Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Freedom in the Time of COVID.

August 19, 2021 by  
Filed under Health, News, Opinion, Politics, Weekly Columns

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(ThyBlackMan.com) “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” — Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

As the world watches the disastrous ending of America‘s nearly 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, we cannot lose sight of what is happening here, just below the media radar.

I hope I am wrong, yet I see a time of great suffering coming soon for those of us who cherish, articulate and defend personal liberty in a free society.

I hear it coming in the media drumbeat over the spread of the delta variant of COVID-19 and the demonization of those who exercise their inalienable right to dominion over their own bodies by declining to receive a novel and largely experimental vaccine.

I feel it in the subtle and not-so-subtle hints of politicians attempting to discern which way the winds of change are blowing and beginning to conclude privately that the direction of those winds is toward another sheepish American acceptance of repressive governmental measures in the name of public health.

black family COVID MASK 2021

And I sense it in the outcomes and judicial rationales of the early stages of litigations in which numerous state judges and state supreme court justices in the past week have purported to find constitutional, and thus recognized, the decisions of officials in the executive branch of government — the branch that exists to enforce the laws that the legislative branch has written — to write their own laws, call them “mandates,” and use force to compel businesses to close and healthy folks to wear masks on public and private property.

The coming violations of basic freedoms — the freedom of total dominion over one’s own body including the face, the freedom to exercise personal liberty and to own and use private property without a government permission slip, and the right to a government that complies with its own laws, particularly the restraints imposed upon it by the Constitution — will sorely challenge and, if unchecked, will severely weaken the values underlying our American republic.

Add to this the near certainty that the federal government will borrow trillions of dollars in the next three years, thus raising the price of everything and thrusting the obligation to repay those loans onto generations of taxpayers as yet unborn; and add to that the political pressures now being imposed on President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to reestablish U.S. military dominance near Afghanistan, a dominance that under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama was lethal, fruitless, catastrophic, and cost 1 trillion borrowed American dollars and tens of thousands of innocent lives, and which President Donald J. Trump wisely argued should never have happened and ought to be terminated, and you can see my fears.

We have seen all this before.

The principal values underlying our republic are that our rights are natural gifts from God and can only be taken away after due process, which requires that the government proves fault at a fair jury trial; that the government’s existence is moral only when it derives from the consent of the governed; that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land; and that when governments abandon these principles and assault our liberties, it is the right and the duty of the governed to alter or abolish or secede from the government.

These are not the musings of a frustrated libertarian.

Rather, they are bedrock American law embedded in and integral to the Declaration of Independence — in which Thomas Jefferson and all other signatories characterized our rights as natural and inalienable and insisted that no government is lawful without the consent of the governed — and the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution — in which James Madison and the Congress and the ratifiers recognized that our freedoms are too numerous to enumerate and thus the amendment commands that government shall not disparage any rights, even unenumerated rights, without due process.

Today, all persons in government take a solemn oath to uphold these documents, which include the Jeffersonian and Madisonian values underlying them. But you would never know that by observing their official behavior.

It seems that no matter which major political party controls the government, the government claims it can right any wrongs, tax any objects, regulate any events, suppress any liberties, kill any foreign foes (real or imagined) and help any of its patrons — the Declaration and the Constitution and their values be damned.

Do you know anyone who has consented to a government that can by executive decree take away the very freedoms that the founding documents guarantee and the authors of the decrees have sworn to uphold? Do you know anyone who has consented to a government that can take away personal freedoms by legislation? Do you know anyone who has consented to the government, period?

Our only recourse is massive, peaceful, loud public resistance that meaningfully threatens peaceful secession from the government — the same secession Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries and signatories argued for in the Declaration of Independence.

Resistance even by a persistent and passionate minority can topple the mandates. But it must be resistance so ubiquitous and so loud and so serious that the government fears the people.

If you want to wear a mask, wear it. If you want the vaccines, get them. But keep the government off the backs of those don’t.

Then our freedoms will be secure.

Written by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

Official websitehttps://twitter.com/Judgenap


Comments

4 Responses to “Freedom in the Time of COVID.”
  1. Pelvo White, Jr. says:

    To Trevo Craw; Fear,cowardice and confusion are three terrible distorters of truth, but there does come a time when one must defer their limited sense of freedom to the judgement of others.The truth is that our country is presently experiencing a pandemic caused by the COVID-19 Virus,and its variants.Some of our best scientist and medical doctors have diagnosed and observed the etiology of these viral diseases, and have also offered their prognoses. Medical Doctors and scientist have asked that the members of our country wear masks to help prevent the spreading of the COVID-19 virus and its variants, and also to get vaccinated against possible infection of these terrible killers. These were all logical positivistic suggestions that have produced a continuation of life for those who follow them, but ofcourse, you are free to ignore all of the suggestions of these medical professionals and suffer the consequences of your errant actions.

  2. Trevo Craw says:

    DO NOT TAKE THE TUSKEGEE 2021 COVID-19 VACCINES
    For proof that they are unsafe, ineffective and unnecessary, go to http://www.covid19exposed.net, click DOWNLOAD SPECIAL REPORT and read the facts, evidence and proof. The CDC, FDA, Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson and most of the medical industry has lied to you. And the VAX-CON 21 REPORT you can download have the evidence to prove it.

  3. Trevo Craw says:

    Wake up! Its not about freedom, its about safety. Its not about rights and politics. Its about being part of the solution, not part of the problem Pelvo. I have blown your silly arguments out of the water so many times that I won’t even take the time to do it again. But I could.

  4. Pelvo White, Jr. says:

    You are out of your mind ( i.e. attention ), that same mind ( i.e. attention ) that gives you the legal right to wear the title ” Judge .” All of the definitions of your title ” Judge ” are granted you if, and only if you operate solely within the legality of the Constitution of the United States of America. By permission of the people of the United States of America, you take away freedoms from those who do not obey the law, and what you are suggesting now is to deliberately disobey the law.Your right to spew deadly infections born of the COVID virus and its variants upon others ends when these infections infect their lungs and possibly kill some of them. You are not free to spread diseases that kill others to prove the reciprocity of your individual liberties. You, above all others, should be willing to wear your mask in accordance with the instructions of our legally college degreed and licensed doctors and scientist.

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