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What Happened to Our Liberties? |
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By Jeffrey Tucker |
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Well, it was nice feeling hopeful while it seemed plausible. The judge in the case of Missouri v. Biden handed down a great decision against executive agencies to prevent them from muscling social media companies to take down posts the government does not like. It seemed then that the First Amendment could make a roaring return. Even the agencies themselves canceled meetings and backed off. It sure felt like progress for a few days. Then late Friday night, another panel of judges from the appeals court agreed with the Biden administration that government can and should stop free-speech rights. They reversed the injunction. In minutes, a fundamental liberty was again deeply threatened. It’s called a “temporary administrative stay” of the previous injunction but no one knows how long it will last. Until some higher court can affirm the original decision, every government agency is free to push its weight around and put a stop to the whole purpose of social media, which is to give you a voice. And we really don’t know how the decision will turn out. What a remarkable thin reed this is! Why should it be the case that our rights so much hinge on the exigencies of court opinions and appointments? The whole idea of the parchment of the Constitution is that it is supposed to be the law of the land. We thought it was. Then it was not and now we spend our hours and days trying desperately to claw back our rights. There is a junta out there among the U.S. ruling class that simply does not believe in freedom. We should know this by now. The question is what we are going to do about it. The courts should not have to be our recourse but they are pretty much all we have left. If they fail too, I weep for the prospects of freedom and civilization itself. When I was a kid, I marveled at the circumstances that led to the fall of Rome. I read everything I could about it because I simply could not understand how a thriving society could have descended from the heights of achievement to the depths. Why was no one in a position to stop it? How is it possible that society and rulers could have full knowledge and experience of what builds a great society and then throw it all away? Living through the last three years leaves no doubt how great civilizations collapse. A ruling class pillages its assets out of short-term self-interest. Once the mechanisms for stopping this are removed or fall apart, nothing can stop it. The trajectory is straight down with no bottom but the state of nature. That prospect was the great fear of the Founders of this nation. That’s why they worked so hard to make the Constitutional structure as impenetrable as possible. We can look back far in history to see the origins of this disaster. Certainly 1913 was a turning point: the income tax, the direct election of the Senate, the Fed, and then later the war that entrench the administrative state. But we don’t have to go back that far in order to see the proximate push that sealed the doom in our own times. For me, it began on the morning of Feb. 27, 2020. I was listening to the New York Times podcast, which I had come to appreciate and respect. On that day, the host interviewed the lead virus reporter on this strange bug from Wuhan. His message was that it was time to panic. Indeed no amount of panic was too much. |
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Well, it was nice feeling hopeful while it seemed plausible. The judge in the case of Missouri v. Biden handed down a great decision against executive agencies to prevent them from muscling social media companies to take down posts the government does not like. It seemed then that the First Amendment could make a roaring return. Even the agencies themselves canceled meetings and backed off. It sure felt like progress for a few days. Then late Friday night, another panel of judges from the appeals court agreed with the Biden administration that government can and should stop free-speech rights. They reversed the injunction. In minutes, a fundamental liberty was again deeply threatened. It’s called a “temporary administrative stay” of the previous injunction but no one knows how long it will last. Until some higher court can affirm the original decision, every government agency is free to push its weight around and put a stop to the whole purpose of social media, which is to give you a voice. And we really don’t know how the decision will turn out. What a remarkable thin reed this is! Why should it be the case that our rights so much hinge on the exigencies of court opinions and appointments? The whole idea of the parchment of the Constitution is that it is supposed to be the law of the land. We thought it was. Then it was not and now we spend our hours and days trying desperately to claw back our rights. There is a junta out there among the U.S. ruling class that simply does not believe in freedom. We should know this by now. The question is what we are going to do about it. The courts should not have to be our recourse but they are pretty much all we have left. If they fail too, I weep for the prospects of freedom and civilization itself. When I was a kid, I marveled at the circumstances that led to the fall of Rome. I read everything I could about it because I simply could not understand how a thriving society could have descended from the heights of achievement to the depths. Why was no one in a position to stop it? How is it possible that society and rulers could have full knowledge and experience of what builds a great society and then throw it all away? Living through the last three years leaves no doubt how great civilizations collapse. A ruling class pillages its assets out of short-term self-interest. Once the mechanisms for stopping this are removed or fall