In discussing COVID lockdowns and “scientific” proclamations that justified a concerted thrust from above and below to raze our scientific and democratic foundations in the name of science and democracy (oh, how Orwellian!), philosopher Giorgio Agamben noted quite accurately that the Nazi’s used the very same logic in their well-meaning attempt to help Germany rid itself of a cancer that ate at its core. So too did slave holders justify their ownership of humans, and so too did a liberal supreme court and political body justify the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans.
I am a life-long liberal and a Democrat, but it’s almost nauseating to witness history repeat itself under the banner of liberalism. Good liberals should have fought hard during the past two years against any measures that deprived people of their rights and their freedoms, that decimated education and the lives of the poor, that used faux science to buttress an assault on science by drug companies and their physician slaves. And yet, liberals not only didn’t question or decry these outrages; they led the crusade to crush our Constitution in the wake of what they called a national emergency, never once exploring just how much of an emergency it really was and just how ineffective anti-democratic and anti-science measures to curb the “emergency” proved to be almost from day one. They placed our nation in a virtual prison, frightening vulnerable citizens day after day, draping them with myths and rituals, suppressing free speech and free choice, all under the guise of necessity. History will indeed look back on COVID not as the “worse pandemic in recent memory” (which it certainly was not!) but rather as a striking example of how fragile our democracy and scientific values really are under the assault of unchecked liberalism.
In the end, the winners of the COVID deception were not the liberals who orchestrated and fell in line with it, nor the doctors and scientists who fed it, nor even the conservatives who tried to benefit from it, but rather the big pharmaceutical companies, the media, and the most affluent and powerful elements of our society, all of which enabled liberalism to do their bidding. How is it that those who claim to be liberal and scientific are far too often the ones who fall into the very traps set by others to deprive Americans of liberties and truth to forward their own self-serving agendas? Yes, Conservatives play the same game, they deny science and believe that the Constitution is not quite as authoritative as the Bible in this nation, they trample on the rights of minorities and the poor, they are anti-choice. But during COVID, all those roles were robustly and enthusiastically taken over by our liberals. Why?
Which makes a recent op-ed by a liberal pundit that much more disturbing, because if liberals can’t learn from the catastrophe they instigated, can’t come to appreciate how easily they fell victim to a dogma and to rituals that so resemble everything they claim to despise, how then we will every have a liberal voice in this nation? Are we now destined to have two Conservative camps, one that uses fake science to badger the nation into compliance, the other that uses fake morality to do the same, both of which in the end work at the bequest of large corporations and the rich? Sadly, it seems so!
The article was written by Jill Lawrence in USA Today and is called “If you care about your country and your rights, don't vote for any Republicans in 2022” and is a diatribe of self-deception and blindness the likes of which most resemble the cries of former segregationists who declared how their “states’ rights” position had nothing to do with racism.
The author glosses over COVID, bypasses the pandemic and the “lifesaving measures” taken by Democrats that were necessary lest everyone die (for an illness that mostly impacted the very old and very poor and that killed 3/1000 people who had it during it brief virulent stage), clearly believing, as do far too many mask-wearing liberals, that COVID weaved a binary opposition pitting science against ignorance, good people against selfish people, right against wrong. That, after all, is the liberal mantra. They are good, scientific, caring souls who truly believe in democracy and helping the poor, while the other side are nasty vicious self-serving scoundrels who hate the poor and trample on the Constitution and on science.
So, yea, COVID was ok because it had to happen, and thus we can’t look at it as anything other than an exercise in necessity buttressed by science. Indeed, as I have written, John Calhoun couldn’t have agreed more, nor could have Eichmann and other Nazi’s, nor the architects of McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and the internment of the Japanese. So, Jill Lawrence falls in line with those fine folks. Our bodies ourselves doesn't apply to forced invasions of the body by an experimental and largely ineffective vaccine.
She focuses not on what liberals have perpetrated against science and democracy the past 2 years and instead focuses on what Republicans are doing today, accusing them (accurately) of stripping women of choice in matters of their own bodies, and stripping the nation of its democratic core. Don’t vote for Republicans lest our country become an autocracy, she and so many liberals cry out. And yet, we can’t ignore the past 2+ years. We can’t simply make what liberals did to this nation go away. And until liberals acknowledge the horror and murder they inflicted on innocent souls, until they fess up to the fact that they were so so wrong and that their huge mistake cost us so many lives and threatened our democracy, until they do that, they are not liberal. They are as bad, if not worse, that those Jill Lawrence tells us to vote against. They are self-deceptive destroyers of everything they purport to hold dear. They are the worst sort of conservative, the ones who blindly adhere to a dogmatic script and follow orders and who insist that everyone else do so too lest we quiet them, shame them, and ultimately deprive them of their lives as citizens of this country. They followed the playbook of southern racists, hiding behin a cloak of self-righteousness, science, and necessity that made them all the more dangerous and deceptive.
