While much of American politics in the 21st century has been dominated by foreign policy, the past two and a half years have not. The hysterical government response to Covid-19 forced Americans to shift their focus back home and grapple with basic questions of liberty in the face of an increasingly totalitarian state.
Former President Trump has a checkered record at best on Covid. While he maintains to this day locking down American “saved millions of lives,” he did ultimately leave that decision to the states, administratively, if not financially.
Unfortunately, while Republican governors were generally less severe in imposing lockdown policies and tended to begin easing them more quickly than Democratic governors, very few took a principled stand. Exceptions that rule were Governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Noem deserves top honors on principle for never locking down her state a single day. She also took the most libertarian approach to Covid vaccines, neither mandating them nor prohibiting businesses or other private organizations from mandating them on their own property.
DeSantis was the first governor to drop all statewide Covid restrictions and was more willing to use government power against the private sector in both prohibiting vaccine mandates and in combatting “woke” cultural issues according to the preferences of his supporters.
Both Noem and DeSantis were rewarded with landslides in 2022 after having won much narrower victories in 2018. Both correctly cited their stands for individual liberty during the pandemic as political risks that paid off in their acceptance speeches.
While Noem’s policies were much purer on these grounds, DeSantis is the governor of a much more populous and politically important state. Unsurprisingly, he has emerged as a credible challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.
Having listened to DeSantis’ stirring victory speech on November 9, I couldn’t help wondering what a DeSantis presidency might look like. While DeSantis is certainly a more polished politician and more disciplined person than Trump, and while I would have rather lived in Florida in January 2021 than California, I couldn’t help being concerned about DeSantis’ foreign policy instincts.
Like Governor Noem, DeSantis has had few opportunities to opine on foreign policy. Also, like Noem, DeSantis has on those occasions spouted generic, establishment rhetoric about the threat China represents.
More telling is DeSantis’ record in Congress, to which he was elected as a veteran and supporter of the Iraq War. DeSantis opposed Obama’s war ambitions in Syria, as did a lot of Republicans just because it was Obama. Otherwise, he sounded much more like a neocon.
He supported President Trump’s decision not to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2017 making all the arguments one might expect from any establishment Republican. DeSantis certainly isn’t Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, but he’s no Rand Paul, either.
Neither is Donald Trump, one would correctly argue, but here is the rub. Trump seems to have a genuine aversion to war that not only exceeds that of most of the politicians in his party, but even that of most of his supporters.
The biggest news coming out of the midterm elections is the failure of the Republican Party to win a more decisive victory. They had predicted a “red wave” since well back into 2021 (an immediate reason to be skeptical) but will at best have a modest advantage in the House and a razor thin majority in the Senate.
Not only were the Republicans denied a resounding victory, but the Democrats did better in a first term midterm election than either party has while holding the White House in decades. There is no denying this was a good night for the Democrats.
This has many scratching their heads. This election was supposed to be, at least in large part, a referendum on the massive damage done to the American economy and society in general by Covid tyranny imposed by Democrats. “Never forget what they did to you” said many a meme on social media in the days before the election, especially after Emily Oster’s infamous plea for amnesty.
There is only one problem with that narrative. Covid lockdowns and other mandates were, with a few notable exceptions, largely bipartisan.
Where resistance won
Where it was possible for Covid lockdowns to be put on the ballot, they were. Governor Kristi Noem, who never locked down her state a single day in 2020, improved upon her three-point victory in 2018 with a thirty-point trouncing of her Democratic rival on Tuesday.
During her victory speech, she said, “Here in South Dakota, we protected your constitutional rights. I trusted in you to use personal responsibility and take care of each other.” The vote totals speak for themselves.
The less libertarian but more well-known Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida also won in a landslide in traditionally purple Florida. Desantis was elected by a razor thin margin in 2018. As governor, he famously convened a panel of non-government epidemiologists in September 2020 and dropped all Covid restrictions based on their televised recommendations.
Governors Gregg Abbot of Texas and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, both of whom dropped Covid restrictions in early 2021, were re-elected by comfortable margins. Senator Rand Paul, who grilled Fauci during multiple congressional appearances, also won easily.
