During government-ordered house arrest because of the coronavirus pandemic, my memory escapes into the past. A poster I remember depicted a galleon at anchor in the port of a Renaissance city. “A ship is safe at harbor,” the poster read, “but that is not what a ship is built for.”
“Be safe!” are the new heartfelt words by which during this plague many conclude conversations. The pandemic has become a fear-house mirror in which many distortedly see their world. Many desperately want safety from the mysterious invisible viral spirits.
Do these fear-filled souls know that every one of us has a sexually transmitted, always-fatal condition called being alive? Accepting life’s inevitable risks, America’s brave Founders saw life’s purpose – what their lives were “built for” – differently.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” warned Benjamin Franklin. “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” asked Patrick Henry. Or as their modern descendants say: “My rights do not end where your fear begins.”
For the old, obese, or ill – fatally susceptible to COVID-19 – this mysterious disease rightly elicits personal concern and precautions.
But the most frightening thing about today’s pandemic is that the radical political left – and the Democratic Party it has hijacked – are using our fear of COVID-19 to impose their authoritarianism on America.
We are experiencing a “flu d’etat,” says writer Barry Peter Chowka, “… a takeover of our supposedly democratic political process by unelected and unaccountable administrative state medical bureaucrats.”
Their inaccurate data and wildly incorrect models predicting this disease have been misused to justify seizing control of the economy, business and our personal lives. The left apparently wants to keep their newly conjured dictatorship forever as America’s “New Normal.”
Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, “internet speech will never go back to [the old] normal,” writes Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith in April 25’s The Atlantic.
“Ten years ago, speech on the American internet was a free-for-all,” he writes. “There was relatively little monitoring and censorship – public or private – of what people posted, said, or did.”
This leftist-hated, intolerable freedom led to “harmful content” and to “growing pressure from governments and users to fix the problem.”
A “Joint Industry Statement” on March 16 by Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube declared that they, “the technology industry,” were “working closely together in coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world” to remove “misinformation about the [COVID-19] virus” while “elevating authoritative content on our platforms.”
Translation: This is the prototype for censoring all future ideas that question any official dogma, especially, in this case, that of the World Health Organization, whose leader is reportedly a former Marxist terrorist from Ethiopia, a nation with close ties to the People’s Republic of China. WHO has parroted Communist China’s ever-shifting propaganda about coronavirus. These dominant globalist media conglomerates, therefore, are promoting Chinese propaganda and silencing contrary American free speech.
YouTube, for example, just deleted a popular video by two California medical doctors who said: “Typically, you quarantine the sick. When someone has measles you quarantine them. We’ve never seen where you quarantine the healthy.”
“They predicted millions of cases of death,” both doctors said. But the unelected, unreliable doomsayers were wrong. “You have a 0.03% chance of dying from COVID in the state of California. Does that necessitate sheltering in place?” For merely questioning the official dogma, these medical doctors’ views were expunged by partisan leftist censors.
The pandemic lockdown is being used to make millions dependent on government money, spend more than $10 trillion printed out of thin air, kill free-market capitalism, redistribute wealth, impose easily-stolen elections by mail and prevent President Donald Trump’s reelection.
But if a socialist paradise can be funded by printing infinite paper money, then why tax anybody? If house-arresting us is justified by “saving even one life,” why not reduce the driving speed limit to 5 miles per hour? This would reduce traffic fatalities of “essential” liquor and marijuana store and abortion clinic workers allowed to leave their homes.
Wise social policy is based on human rights and cost-versus-benefit analysis. Today roughly three out of every 1,000 COVID-19 victims die – although government numbers are uncertain because we do not know how many have been infected by the virus, and because government offers huge financial incentives to inflate the number of COVID-19 cases. Divide the number who lost jobs because of the lockdown by the number of “confirmed” COVID-19 deaths, as the economic website ZeroHedge did, and you get 565 Americans whose livelihoods, liberties and dreams have been destroyed by government “lockdown” policies per death. Is it a good tradeoff that for each death attributed to coronavirus, government devastates the lives of 565 Americans? Or is this like imposing a 5 mph national speed limit to “save even one life”?
Collectivist leftists want to erase your individual rights and silence any analysis that would discredit their using the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext for their perpetual seizure of dictatorial power. Stay Safe – and Free!
Lowell Ponte is a former Reader’s Digest Roving Editor. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other major publications. His latest paper co-authored with Craig R. Smith, “The Secret War,” shows how to rethink several areas of investment to protect and grow your savings against little-known economic threats. For a free, postpaid copy, call toll-free 800-630-1492.