Let’s look back at their crimes, just a brief accounting of them, so we can understand why, despite Jill Lawrence’s pleas, all good liberals should not vote for Democrats if they care about their values and our nation. Because even today, at least where I live in the liberal and over-educated enclave of Columbia Maryland, masks are the norm (people wear them outside, in the car, and any time they encounter other human beings), forced vaccination is good policy, and suppression of freedom is always around the corner if COVID cases exceed an artificial threshold that Pfizer and friends constructed to ensure that we never stop thinking of this very profitable virus. Here is a short list:
· When the initial wave hit, liberals didn’t at all question the dictatorial dogmatic proclamations of Anthony Fauci, the CDC, or the Democratic media all of which lacked even a speckle of scientific validity; they immediately labeled all of those statements as facts and all opposing points of views as “misinformation,” even when other tested ideas were offered that could have saved people and prevented a full society lockdown. By doing so, they deprived those of us on the front lines from saving lives and treating people like human beings and they suppressed facts and knowledge that challenged their one-right-answer agenda. Fauci and Pfizer wanted a vaccine, and to do so, all effective treatment had to be stopped and discredited, something liberals gladly enabled. This is liberalism?
· As COVID progressed and then became less virulent, liberals refused to back down, counting cases instead of focusing on overcrowded hospitals, and refusing the acknowledge that especially after the Spring of 2020 COVID was just another virus no worse than what we face on a regular basis, most similar to a flu bug from 2017. Anyone who contested their proclamation that COVID was the worst plague to hit the world and that it would never go away was muffled and shamed, all facts to the contrary buried by deceptive fictions. They silenced the nation behind mandated masks despite the clear fact that masks can’t stop a virus, instigating school closures, quarantines, travel bans, hospital restrictions, and societal shutdowns. The result was catastrophic, but liberals didn’t see it that way, showing no compassion for those whose lives were ruined or ended by their oppressive measures, and failing to even discuss other alternatives, such as that offered by the Great Barrington Petition or in Sweden. In the end, while our liberal-instigated measures led to the highest excess mortality in the world and in our history, as well as a drop in life expectancy by 4 years (none of which can be ascribed to COVID itself, as I have discussed), Sweden had the lowest excess mortality in the world and an increase in life expectancy. Still, liberals today claim that the Fauci plan was right, and the Sweden/Great Barrington Petition plans were “mass murder,” as the commentators on CNN frequently stated, as they weaved a tale of horror and deception that their liberal audience soaked up and spit out as proven truth that could not be challenged.. This is liberalism?
· When the vaccine became available, liberals insisted that it be mandatory, not caring about possible dire consequences of its generic and non-targeted use, not desiring to educate people rather than compel them, not caring that young adults and kids who were not vulnerable to COVID could become severely injured by an untested vaccine. That not a single study suggested that the vaccine halts the spread of COVID or that the unvaccinated pose a risk to society did not deter liberals in preventing unvaccinated kids/adults from being educated, from working, and from engaging in life and travel if they did not allow an experimental treatment to be inserted into their bodies against their wills. The unvaccinated became the liberal “other;” they were like Agamben’s home sacer, people who lived but who lost their life in our society, they were the cause of all wrongs, they alone (along with those who decried masks) were like Satan who spread evil and wronged the righteous. This was the Religion of COVID, and it allowed liberals to create a theocracy in which a singular unassailable dogma prevailed. Pro-choice liberals like Jill Lawrence, those, who now blame Republicans for their horrific anti-choice agenda and for not respecting women’s choices over their bodies, insisted that we all lose control over our bodies and our choices, that we all succumb to being violated and invaded. This, to me, is the most dangerous and harmful hypocrisy that I have experienced in my lifetime, and it alone puts liberals in the same category as pro-lifers who insist that the rights of women must succumb to the rights of the fetus, in the same category as southern racists who (through science as well) insisted that it was necessary for society’s health to keep whites and blacks apart, to the very scientific Nazi’s who believed that the body politic must rid itself of the cancer of Judaism lest it die, all of whom believed that a danger to society enabled the government to remove people’s control over their own lives for the sake of the whole. This is liberalism?
· Mask mandates—and masking in general—has been definitively proven to be ineffective in slowing the spread of COVID and of saving lives. This we knew before COVID hit our shores and it has been buttressed by 3 large studies and by every other clinical and comparative study thus far conducted. And yet, liberals wear masks and insist that others wear them too, as though somehow these flimsy pieces of cloth will protect them from a virus that passes through masks like flies pass through a wire fence. They blame their illness on the un-masked, even if they are wearing a mask and got COVID regardless. They don their masks through a self-righteous act that makes them feel superior, safe, scientific. Masks are a symbol of today’s liberalism. They form a barrier between human beings, even as they trick people into thinking they are being safe and responsible. They divide the good from the bad, they maintain the specter of never-ending fear and prevent humans from interacting and from sometimes even breathing. They refuse to acknowledge facts and insist on the power of a ritual that propels them to hate others and to deprive people of their rights. This is liberalism?