By contrast, Republican Lee Zeldin, whom some polling indicated had a real chance to defeat incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul in deep blue New York, didn’t really compete on Tuesday. He was forced to campaign mostly on traditional Republican tough-on-crime talking points because that’s all he could do. He certainly couldn’t run a strident anti-lockdown campaign after failing to question lockdowns at all during 2020.
Anyone inclined to question their federal and state governments, the national media, and corporate America – aka, “the establishment” – wonders how much longer the American public can possibly go on believing what they’re told. The long-suspected “liberal bias” of the media has morphed into outright falsehoods told the public about Covid-19, Ukraine, “climate change,” and a host of other issues.
One after another, previous narratives enforced by de-platforming dissenters has crumbled, although the establishment seeks to cling to as much of the previous narrative as minimally plausible.
For example, natural immunity to Covid was at first ignored as if it didn’t exist at all. Then, it was reported as waning faster than vaccine immunity. Once it was undeniable that natural immunity was broader, more robust, and more durable than vaccine immunity, the focus was shifted to the superiority of vaccine immunity and natural immunity together over merely natural immunity.
Why at that point were people with only natural immunity excluded from participating in large swaths of civil society while those with only the inferior vaccine immunity not excluded? A few people screamed about it; most did not. The dissenters were censored or simply drowned out by establishment information.
A particularly egregious lie perpetrated throughout 2020 and 2021 was that immunity to previous infection no longer existed after antibodies were no longer detected in the blood. Forty years after my last biology course, I knew this had to be wrong. Doesn’t the body remember previous infection even after antibodies disappear from the blood?
Of course it does. It’s called T-cell and B-cell immunity. B-cells produce new antibodies upon new exposure to the same virus and T-cells kill infected cells directly. This is not new or controversial information. But even now, people seem to operate on the assumption that immunity from previous infection ends once antibodies are no longer detected in the blood. The establishment does everything it can to encourage this false belief.
Then, there are the “safe and effective” vaccines themselves. Americans were told by no less than the president himself, in addition to presumably more reliable sources, that the vaccines would keep them from getting infected with and spreading Covid. When that untruth was no longer defensible, the establishment tried to tell us they had never said any such thing, that the vaccines would only prevent serious illness from infection.
This begged the question of why, if they did not prevent infection and transmission, the vaccines would be mandated for employment and/or admission into publicly accessible spaces. If the risk to others is the same with or without the vaccines, what is the justification for the mandates?
Again, a few people asked; most did not.
Now, evidence is mounting that the vaccine is not only ineffective, but not as safe as previously advertised. Certainly, it is important to question all claims about the vaccines, positive and negative. The theory that Covid vaccines are a plot to depopulate the earth don’t seem to jibe with reality. But neither does the claim they are completely safe.
Alex Berenson was recently reinstated on Twitter following settlement of his lawsuit for de-platforming based on his reporting on all the lies of the Covid Regime, including the exaggerated danger of the disease itself, the ineffectiveness of the nonpharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, mask mandates, etc.), and the ineffectiveness and danger of the Covid vaccines. Had the company been able to definitively disprove any of his reporting, no settlement would have been made.
“Promoter of misinformation” Steve Kirsch is willing to pay any “doctor, professor of medicine, epidemiologist, or public health official anywhere in the world” $50,000 to demonstrate on camera where his information on vaccine deaths is incorrect. There have been no takers.
Kirsch recently presented evidence from multiple sources of massive spikes in daily deaths five months after significant vaccine rollouts.
In one sense, the Covid-19 era revitalized American federalism. While every U.S. state except South Dakota at first followed the advice of the federal government’s various national public health agencies and their spokesman, Anthony Fauci, M.D., eventually more and more diversity began to emerge in the way individual states responded to the virus.
In September of 2020, after televising a roundtable of non-government scientists from Harvard and Stanford, Governor Ron DeSantis reopened Florida completely and banned local jurisdictions from fining people for noncompliance with mask mandates.
