Americans suckered by the coronavirus bait-and-switch

Editor's note: This is Sean Harshey's first weekly column for WND. Find out more about him.

We all know the phrase "bait and switch." It is the dishonest practice of urging an unsuspecting person to give up something of value, then substituting a trade they would never have agreed to if the transaction were honest. The practice is illegal in a consumer setting, but standard practice by liberal politicians seeking to gain power.

Americans were suckered big-time with the coronavirus lockdown/shutdown, trading away our constitutional rights and freedom.

Just eight weeks ago politicians and experts predicted millions of Americans would soon be dead and dying from the Chinese coronavirus. Doubting them was heresy, implying they could be wrong. The few people in March 2020 who questioned the estimates or motivation of politicians and bureaucrats were derided as conspiracy theorists whose reservations would cause more people to die. We were assured there was no time for sober reflection or rational debate. Experts were to be trusted without question because the situation was too dire to do otherwise.

If you had a bad feeling about the demanded lockdowns and economic shutdowns, you were not alone.

The cast of characters calling the loudest for drastic measures, loss of freedom, unprecedented economic shutdown and massive government control were largely the same people always demanding these things: big-government statists, bureaucrats and major media. Their reasoning was strikingly familiar, too, based on experts citing computer models, warnings of imminent catastrophe and claims that delay would be deadly to millions. The timing of the emergency was suspect, also, as it came on the heels of Democrats' impeachment debacle that not only failed to remove President Trump, but actually increased his approval ratings.

The coronavirus panic followed the playbook we know from global warming, the "health care emergency" that gave us Obamacare, and the response to 9/11, which resulted in the Patriot Act. The hole-in-the-ozone panic from the 1990s turned out to be a dud, and Americans largely resisted falling for the global warming hysteria. But Obamacare and the Patriot Act were passed in this same rushed manner, with those advocating rational debate (or even a chance to read the laws) demonized as insensitive to those about to die. Both these enormous laws resulted in considerable buyers' remorse. Had Americans understood the resulting loss of freedom and invasions of privacy, these laws would not have passed.

With coronavirus, though, the politicians peddling the emergency had the benefit of being able to point to an actual virus. Unlike global warming or the hole in the ozone, there was a real sickness likely to come here at some point. Virtually everyone can relate to being sick, and avoiding the level of deaths from previous pandemics seemed sensible. Add in that politicians everywhere want to avoid being seen as slow to act in the face of disaster, and we had a perfect storm resulting in the Great Coronavirus Panic of 2020.

As subtle as some of these similarities were, though, there was a deeper parallel: the vague and open-ended nature of the control they demanded.

Anyone who has debated liberals can attest they are masters of "moving the goalposts." Changing the subject or changing demands justify continue their control. This is how taxes or government programs passed for specific reasons continue to haunt us long after their original purpose is gone.

Another way the left shifts the goalposts, though, is by making their initial goals vague enough to achieve and maintain open-ended controls.

Examples of this tactic are demands for the rich to "pay their fair share," "adequate funding for schools" or "common-sense gun control." These are all ambiguous, open-ended demands that serve as a pretext for unlimited control and taxation. No matter how high taxes go, how much money is spent on schools or how many gun control laws are on the books, these demands never expire. To see this for yourself, ask a liberal friend for a specific tax rate or amount of school funding that, once and for all, they would consider a "fair share" or "adequate funding." They will not commit to a specific number, because it would result in their losing the continued use of that demand.

When the U.S. Constitution was effectively suspended and the coronavirus controls were first put in place, it was claimed they were immediately necessary to "flatten the curve" of infections to avoid overwhelming the health care system in the massive wave of hospitalizations and deaths experts predicted. As we now know, American hospitals (besides those in New York City and a few other large urban areas) sat mostly empty as the predicted millions of sick never showed up, while other medical procedures were canceled.

As it became increasingly apparent the experts' models were overinflated by orders of magnitude, and there was never going to be an unmanageable spike in hospitalizations, Americans expected an end to the emergency controls over their freedom and their careers.

But it was too late. Many politicians are not giving up that control.

The "flatten-the-curve" excuse used in March to justify putting Americans on house arrest, shutting businesses, banning religious services and prohibiting people from gathering morphed into "stopping-the-spread." Now that excuse is transforming into "not-until-a-vaccine" or "only-when-safe" – unknown times in the future, or possibly never. Now that politicians and government bureaucrats have previously unimagined control over entire populations, they are switching to a series of open-ended excuses to justify keeping that grip on power, or only giving token concessions while maintaining overall control.

Democratic governors are maintaining heavy-handed control, but some Republican governors are also ignoring their citizens' demands to be freed from government restrictions.

Americans were suckered into forfeiting freedom by use of pretexts and fear. A bait-and-switch. The only way to restore freedom and pry this power out of the hands of our political overlords may be years of litigation.