I & I Editorial BoardNot to downplay the damage done by COVID, but we’re still dealing with a far worse disease and will be for some time. It has no medical name but if it did, we’d call it the tyrannococcus.
From the top we acknowledge that the novel coronavirus killed millions around the world. This is not a statistic but a procession of tragedies, and they happened despite the policy responses from those who claimed to be our guardians. Now, four years later, the experts are telling us to treat the disease similar to the way we treat the flu. The much-feared “long COVID appears to manifest as a post-viral syndrome indistinguishable from seasonal influenza and other respiratory illnesses,” says Medical Xpress.
Yet the damage wrought by governments, spread by the tyrannococcus machine, will continue well beyond 2024. “We will be dealing with the harm done for decades,” says Martin Kulldorf, the biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist who was fired from his Harvard faculty position because he objected to COVID vaccine mandates.
Rather than respond in any sort of reasonable way, elected and unelected officials acted as tyrants, closing businesses, restricting our freedom to move about, limiting the number of people who could gather in private homes, requiring mask use and mandating vaccinations. “There was very little oversight or limitation on the powers conferred to” the agencies that made those decisions, says the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They simply gave themselves power they should have never wielded.
Consequently, businesses, jobs and livelihoods were destroyed without mercy; education was wrecked; our health suffered as screenings and treatments were delayed and sometimes canceled altogether; powerful people silenced critics and dissenters. Government went $6 trillion deeper into debt as politicians thought spending could stop the spread, bankruptcies soared and alcohol-related deaths “increased during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic,” reaching 488 fatalities a day during the pandemic’s lost years.
The results have been catastrophic, the carnage exceeding “by multiple times any health benefits from mandates and lockdowns,” says the CTUP. It can’t be allowed to happen again. To make sure it doesn’t, or to at least lay down a set of guidelines that, if followed would produce better outcomes, the Committee recently published a study that offers “10 key lessons that must be learned to avoid mistaken policy responses to future pandemics and other crises.”
The authors suggested that in the future leaders should calm public fears rather than stoke them, refuse to pay people more not to work than they would earn working, refrain from suppressing dissent or policing the boundaries of science, take extra steps to protect the most vulnerable, and reject lockdowns and mask mandates.
None of this counsel should be controversial. But it was in 2020 and 2021, and after. Policymakers, public health officials, institutional commissars and the vacuous, venal and fear-stricken elites of the media descended on anyone who didn’t bend the knee to the narrative. Nearly 250 years after the U.S. was founded, tyranny is not dead in this country. It’s only changed its face and its methods.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Armando Simón
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Examples of this same unhinged, unbridled tyranny are evident in other areas of our government and in the application of the law, too. Yes, at least 250 years later, it is still near the surface and we need to be vigilant against it.
These are tenuous times and we need a leader strong enough to return those who are astray back to the founding principles of our constitution.
Consider the continuation of the last 8 years of tyrannical persecution/onslaught against one man, Trump, for his ideas.
Pelosi, vibrating with her unseemly hatred, abused her office as never seen before, by initiating two constitutionally unfounded impeachments, subverting a presidency with full on seditious intent, and then empaneled the wholly unAmerican kangaroo court of her J6 Committee, and she is still a free women. Why is Pelosi not in jail for her tyranny against our government?
Then, curiously and statistically unlikely, three black prosecutors made up absurd charges against Trump just before an election, and somehow they are winning in court against all reason, against the fair application of our laws, against the universal practice of business methods, against any fair citizen’s understanding of the use of our English language and against all common sense.
We do get justice eventually after a bit of time that allows the wrongs to be recognized as wrongs.
My bet is that Trump eventually wins a law suit against these three prosecutors, the cities and the states involved in his prosecutions for at least $500 million settlement against all these wrongs, and that Fani, Bragg and L. James are disbarred and all three go to jail for their real and clear prosecutorial crimes against justice in our country.
Good argument, but re “Government went $6 billion deeper into debt as politicians thought spending could stop the spread . . . ,” should that not read $6 trillion?
Thank you, and reader Kevin Kilty, for pointing our error out out. The number has been corrected to $6 trillion.
Not “6 Billion” deeper in debt, but rather 6 Trillion.
The threat of tyranny is always present. Every population is composed of people who tend, more or less, toward authority pitted against another group who tend toward liberty. Even if coexistence is possible, it is certainly uneasy.
The global scope of the control and tyranny running through the federal government is growing hugely. (Although in the founding days there was worry about the British control.)
It’s interesting in that all colonists weren’t necessarily for a new country with a Constitution that guaranteed “freedom and liberty for all.”
About 2/3’s didn’t fight for liberty-and, even though all didn’t fight and were against a new country or were neutral, they all benefited. The 2/3’s were -in effect-the first”free riders” of this nation.
Sound familiar? The ones who refused to get the vax for whatever reason were denigrated and besmeared all over the place-especially by our Government, that was founded on liberty and free men.
The lack of freedom and liberty ensconced in COVID vaccine mandates aligns with our a new impingement on freedom by Biden’s Administration (except, of course, if you are an illegal alien).
In my opinion, free choice was trampled by Government dictates. It wasn’t as if there were no alternative opinions on how to handle the COVID crisis. There were the authors of the Barrington Declaration, Dr. Scott Atlas and many (although a minority) of others. They alerted us to other ways-and better ways-to handle the COVID crisis.
But their opinions-although they were proved right-were either ignored, dismissed or censored.
I&I has got this right I believe. COVID was just another excuse for Big Government’s takeover. It was a cry of war that a new Revolution had already begun-unfortunately, like in the American Revolution, not all Americans saw this new peril, ie COVID leading towards and trying to institutionalize another tyranny.
Perhaps all who didn’t get the vax saw this. Perhaps they didn’t-but still stubbornly refused to take the vax (after all, it hadn’t been really proved to be safe or effective). But to all who refused to take the vax (in spite of the Vax Mandates) we owe a debt of gratitude.
By the end of the pandemic, with all the stories on COVID-19, we still wound up learning a lot more about how governments works than about how viruses work.