Observing the political gains DeSantis enjoyed from lifting restrictions and the absence of disaster predicted by all opposed to DeSantis politically, Iowa’s governor lifted all restrictions in February 2021, followed closely by Gov. Abbot of Texas the following month.
While states with Republican governors trumpet their states as “free states” due to generally less severe and shorter-lived lockdowns, and proponents of decentralization from across the political spectrum point to this as a triumph of local government, federalism completely failed in the most important respect. Every United States citizen, regardless of the decisions of their state and local elected leaders, is being forced to pay for lockdowns equally.
Although Covid relief was federally funded, it wasn’t paid for with higher taxes. It would have been impossible to collect more taxes from a society producing considerably less wealth. Instead, the money was created by the Federal Reserve and handed out through programs created by the CARES Act and subsequent legislation.
We are feeling the effects of that money creation combined with decreased production now. Although his Republican critics would like to blame President Biden for rising prices today (and he has certainly contributed to them, especially energy prices), the majority of the spending authorized and new money created occurred while Trump was still in office.
M1 showed the supply of dollars at $4 trillion in February 2020. It was $16 trillion by May 2020 and $18 trillion when Trump left office in January 2021. It was just over $20 trillion as of January 2022.
President Biden, on the other hand, has largely failed to get most of the spending he wanted beyond an early Covid relief bill similar in size to the CARES Act. However, due to the mechanics of the way money gets spent by the federal government after it is appropriated by Congress, even much of the money appropriated in 2020 wasn’t spent until 2021.
That and the general lag between new money creation and the resulting rise in consumer prices is why price inflation only began in earnest in 2021. But this is not to lay the blame at Trump’s or Biden’s doorstep. Rather, it was the very bipartisan departure from reality, including by most the American public, that a large percentage of the economy could be turned off while people went on consuming as they did before.
Many otherwise “fiscally conservative” people threw up their hands and justified Covid bailouts on the grounds that those ordered to close their businesses or stay home from their jobs weren’t “at fault,” and therefore were entitled to bailouts.
It doesn’t matter who was at fault for lockdowns. Goods that are not produced cannot be consumed. One cannot consume more than one produces unless someone else provides the difference. Scarcity does not make exceptions for assignment of blame, political theories, or feelings. Even if lockdowns significantly reduced Covid deaths, which they didn’t, one still had to face the reality that producing enough to survive takes priority over avoiding the virus.
The truly “federalist” approach to Covid-19 would have been to allow each state to decide and pay for the policies it chose to implement in response to the virus. Politicians spoke in absolutes, saying lockdowns were “necessary.” Well, producing enough to survive was more necessary. This would have been true even if the virus had turned out to be as deadly as it was originally touted.
Had governors been forced to face reality and decide how to respond to lockdowns without external bailout money, there may not have been any lockdowns at all. If there were, they would have been fewer, of less severity, and of shorter duration.
This would not have made a bit of difference overall in the number of Covid deaths, as the retrospective comparisons of “open” vs. “locked down” states so clearly show.
Like TARP in 2008 and every other bailout, profits have been privatized and costs socialized. People who elected governors who took a more realistic approach to Covid and who themselves balanced the personal risk of contracting the disease more realistically with the responsibility of supporting themselves are paying the same cost in runaway inflation as those whose governors closed their economies completely and kept them closed for much longer periods of time.
Today, Americans are being asked to again support a departure from reality. The U.S. government, the most prolific invader of foreign nations in the past seventy years, has proclaimed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine beyond the pale and imposed drastic sanctions in response. President Biden has acknowledged this will have a cost to American citizens, although he has vastly understated the cost.
The president and others have tried to shift the blame for present economic pain onto Putin. This is dishonest for two reasons. One, it is not Putin’s invasion but the sanctions in response to the that will cause economic hardship, just as it wasn’t “Covid” but the government response to the virus that caused the economic fallout we’re experiencing now.
