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Authored by Buck Sexton via AmericanConsequences.com,
Biden’s Authoritarian COVID-19 Battle
We are entering a new and even more politically toxic phase of the pandemic. The initial promises of the vaccine campaign – it will allow for an end of masking, never be forced upon those who don’t want it, and herd immunity will not require everyone to get the shot – have been abandoned. Not only that, but those at the top of the government and health bureaucracy have adopted a tone that is hostile to anyone who remains hesitant to get a COVID vaccine.
The growing spasm over unconstitutional overreach from the Biden team has been building for months. President Joe Biden’s biggest pitch to the American people, other than him immediately abandoning his promise of “unity” across party lines, was to be his handling of the pandemic.
Despite the Biden White House’s endless repetition of their “follow the science” mantra, the summer of 2021 was much worse for COVID than any of their so-called experts expected.
Cases over Labor Day weekend across the U.S. were up almost 300% from the same weekend 12 months ago. There were around 40,000 daily cases in the U.S. in mid-September 2020, and there are close to 150,000 new cases a day in the same period of 2021.
Crushing our Freedoms
This is not “crushing the virus” as Biden promised us. That around 200 million Americans have received at least one vaccine shot, and the virus is spreading even more rapidly now than it was in the same month a year ago, has caused considerable alarm. And with that, the political animus between the vaccinated and unvaccinated has only grown… The Biden White House and the Democrat Party have decided to use the force of government to make that hostility even worse.
Of course, the people in charge of our response have found someone to blame:
the unvaccinated. “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” Joe Biden said in his recent speech announcing federal mandates. “And your refusal has cost all of us,” he added. The ominous tones were followed with various promises to punish the non-compliant.
It didn’t have to be this way… For one thing, less than a year ago President Biden told the country that he didn’t agree with imposing a vaccine mandate. And now, as of September 2021, Biden has completely gone back on that and ordered a series of sweeping mandates that will make all federal and 100 million private-sector employees get the shot or lose their jobs.
This is pretty close to the nuclear option of government pandemic countermeasures. It will have enormous ramifications for the future of the country, not just when it comes to public health issues, but to the very core of the Constitution and the relationship between citizen and state.
What is the constitutional justification for this? If the federal government can mandate that all private businesses with more than 100 employees must vaccinate their staff (or get them weekly testing, which is meant to be onerous and ruinously expensive), then what can’t Washington, D.C. mandate? What’s the point of the 10th Amendment, and the plenary powers delegated to the states? If for reasons of pure politics, the federal government can, via administrative fiat instead of going through Congress, make such an order on a health matter, could they take similar action about climate change or gun confiscation?
In our standard political discourse, polemicists abuse terms like “tyranny” and “authoritarian” – but this has more than a whiff of both. The top-down decision from the Executive Branch of the federal government to use the Labor Department as the implementation arm of a health policy dictatorship shows that, in the era of COVID, the Democrat Party no longer views the separation of powers as any meaningful impediment to its preferred health policies.
The Biden Mandate
In fact, in his September 9
speech outlining the new plan to get the virus under control, President Biden made clear his intent to steamroll any states’ rights opposition…
If they will not help, if those governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way. The Department of Education has already begun to take legal action against states undermining protection that local school officials have ordered. Any teacher or school official whose pay is withheld for doing the right thing will have that pay restored by the federal government, 100 percent. I promise you, I will have your back.
Get them out of the way, Biden said, in a line that seemed to tell the American people more than he intended about the lack of limits on his power. During the early months of the pandemic in 2020, the same voices who are backing Biden’s authoritarian maneuvers now were claiming that – with stronger legal backing – state governors have extensive plenary powers to deal with health emergencies, including some mandatory quarantine practices.
Now that some states – most notably Florida, though Texas has begun to mirror the pro-freedom approach of Governor Ron DeSantis – refuse to do the Biden administration’s bidding on COVID policy, the federal bureaucracy steps in as an unconstitutional super-legislature. On the school masks mandate issue, in particular, the Democrat-Fauciite position has become:
We will find a way to have it our way.
Biden’s September 9 declaration of COVID total war had no shortage of ire directed toward those who have thus far made the choice not to get the vaccine, one they had been previously told they were legally and ethically entitled to make. That has suddenly changed. Biden made it clear that the unvaxxed are public health enemy No. 1…
We still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot. And to make matters worse, there are elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19. Instead of encouraging people to get vaccinated and mask up, they are ordering mobile morgues for the unvaccinated dying from COVID in our communities. This is totally unacceptable.
As many commentators have pointed out, Biden seemed to be much more agitated with Americans who have chosen not to get a COVID vaccine than he ever was toward the Taliban during his chaotic, incompetent withdrawal plan. This parading of partisan animus is unsettling, to say the least, as it is meant to convey a message to American people (or at least the Biden voters among them) that anyone who is unvaccinated is a reckless, selfish menace to public health.
But there’s cognitive dissonance at the heart of this thinking from Biden and his supporters. First of all, when one breaks down the demographic data, the highest
proportion of eligible but unvaccinated individuals in America is young Black and Latino males, who have received at least one shot at 43% and 48%, respectively. While there’s certainly a group within those categories of Republicans and Trump voters, the data tells us that most young minority males are not MAGA-hat-wearing, anti-vax Right-wingers… But the Democrat narrative ignores this reality.
After months of extraordinary gains, the U.S. stock market is now looking off. Investors worldwide now ask, “Is this the beginning of the end of the most epic stock rally in history?” All eyes are on September 28 for the answers.
Here’s the entire story.
In fact, the Biden view of vaccine hesitancy is that white male, Right-wing individuals who refuse to get the vaccine are bad people who don’t care about the science. However, racial minorities are an entirely different matter when it comes to vaccine hesitancy. Dr. Fauci, Biden, and the whole COVID apparatus of control constantly make excuses around “access” issues for minorities who choose not to get the shot. We are supposed to ignore the politics of this and the fact that more than 90% of African American voters cast their ballots for Democrats in the 2020 election.
There’s also the inexcusable, inexplicable absence of any policy or even mention of naturally acquired immunity. Americans who have had COVID-19, and the most current estimates say that around 100 million of them have beaten the virus, are likely the most
immunologically protected of anyone. That Biden, his chief henchman of the biosecurity state Dr. Fauci, and the rest of the control apparatus refuse publicly acknowledging this scientific reality is further evidence of the intense politicization at work.
The Power-Drunk Variant
People are, understandably, very angry in America about what the country has gone through. We have lost more than 650,000 Americans to the novel coronavirus, and we’ve also lost a tremendous amount of freedom, spent trillions of dollars of public money, and continue to suffer through a period of tremendous anxiety.
But instead of trying to unite and heal the country, the most powerful voices in the government and bureaucracy have decided to scapegoat disfavored political groups.
And that, in essence, is where we find ourselves now: the fight over total control. The national response to COVID in America has been an abject failure, based on the promises the experts made and the concessions they demanded of us. Perhaps it was never going to be any different in this country, regardless of the collective response to a highly contagious virus. But we will never be allowed to figure that out, or even have the discussion. There’s too much government power and intellectual vanity at stake for the elites.
And so we are forced to get the shot, mask up, “social distance,” and suffer whatever ineffective indignities our government overlords can conjure to pretend they are protecting us from COVID.
It will not be enough for them to silence dissent – they will demand everyone participate in and celebrate their new authoritarian health regime. Biden isn’t even trying to hide it anymore.