On Fox News earlier this week, the great Pete Hegseth had a very interesting thought: once you start giving your freedoms up, it becomes VERY difficult to get them back. And that is what we’ve ALL been doing since the start of these lockdowns nearly a year ago due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We accepted China’s idea that lockdowns were the only way to control the pandemic–a pandemic, by the way, that they started. As a result, China has succeeded in utterly decimating the greatest economy the world had ever seen. We took the word of Dr. Fauci as gospel, despite his many, many flip-flops on everything from mask-wearing (January 2020 – BAD! April 2020 – REQUIRED!) to the effectiveness of the vaccine and whether we can all return to “normal” life now that vaccination is underway.
I have some news for you all: we’re not likely to get back to “normal” unless we fight like hell for it. You see, the elites in charge have never had the kind of power they have right now at any point in American history, and if you think they’re going to be ready and willing to give it up, you don’t know American history. We’ve all seen the stories of elected officials disobeying their own rules by doing everything from getting blowouts in hair salons to having dinners with $15,000 wine bills. While their hypocrisy is loathsome but expected, the pandemic has unleashed a wave of petty authoritarianism even from lower-level people.
How else do you explain the city worker caught dancing with glee after she’d shut down a bar/restaurant on Super Bowl Sunday? Surely this was one of that establishment’s biggest days of the year! How else can you explain the rabidity with which cashiers at coffee shops or security guards at restaurants pounce on you to put a mask on? Most of the time, they do this before even attempting to engage in any kind of customer service.
Yes, these people are concerned about their own health – but there’s something else going on here. The desire for control is warped by those with actual power and trickled down to those with little of it. There are too many people with real power who have WAY too much of it right now and too many people with fake power who like having a feeling of some kind of agency for once in their lives. These two things are a lethal combination in a country that values liberty and freedom above all else.
Yet liberty and freedom are what is slowly slipping away from us in the guise of “public health” and “stopping the spread.” We may be slowing the spread of COVID-19 (maybe), but we’re definitely accelerating the decline of our liberties and freedom. If we don’t start fighting back now – via lawsuits, via speaking out, via every tool we have to stand up against the wave of totalitarianism that is sweeping the nation – we may find ourselves very much locked down in the Land of the Free.