Most importantly, the economic consequences of Biden’s Russia sanctions have not even begun to be felt by American consumers. They are just now suffering the effects of Covid lockdowns. The Russia sanctions could have far more onerous economic consequences, especially if they result in a new world economic order where a significant portion of the global population no longer uses the U.S. dollar as its reserve currency. That is a reality Americans are not ready to face.
Regardless of whether Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified, America may not be able to afford the combined cost of Biden’s sanctions and the Covid lockdowns. Ignoring that reality may have fatal consequences for both America’s economy its political order.
Since early in the pandemic, Americans have been led to believe immunity to Covid-19 acquired from previous infection – to the extent natural immunity has been acknowledged at all – fades after three or four months. Why? Because after that time period, antibodies to the virus are no longer detected in the blood.
That was an immediate red flag for me because that’s not how the immune system works. Antibodies don’t stay in the blood indefinitely after infection or vaccination for any virus. If they did, your blood “would be thick as molasses,” as Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at University of California San Francisco, put it.
Rather, after natural infection or an effective vaccine, your body “remembers” the infection. B cells produce new antibodies upon encountering the same or a similar enough virus again and T cells kill virus-infected cells directly.
Having done my undergraduate and graduate work in English, I’m not sure where I acquired this knowledge. Perhaps it was a high school biology or health class, but the first time I heard Anthony Fauci or another “expert” imply immunity went away with antibodies I knew it was wrong.
I had the same experience when I went to my own physician after testing positive for SARS_COV-2 antibodies in January 2021, following an infection the previous December. The physician’s assistant made the casual statement that I should have antibodies for at least three months and left it there. I had to challenge the statement with, “but that doesn’t mean I no longer have immunity to the disease, right?
How many Americans have simply accepted that immunity goes away with the antibodies produced from the infection?
But in an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC on Sunday, Fauci acknowledged that immunity does not go away simply because antibodies are no longer detected in the blood. He now says it is “quite natural” that antibodies go down after a few months (which it is) but that:
“There is an element of the immune response, B cell memory and T cell responses, where even though you see a diminution of antibody levels, it is quite conceivable, and I hope it’s true, that the third shot boost will give a much greater durability of protection. We’re following that very closely.”
I’m not sure why Fauci believes more durable immunity will be provided by a third shot that was not provided by the first two. He did not elaborate.
We have known since July 2020 that prior infection likely does elicit durable immunity, based on a study published on the NIH website (Fauci’s own agency). That study found that even people infected with the original SARS virus in 2003 had a strong T cell response to SARS_COV_2 seventeen years later. So, there is every reason to believe immunity from natural infection with SARS_COV_2 itself confers the long lasting, durable immunity Fauci hopes a second booster will produce.
So, why the sudden acknowledgment of the way the human immune system really works? We can only speculate. Perhaps Fauci is uncomfortable recommending a fourth dose of mRNA given the light shed on risk by high profile figures like Robert Kennedy and Dr. Robert Malone. He can certainly scoff at them in public and know they’re right in private. Or maybe he’s just reading the room politically and knows Americans are losing patience with the booster shots (and mandates).
Since more people get infected every day (although I’m not sure Omicron infection is relevant here), acknowledging B cell and T cell immunity and hoping to connect them to the vaccines rather than prior infection could be a way out once the Omicron wave is over.
Whatever his motives for telling at least half the truth, no one should listen to this man about anything ever again. Yet, I cringe when I imagine the way historians will treat him and this pandemic. The same schools presently teaching your children the government ended child labor, protected us from “robber barons” and their “monopolies,” or ended segregation – all falsehoods adopted as articles of faith in the progressive religion – will someday teach future children Dr. Fauci and the Covid Regime saved America from a deadly virus.
Strike a blow for freedom. Get your kids out of the school system.
I ran across a very powerful clip from George Orwell’s last interview. He’s visibly struggling to catch his breath (he died of tuberculosis later the same year) and looks into the camera to say, “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous, nightmare situation is a simple one. Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
The passage Orwell reads, which includes the famous “boot stamping on a human face forever” line, occurs while the government is torturing Smith for the purpose of making him say what his own eyes tells him is untrue.
