Editors at Issues and Insights assess lessons learned from the COVID-19 lockdowns.
The Democrats and their media accomplices keep telling us the Republicans are the fascists and autocrats hungry for power. But just the opposite is true. The Democrats themselves made it clear during the pandemic that they are the party of authoritarianism.
In the spring of 2020, this country went into a lockdown. As Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute has noted, government officials canceled public worship services, segregated the large cities, abolished in-person education, foisted masks on all the kids, destroyed millions of businesses, and censored speech “so that we could barely discover facts.” They shut down concerts, imposed limits on house parties, scrapped weddings and funerals, locked the elderly into their homes and blocked visitation, ended dentistry, and imposed travel restrictions across state borders, says Tucker.
Some officials, however, saw that the rules were oppressive and restored liberty in their states. None of them are Democrats.
The authoritarian streak that runs throughout the Democratic Party came roaring out, no longer hidden just below the surface. Here was their chance to feed their hunger for more raw power. And they dined sumptuously.
The actions of both elected and unelected Democrats were not “hard calls,” as an Atlantic contributor recently labeled them in an appalling plea to grant amnesty to the offenders. They were the coercive orders of monstrous minds that perversely enjoy telling others what they cannot do and what they must do, who take great satisfaction in demanding and receiving obedience to their diktats.
Pleading for amnesty is not a sincere appeal to forgive and forget. It’s an effort to disarm the defenders of liberty so that the tyrants can more easily in the future establish another set of restrictions, most likely to “flatten the curve” of a climate emergency that doesn’t exist.
It’s clear that Democrats knew exactly what they were doing. The excuse that “we just didn’t know enough” at the beginning of the novel coronavirus outbreak was the perfect cover for their tyrannical urges.