apart, nothing can stop it. The trajectory is straight down with no bottom but the state of nature. That prospect was the great fear of the Founders of this nation. That’s why they worked so hard to make the Constitutional structure as impenetrable as possible. We can look back far in history to see the origins of this disaster. Certainly 1913 was a turning point: the income tax, the direct election of the Senate, the Fed, and then later the war that entrench the administrative state. But we don’t have to go back that far in order to see the proximate push that sealed the doom in our own times. For me, it began on the morning of Feb. 27, 2020. I was listening to the New York Times podcast, which I had come to appreciate and respect. On that day, the host interviewed the lead virus reporter on this strange bug from Wuhan. His message was that it was time to panic. Indeed no amount of panic was too much. |
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I knew for certain at that moment that there had been a massive change in the matrix, a sudden plunge into darkness. In one hundred years of public-health reporting, the Times had never before set out to stoke public panic. I also knew that lockdown plans had been an option B for the better part of 15 years. I had written about them. Now I knew for sure that it was coming. I also knew that once we entered this track that there would be no turning back. Many people think all of this was an innocent mistake, that people got very confused in thinking that a common respiratory virus was actually Ebola or worse, like something out of the movies. I knew, even in the early days, that this was no mistake. This was a controlled demolition of our rights and liberties. The only question in my mind all these years later has been: why? I still don’t have a perfect answer but it surely involves political crises and opportunistic industrial actors (media, tech, pharma) who swept into the void to pillage as much as possible. It’s reasonable to assume that it was all a plot against Trump. They tried to get him on Russia and Ukraine and myriad other phony issues but failed. So they flipped through their files of fake panics and came up with infectious disease. And sure enough, they got Trump’s buy-in and drove the panic all the way to the election, which was lost due to enormous changes in voting rules brought about through pandemic restrictions. It was a brilliant plan and it worked. However, I do not believe this was the whole reason. There was much more going on behind the scenes. From at least 2008 and following, a substantial slice of the population had become unruly and distrustful of the elites. They were getting restless and started supporting politicians that were raising fundamental questions. First there was Ron Paul. Later came Bernie Sanders and the Occupy movement. Trump stepped into the role—a moderate by comparison to the real mood on the streets—and the real rulers of the United States had hopes that he could be controlled. The real problem that caused the real rulers of America to crack down was the growing information flows that were causing Main Street to grow ever more restless. Once Trump started going after the world trading order that had been in place since 1946, it was a bridge too far. The lockdowns came as a domestic form of “shock and awe” that had worked in Iraq. Stay-at-home orders, the nationalization of media, the school and business closures, the shuttering of churches and gyms, and travel restrictions would have been absolutely unthinkable in the past. Once they happened, we entered into a new era. We were presented with a vision of totalitarianism. In short, the real purpose of the lockdowns and the astounding chaos that’s been with us ever since was to send a lasting message concerning who is really boss in the United States: not the people but the unelected regime. The rest of 2020 was nothing but pain. The elected branches of government were no longer in power, preserved only to allow the veneer of democracy to cover despotism. The new president intensified that pain with mask and vaccine mandates, plus blessing a plan for a new currency reform that would allow full Chinese Communist Party-style control of the population. And that’s where we are today, in the midst of a domestic cold war for the cause of freedom itself. It plays itself out daily in courts, media, and every sector of life. That explanation doesn’t answer all questions. There remains the mysterious waves of death in the spring of 2020 that seem to make the virus just as lethal as predicted. But the more we investigate this, the more the real explanation reveals a scandal for the ages. Bad medicine and intubation killed thousands who had panicked themselves into ill health. We were treated to astonishing theatrics such as the images of freezer trucks holding dead bodies all over New York. We now know why they were there: coroners’ offices, mortuaries, and funeral homes were all closed, plus even medical personnel were afraid to touch the bodies. Will there ever be a definitive book on this subject? Someday surely but we need perspective. Edward Gibbon’s multivolume work “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” began publication in 1776. It covered events a millennium and a half earlier. It has been a staple of American literary experience ever since, until the 21st century, when an entire generation or two or three simply stopped reading, learning, and understanding. If we cannot understand the tragedies of the past, we are in no position to forestall them in our own time. Is there still time to reclaim our republic and the rights and liberties it was established to secure for the ages? Surely there is. But for my part, I’m done with optimism or pessimism over the large trends of history. We all know what we have to do and why. We simply cannot allow the coup d’état against freedom to persist. |
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