Even worse, when O’Brien holds up four fingers, it isn’t sufficient that Smith tell him he sees five. He must believe it.
What a terrifying parallel to the Covid Regime today.
“The vaccines are safe and effective.” “Lockdowns and mask mandates slow the spread of Covid.”
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
If you haven’t read Orwell’s classic, I implore you to do so. There are actually four books I’d recommend that I was required to read in high school but have a feeling aren’t being assigned anymore:
Read them yourself and if you have teenage children, have them read them as well (some violence and adult material in some of these). Don’t let school thwart your children’s education.
Don’t forget my new e-book,It’s the Fed, Stupid, is also available in paperback here. It’ll cost you less than a sawbuck and is a great way to introduce friends to our ideas.
I thought everyone outside New York State, especially those in free states like Florida or Iowa, would be interested in a little news from behind the Iron Curtain.
As I’ve said on several interviews over the past two weeks, New York State is a microcosm of the United States as a whole. This electoral map probably says it better than the proverbial thousand words.
That blue patch on the far left (western end of the state) is Erie County, which includes the city of my birth, Buffalo. I live in Niagara County, directly north of Erie. Two counties to the east of mine, Monroe County, includes Rochester, N.Y.
My point here is that New York is not all one homogenous blob of politically likeminded people. Like much of America, the densely populated urban centers vote Democrat and the rest – rural and small-town America – vote Republican.
Obviously, voting Republican doesn’t by any means mean Ancapistan. But let’s face it, as far as the last two years are concerned, your only chance for a relatively free existence was living in a “red state.”
Or was it?
I can tell you firsthand that living in Niagara County, N.Y. in December 2021 is for all intents and purposes no different than living in Niagara County, N.Y. in December 2019. The only difference in 2021 is the extreme minority of the population voluntarily wearing masks.
However, if the Erie County Executive had his way, Erie County would be right back to April 2020. He mandated masks indoors for all indoor “public” spaces (I’ll let calling private property “public” go for now). But even inside blue Erie County there is political diversity.
On Monday, I’ll have my interview with Gary Dickson, Republican Town Supervisor of West Seneca, N.Y., who is one of two town supervisors in Erie County who have spoken out against the mask mandates. While their opposition was hysterically exaggerated by the news media, at least Dickson’s stance shows just how toothless these mandates are when they don’t have the consent of the populace.
In the meantime, I could use your help on one thing. In order to get my new podcast visibility, I need to get some “social proof” of its popularity among listeners. I would very much appreciate you taking the time to post a review on the podcast app (Apple, Stitcher, Google, etc.) you use to listen or right on my website at https://tommullentalksfreedom.com/podcast/.
I know the Apple podcast app doesn’t make this easy – you have to go to the show page, scroll down to the Ratings and Review section, and click the star farthest to the right (wink, wink). Then, you can leave a review.
On my website, you have to go to one of the individual show pages. Nothing can be easy, right? But if you can help me out on this, although there won’t be any money, when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.
Don’t forget my new e-book, An Anti-State Christmas, is also available in paperback here. It’ll cost you less than a fiver and makes a great stocking stuffer!
Get a few copies for friends or family who need deprogramming – or even just a few laughs.
Like the music on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom? You can hear more at tommullensings.com!
“Attacks on me are, quite frankly, attacks on science,” said Anthony Fauci to widespread ridicule or approval, depending upon which side you are on. If you doubt his judgment personally, he’d have you believe, you must not believe in “the science.” Fauci went on to claim that all of the “things he’s talked about” were “fundamentally based on science.”
Let’s put the weasel words aside and recognize that what he wants you to believe – that all his official policy recommendations (“all the things I’ve talked about”) were firmly proven effective through application of the scientific method – is demonstrably false. The most rigorous, most scientific studies show precisely the opposite.
Fauci was a proponent of what has become to be known as “lockdowns,” the widespread closure of businesses and/or stay-at-home orders for the general population. Dozens of studies show this had no demonstrable effect on the spread of Covid-19. As one after another came out, Fauci went on talking about lockdowns as if this evidence did not exist.
