Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh on Monday warned Americans of the possibility of “Your papers, please” travel checkpoints in the United States as part of the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
His comment comes as Trump administration officials and governors discuss reopening the economy amid the unprecendented lockdown.
Limbaugh said malls, restaurants, sidewalks and roads need to be open. He emphasized the American economy runs itself if there aren’t boundaries, noting a Massachusetts town mandated one-way walking on sidewalks to minimize contact.
He’s particularly concerned that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has floated a plan for “immunity cards,” to identify people who have had the virus.
“Can you say George Orwell, folks?” Limbaugh said. “Do you know what an immunity card is? It is federal permission to leave your home. It is federal permission to leave your home and go to work and interact with others who are immune.
“You may not remember this, but back during the apartheid days of South Africa they had ‘pass laws.’ You remember? You had to have permission from the government to pass here, go there — and it was racist, and it was bigoted. The primary problem with immunity cards is everybody’s gonna want one.
“If immunity cards are what turns you loose — if immunity cards, instead of the Constitution, is what becomes the source of your freedom — oh, my. Phrased that way, this is doubly scary.”
To get an “immunity card,” one has to get infected then recover.
“But aside from the dangers of people trying to get infected, the very idea that we’re gonna have in the United States of America checkpoints where you have to produce your papers? We’ve all seen… Well, most of us have seen these World War II movies where anywhere in the Soviet/Eastern German bloc you get to some checkpoint somewhere in Germany or Eastern Europe, ‘Papers, please. Your papers,'” he said.
“And people get nervous, search around for their papers. If they don’t have their papers, it’s the last you’ve ever seen of ’em. Do we really want that in the United States of America, ‘Papers, please,’ at checkpoints throughout American cities?
“Dr. Fauci said this is entirely possible.”
But Limbaugh called it “a bad idea.”
“We don’t want to go down that road,” he said.
“The people floating the idea of immunity certificates are dead serious about it. They’re dead serious,” he said.
