Killing liberty: COVID tyranny is completing the task started post-9/11

In post-9/11 America, government has been slowly and surely killing liberty, and it looks like COVID tyranny is completing the task started on that fateful day.

Twenty years ago tomorrow, an Islamic terrorist group attacked America when they hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in NYC and one into the Pentagon. The fourth jet — believed to be heading for the US Capitol — crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers attempted to overpower the hijackers and regain control.

Obviously, we should always remember the tragic events of 9/11: the thousands who died, the first responders who risked their lives to save others along with the many who died trying, and the heroism of the Flight 93 passengers on the fourth plane.

Following that horrendous day, Americans vowed to never forget this tragedy and to do all they could to make sure the terrorists would never win. Noble sentiments to be sure, but little more than political rhetoric used by big-government Democrats AND Republicans to begin dismantling our God-given rights in exchange for government-provided safety and security.

Unfortunately, in addition to the thousands of lives lost on 9/11, there was another tragedy because liberty also died on that fateful day.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The Patriot Act. The Patriot Act II. Spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA). Fake cell towers to tap your cell phone. These and many other attacks on liberty began under George W. Bush — one of the many evidences that “compassionate conservative” was really code for “progressive” — and grew under Barack Obama.

The post-9/11 liberty-killing trend continued under Donald Trump. In a piece I wrote in 2017 commemorating 9/11, I documented the host of ways that Trump — he claims he predicted 9/11 in his book The America We Deserve — was keeping Bush’s and Obama’s terrorism policies in place.

Under the “leadership” of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, we witnessed the creation of the US Cyber Command within the NSA, an idea originally proposed by Obama that gave the agency greater power to spy on Americans. Trump also reauthorized FISA-702 to give the NSA authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance on Americans.

Government’s liberty-killing agenda began post-9/11, but COVID tyranny is helping complete the task.

In an piece I wrote in March 2020 about coronavirus bringing an end to liberty and the beginning of tyranny, I referenced an article written by John Whitehead, the founder and president of the Rutherford Institute. It is Whitehead’s contention (and mine as well) that COVID tyranny is leading to the creation of a full-blown police state.

“This coronavirus epidemic, which has brought China’s Orwellian surveillance out of the shadows and caused Italy to declare a nationwide lockdown, threatens to bring the American Police State out into the open on a scale we’ve not seen before.

“If and when a nationwide lockdown finally hits — if and when we are forced to shelter in place — if and when militarized police are patrolling the streets — if and when security checkpoints have been established — if and when the media’s ability to broadcast the news has been curtailed by government censors — if and when public systems of communication (phone lines, internet, text messaging, etc.) have been restricted — if and when those FEMA camps the government has been surreptitiously building finally get used as quarantine detention centers for American citizens — if and when military “snatch and grab” teams are deployed on local, state, and federal levels as part of the activated Continuity of Government plans to isolate anyone suspected of being infected with COVID-19 — and if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public — then we will truly understand the extent to which the government has fully succeeded in recalibrating our general distaste for anything that smacks too overtly of tyranny.

“This is how it begins.”

It’s an indisputable fact that socialism and tyranny have grown during this so-called pandemic.

Ivanka Trump’s feminist socialist dream of government-mandated paid family leave has become a reality. One of the first coronavirus bailouts — Families First Coronavirus Response Act — included taxpayer-funded paid family leave and provisions for taxpayer-funded sick leave.

Socialist ideals such as prison reform, so-called gun control, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal have also seen major advances.

9/11 brought us the PATRIOT Act, so it was with a bit of irony that COVID tyranny brought us a Patriot Act for healthcare , a plan created by Jared Kushner. Under his plan, a government/private sector partnership would be formed to create a new “surveillance and data collection system” used to track coronavirus Americans.

Apple and Google have been developing new hardware and software that will give Kushner exactly what he wants. And while the two tech giants claim that their tracking system will completely protect privacy, protecting privacy has never been the prime directive. The whole point of creating a Patriot Act for healthcare is to make the names, phone numbers, and locations of people available to the government in real-time.

Parts of Kushner’s plan have become a reality in the form of vaccine passports. Earlier this year, we learned that digital COVID vaccine passports were being jointly developed by a group of health and technology companies under the belief that governments and businesses would soon require proof of being vaccinated before being allowed to return to “normal.”

In July 2021 we learned how vaccine passports were being used as a model to replace the credit report system with a totalitarian “social credit system” like the one used in Communist China. Some of the areas tracked in real time by China’s “social credit system” are (via New Horizons):

• Medical history
• Social media posts and internet search history
• Bank accounts and credit cards
• Residence, employment, and criminal history
• Relationships and religious activities
• Political activity

This information is continuously fed to a central database where it is used to create a “social credit score” that is used to reward or punish citizens.

On this 20th anniversary of 9/11, it’s a sad irony that Joe Biden has identified a new terrorist threat: Americans exercising their God-given constitutionally protected right to free speech. And just as government did in the days following the 9/11 attacks, Biden is looking for ways to take another chunk out of liberty in response.

In a terrorism threat advisory released last month by Biden and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS), they determined that people pushing “anti-government rhetoric” — including people standing in “opposition to COVID measures” — would be classified as “domestic terrorists.”

The advisory lumped people exercising their free speech rights via online forums, people who disagree with COVID restrictions, and Al-Qaeda into one all-encompassing category. In the eyes of Joe Biden, exercising your free speech right to protest masks and vaccine mandates and/or using social media to do so means you’re no different than the terrorists who crashed planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Washington has made killing liberty standard operating procedure post-9/11, and COVID tyranny is helping complete the task.

Welcome to the “new normal.”

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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