· Censorship of “misinformation” became another liberal credo, effectively curtaining any debate about how to best balance the prevention/treatment of COVID with the rights of people and the devastation of an over-zealous clamping down of society. To liberals, there was good vs bad, right vs wrong, and their myopic perception of COVID was so dogmatic and unyielding that they closed their eyes and ears to anything that veered from the gospel to which they vowed to adhere and to the horror that sprouted from their unassailable agenda of absolutism, deception, censorship, and a suspension of democracy, while at the same time blaming the excess deaths from both COVID and from the quarantines to those who questioned them. This is liberalism?
· Even today, liberal California threatens to take away doctor’s licenses if they utter anything that is contrary to the CDC/Pfizer line of truth, contending that dangerous speech is not to be tolerated, and then defining what dangerous speech is, even as California has among the worse COVID and non-COVID death rate in the nation. To me, a front-line liberal doctor who read and wrote about measures that effectively and ineffectively were used against COVID, and who cared for my patients as best I could under the tyranny of public health dictates, this is an onerous act and a direct assault on democracy, and one that by definition defines it as conservative and anti-democratic and anti-science. I almost lost my medical license because I stated a fact about my patients that the liberals didn’t like. This is liberalism?
· In my county, the legislature voted to suspend a mask mandate after hearing people testify for and against it. Not liking the answer, the county executive—Stuart Pitman—simply decided to disregard the will of the people, not unlike Andrew Jackson who ignored the Supreme Court when they told him not to relocate Natives across the nation. This is something that has repeated itself all over the country, always in liberal states and cities, when governors and mayors simply toss out any semblance of democratic rights and safeguards for over 2 years and replace them by draconian measures that have no proof of helping curb death or illness, but which clearly deprive people of their education, livelihoods, and freedoms. California’s governor has trampled on the constitution and on the will of the people so emphatically that likely even Hitler and Mussolini are envious of how easily he accomplished their goals with the enthusiastic support of those who claim to value democracy. This is liberalism?
· My state’s governor, Larry Hogan, a Republican who is also quite liberal, disregarded an amendment in the Maryland Constitution that clearly states that even under the most onerous emergencies the rights and privileges of the people cannot be suspended by the executive. Well, he said, when they wrote this, they didn’t know about COVID. This is liberalism?
· Depriving kids of school, forcing them to be masked in class, forcing them to be vaccinated, scaring them all for a disease that is far less injurious and deadly than driving a car or walking the streets (an unheralded flu strain killed ten times more kids just 3 years earlier, and yet the CDC and the liberals didn't talk about forced flu vaccinations or shutting down schools at that time), all of this accentuated a gap in education between the rich and poor, set back education for decades, taught kids to be always afraid, and led to a huge spike in youth suicides, drug overdoses, and depression, and yet, liberals continue to threaten to force masking in schools and to close them during any “surges” even though every study shows none of that to be effective and all of it to be harmful to the young and the poor. This is liberalism?
· In the end, we curtailed treatment that works for COVID and relied instead on untested vaccines and medicines, masks, and shutdowns, refusing to listen to any whose studies proved the value of safe effective treatments (which I used), and both censoring and taking away the licenses of those who treated patients in a way that saved their lives. All of this was to allow Pfizer and other large corporations to sell their vaccine and anti-virals, to sell and promote “boosters” that every respectable scientific journal prove don’t work, to push the vaccine on people as young as infants despite no benefit and proven harm. This is liberalism?
Jill Lawrence has a huge credibility problem. For the past 3 years, liberals have crucified science and democracy, have used the threat of an illness (one that largely faded into the normal viruses we face year after year after its initial burst) to expunge democratic safeguards and deprive people of choice over their lives and bodies, have censored and punished any and all who disagree with them, have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people to the point of dropping life expectancy by 4 years, have consorted with big corporations and allowed them to dictate the course of public policy, and have tossed science, human decency, choice, and freedom into the trash can all for something they do not understand.
If this is liberalism, then liberalism is dead. Jill Lawrence should be imploring people to vote for neither party if she truly is a liberal. Democrats have taken over the mantle of everything they despise. They are now the party of hate, of anti-science, of anti-kids, of anti-choice. They are the masked party, the ones who engage in rituals that demonstrate allegiance to a dogma, a dogma that is both deadly and autocratic. So, when Jill Lawrence says to vote against Republicans, and to vote for Democrats, lest our democracy be at risk, she must either be blind or be deluded. Certainly, she is no liberal. Nor is the Democratic party.