration, a dictatorial ultimatum, that has suspended our civil rights and shut down most businesses and the families who depend on them. While many of us have a strong sense of duty to our fellow humans, and we are happy to make personal sacrifices in order to protect our neighbors and our communities, at a certain point we begin to chafe under the dictatorial approach to applying law.
A lot of pain is being felt across America, and certainly here in Pennsylvania. Many of the businesses I regularly interact with are in increasingly bad shape. Much of this has to do with their diminished cash flow and uncertain banking situation. So if the banks are eventually made whole, then the rest of these businesses will be made whole, and the whole economy will come roaring back to where it was or stronger. In the mean time we all have families to feed and bills to pay, and the pain of Wolf’s lockdown is becoming intense.
Is this pain worth it, is it justified, people are asking.
Everyone I know has a real commitment to doing the right thing, because it is the right thing to do. They do not need to be told what to do, just asked. But now the pressure and resentment to being told what to do, at great personal cost, without a lot of evident gain, is beginning to build up. This would naturally be expected. The sacrifices we are all making seem to be much greater than would normally, reasonably be expected. We cannot really see the fruits of our sacrifices.
Americans die every day from all sorts of maladies and accidents. A regular flu season sees about 32,000 Americans die nationally, from just the regular old flu. We take that number of deaths as a matter of fact, a cost of being alive. And yet we are not seeing that same result from this covid19 coronavirus thing. Not even close. In fact, so far, just the opposite.
If it turns out that Wuhan China covid19 Chinese Flu actually results in very few deaths, and yet the entire nation’s economy was thrown out the window for little or no gain in health, then there is going to be hell to pay.