Hard Cases; Stealing Liberty

Timothy Birdnow

Masks are a slippery slope; if we let them force this little piece of cloth over our faces we will let them do worse. Readers of the Aviary probably understand that. But much of America does not, or they would be mad as hell about it.

Well, some people understand.

From the Federalist:

On Sunday of Labor Day weekend, former Olympian Kerri Walsh Jennings declared on Instagram her rebellion against mandatory masking. Jennings explained she had recently been inspired to resist restrictions more actively because "our freedoms won’t come back unless we are willing to push back and stand up for them.” She shared that her small act of pushback was to go to the grocery store without a mask.

Predictable condemnation ensued, and on Monday Jennings published a quasi-retraction she titled "Truce.” While Jennings repeated parts of the formulaic apologies typical of stars who incur the wrath of the mob, she didn’t capitulate entirely.

Her final comment voiced a very concrete concern. Jennings said she worries masks are "the potential starting point for so much more,” and that she "truly believes we are on the slippery slope of a mask mandate evolving into a vaccine mandate. That,” Jennings concluded, "scares the [fire emoji] out of me.”

Jennings is absolutely correct. Proponents of masking dismiss complaints about mandatory masks as the selfish whining of people who aren’t willing to put up with a small inconvenience for the greater good, but nothing could be further from the truth. Mandatory masking policies stifle the American spirit and are segueing us right into mandated COVID vaccines.

Masks set the stage, because they are an extraordinary intermediate step that Americans were — incredibly — willing to take. If Americans had refused to put a piece of cloth over their face to leave the house, the likelihood that the public would be willing to accept a mandated shot would be far lower.

And if you think it will stop with vaccinations you have another thing coming; governments are insatiable. Having tasted this power they will exercise it again and again and again - and the public will submit over and over, now that they have accepted the bit in their mouths. It's how horses are broken.

The author realizes this, I think:


Or, as has been attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes "hard cases make bad law". Crisis drives despotism. A despot does not come and say "I'm going to steal your liberty because I want to tell you what to do" but rather finds a series of  crises, real or imagined, to panic the public into allowing him to fix the problem. America has been in an endless series of crises for decades now, and systematically we have been surrendering our liberties.

Would anyone have dreamed that we would have cameras feeding information on our movements to the government? That we would have the NSA processing data about our telephone calls or computer usage?  That even a guy running for President would have the CIA spying on him, and that the national security apparatus would attempt to bring his Administration down with a black op? But we built a police state-style system with the Patriot Act and other draconian measures to fight terrorism (rather than just stopping aliens who were suspicious from coming to America in the first place). It was the crisis that drove this. And now we have the crisis of Covid to empower government to force vaccinations, mask wearing, home arrest, etc.

When are Americans going to remember we were a free people?

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:38 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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