Now, there are studies being conducted every day on this or that aspect of Covid-19 and I’m sure Fauci and his supporters can produce links to some that support lockdowns. While there are no absolutes, here is a general observation: the most scientific studies – the randomized controlled trial studies with large sample sizes measuring results in the real world – tend to point towards inefficacy of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). NPIs include (anti)social distancing, masks, and lockdowns.
Less scientific studies – those with small sample sizes or based on laboratory experiments rather than experience in the real world – tend to point towards efficacy. Remember the experiment on mannequins wearing masks? You get the picture.
Let’s not forget that early in 2020 Fauci said a study based on a single case of asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 “lays the question to rest.” And guess what? It turned out the patient documented in the case had never been asked if she had symptoms. When it turned out she was symptomatic at the time of transmission, the study was unpublished. Subsequent studies failed to prove asymptomatic spread was significant. A December 2020 study looking at secondary attack rates within the same household – published right on the NIH (Fauci’s agency) website – says it’s miniscule if it exists at all.
Yet, Fauci goes on talking as if this study doesn’t exist. He has no choice. Without asymptomatic spread, there is no justification for lockdowns or mandating masks for asymptomatic people.
On a rare occasion where the largely useless national media confronted Fauci with a question about how Texas could be doing so well four weeks after abandoning all Covid restrictions, he had no answer. “Maybe they’re doing more outside,” he mused. Then, he went on recommending the same policies as if the question had never been posed.
Fauci wasn’t alone. When White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Slavitt was asked why locked down and masked California and restriction-free Florida were having similar results in terms of Covid spread, he began his answer with perhaps the only honest words that have escaped a public health official’s mouth: “There is so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that is just a little bit beyond our explanation.” But then, in literally the same breath, he said we do know masking and social distancing work.
Now, you don’t have to be a trained journalist for the obvious follow-up question to occur to you: “No, Mr. Slavitt, the question I just posed to you suggests we don’t know masking and social distancing work because we are seeing equivalent results in states that are and are not following those policies.”
Of course, that follow-up was not put to Slavitt. And you really have to ask yourself why.
The failure of scientists to be scientific is not a new phenomenon. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) dealt directly with the tendency of scientists to reject evidence that contradicts the prevailing theory or “paradigm.”
“Part of the answer, as obvious as it is important,” wrote Kuhn, “can be discovered by noting first what scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies. Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis.”
Kuhn’s overall thesis challenged the prevailing understanding at the time that science proceeds in a linear fashion, with new discoveries incrementally adding to the accumulated knowledge that preceded them. Instead, argued Kuhn, science throughout history has featured a series of revolutions, where paradigms like the geocentric theory of the solar system or Newtonian physics collapsed under the weight of “anomalies” (evidence which contradicted the theory) and made way for new paradigms like the heliocentric theory of the solar system and Einsteinian physics.
There is much nuance in Kuhn’s argument which his critics have tended to ignore, but one takeaway that we’re seeing proved in real time is that these scientific revolutions are only revolutionary because of the tendency for scientists to cling to a theory regardless of evidence that refutes it. Kuhn argues that scientists will not abandon a disproven theory until a new theory is presented that they are convinced explains the evidence better than the old.
What makes the New Normal so strange is that a scientific revolution occurred with no anomalies. It was firmly established by a century of scientific research that nonpharmaceutical interventions weren’t effective in combatting the spread of respiratory viruses. Indeed, Fauci himself initially repeated the established scientific consensus that lockdowns and mask mandates were not effective policy responses. He even discouraged people from voluntarily wearing masks.
Then, he and the rest of the government scientists did a complete about face. There was no new evidence that motivated this. They simply abandoned the prevailing scientific consensus based on a desire to do something – even though the scientific evidence before, during, and after the outbreak of Covid-19 said what they wanted to do wouldn’t work. As a result, there is now a New Normal paradigm based on…nothing.
It should be noted that there were plenty of non-government scientists protesting vehemently right from the beginning. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were already loudly protesting lockdowns as early as April 2020. Others contested asymptomatic spread, the mortality rate initially reported (they were right), and the efficacy of masks.
Here is the problem. This New Normal paradigm can’t collapse in the face of anomalies, no matter how numerous they are, because the anomalies are now simply ignored. Anyone who calls attention to them, no matter how credentialed or qualified, is systematically discredited.
In such an environment, scientifically disproven assertions like “Covid-19 spreads asymptomatically” and “lockdowns and mask mandates work” continue to form the basis of policy. The same goes for vaccine mandates.
It’s not that evidence against New Normal science can no longer be found. Much of it is available right on the websites of the government agencies denying it. It is simply a matter of saying “no” when governments and media demand you refuse to believe you’re lying eyes and obey.
Obedience has a price. We will be feeling the economic effects of lockdowns for many years. An entire generation of children will suffer psychological damage from being forced to wear masks during their most formative years. The damage to society as a whole from lockdowns, mask mandates, and (anti)social distancing policies may be immeasurable.
Neither can you simply go along to get along until things “get back to normal.” If and when the Covid Crisis finally ends, there is a Climate Crisis already teed up to begin as surely as night follows day. It will feature the same breathless media propaganda and ignoring of contrary evidence as did the Covid Crisis. The cost this time will be a significantly and permanently lower standard of living for you and your children.
I’ve been writing about the awful consequences of the New Deal lately, particularly the widespread delegation of legislative power to the executive, something the Constitution clearly prohibits Congress from doing.Of course I’m talking about the various regulatory agencies created during the New Deal which can not only “write regulations” (i.e., “legislate”) and execute them, but in some cases even judge disputes in their own administrative courts.
We used to refer to an executive who made laws by decree and enforced them himself a “dictator,” but I guess the cigarette holder and the fake, Mid-Atlantic accent (which occurs naturally nowhere in the world) made it ok for FDR.OSHA wasn’t created until 1971, but it is built upon the same blueprint as the New Deal agencies. And it was OSHA that issued the regulation (passed a law Congress never voted on) requiring employers with 100 employees or more to require proof of Covid-19 vaccination or a negative test every week (the non-vaccinated would also have to wear facemasks indefinitely).
I had the good fortune to have Kevin Gutzman on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom’s very first episode to explain to us 1. How it came to be the executive branch acquired the legislative power and 2. How anything occurring at a single workplace could possibly be “interstate commerce.”
The federal government is only allowed to regulate interstate commerce, meaning commerce that crosses state lines.
If you haven’t heard this one yet, I encourage you to listen to it because the story is about to get even more interesting with what is going on in the courts.
Kevin referred to the constitutional prohibition on Congress delegating its legislative power to another branch “the nondelegation doctrine,” adding that it and the idea the federal government’s regulatory power should be limited to interstate commerce are both long dead and buried. And, of course, he’s right. Check out his Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution if you want to experience the long, painful death first hand.
Well, lawsuits were brought against President Biden’s tyrannical mandate arguing the very issues we discussed – nondelegation and the Commerce Clause – and the courts have issued a stay on enforcement of the mandate with language indicating they might just shoot this down. We don’t have a decision yet, but the stay order contains the following language:
“It was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine8—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.
“Well, whaddya know? The courts suddenly believe there is some limit to what the executive branch can do in terms of writing its own laws without Congress. But based on what? Why would OSHA writing a regulation requiring hard hats on construction sites not be legislating while requiring vaccines would be?
Why would the hard hat rule be interstate commerce but the vaccine rule not be? Folks, if you’re looking for sound reasoning from the federal courts, I will again direct you to Kevin’s book. Don’t let the pomp and circumstance of the Supreme Court fool you – the black robed high priests often engage in reasoning that rivals this.
So, we may just have to take the W on this and move on. We’ll see.
Some good news that does make sense: If you haven’t already, you can download a free copy of my new e-book, An Anti-State Christmas, at antistatechristmas.com.
It’s also available in paperback here. It’ll cost you less than a fiver and makes a great stocking stuffer!
Like the music on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom? You can hear more at tommullensings.com!
