Reminder: Democrats lead an unprecedented assault on freedom and democracy during the pandemic

Strangely, the entire issue seems to have disappeared from the public consciousness, an event so traumatic, we’ve suppressed the memory of forced lockdowns, masking, school closures, and more, save to criticize President Trump’s economic record by cherry picking a period during which we effectively committed economic suicide.

One of the many ironies of the 2024 campaign is that the self-appointed defenders of freedom and democracy did more to limit if not outright destroy both during the pandemic.  In their view, protesting the results of an election conducted like no other, which resulted in the largest change in the electorate in a century, and returning abortion rights back to the states where they can be voted on by the people, is somehow more of a threat to America than forcing people to remain in their homes, arbitrarily closing what they labeled “non essential” businesses, suspending first amendment rights to freedom of religion and association, barring students from school, and forcing them to receive an unproven vaccine among other restrictive measures.  The lockdowns and all of the associated draconian policies and rhetoric might seem like a bad dream at this point, something that happened to someone else from which we awoke again to normalcy, but it was only four years ago that the very same people championing democracy and freedom were actively terrorizing it – and insisting anyone who disagreed, who believed we needed to return to normal life as soon as possible, was responsible for uncounted deaths, literally conducting “an experiment in human sacrifice.”  In the years since, those who championed freedom at the time have been proven correct over and over again.  We now know that the lockdowns failed to achieve their stated goal of slowing the spread and might have even worsened it.  The school closures damaged an entire generation of children, causing behavioral problems and learning loss for years to come.  The masking, six feet distancing, and other bizarre restrictions on behavior – remember wearing a mask into a restaurant, and then removing it as soon as you sat down? – were literally made up in their entirety with no basis in fact and with no evidence to support their effectiveness.  The vaccine failed to stop the spread as promised, has more side effects than advertised, and is completely unnecessary for those who aren’t at a high risk from the disease.  Further, none of this, from the lockdowns themselves to the forced vaccinations, was voted on by anyone, either the actual citizens or their elected officials.  It was instead instituted entirely by decree, primarily by Democrat politicians who brooked no argument with their disastrous plans and have so far paid no price either legally or politically.  Strangely, the entire issue seems to have completely disappeared from the public consciousness, an event so traumatic, we’ve suppressed the memory, save to criticize President Trump’s economic record by cherry picking a period during which we effectively committed economic suicide, as though he wasn’t fighting almost immediately to keep the country open against massive institutional opposition coming primarily from progressives who would resort to nothing – up to and including outright censorship and lies – to keep the country shackled indoors.

To date, neither Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, nor any other Democrat has so much as been asked a simple question about whether they would do it all over again, or whether they had any regrets despite promulgating some of the most destructive yet least effective policies in American history.  It’s not as if this isn’t a target rich environment as they say.  Even before the 2020 election, future President Biden and future Vice President Harris were sowing distrust about the vaccine because it was developed under President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, the most remarkable and fastest healthcare initiative in the known universe.  As the Vice President herself put it that September, “I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump” on the reliability of a vaccine.  “If past is prologue … they’ll be muzzled. They’ll be suppressed,” she added of health experts and scientists, though they themselves would do all the muzzling and suppression in short order. “They will be sidelined because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days, and he’s grasping for whatever he can get to pretend he has been a leader on this issue when he has not.”  “Why do we think, God willing, when we get a vaccine — that is good, works — why do we think the public is gonna line up to be willing to take the injection?” the President asked in a similar vein, though he would try forcing people to do so less than a year later. “We’ve lost so much confidence, the American people, in what’s said [by the Trump administration].”  Almost immediately upon taking office the following January, both would proceed to take credit for that very vaccine and force everyone to take what they themselves questioned, bizarrely attempting to use an occupational health law to mandate vaccinations for the entire country in an unprecedented abuse of federal power until it was stopped by the Supreme Court.  If you didn’t comply, they were happy to see you fired from your job and lose your livelihood, actively mocking anyone that questioned their authoritarian, freedom crushing approach.  Even worse, they transformed what should have been a healthcare issue into a political one, regularly smearing conservative states and claiming Republicans were dying in droves because of their ignorance of their munificence.   By December that year, President Biden put it this way, flat out lying about the efficacy of the vaccine, “For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — if you’re unvaccinated — for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you had your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death — period. Number two, booster shots work. Three, boosters are free, safe, and convenient.”  Determining the total number of people who were fired as a result of the unconstitutional Biden-Harris mandate is near impossible, but the number is obviously in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a couple of million when some studies suggest about 1% of the workforce was affected by December 2022.  The mandate was subsequently ruled unconstitutional and the entire episode was forgotten, like it never happened – save for those who suffered from the effects.

While the Biden-Harris Administration was pursuing these vaccine mandates, they were also lashing out at anyone who disagreed with their fervent yet-ineffectual masking, school-closure, and other policies.  Shortly after he was sworn in in January 2021, conservative states began questioning the prevailing orthodoxy, removing mask mandates and opening schools and businesses without restrictions, but the self-proclaimed party of freedom and democracy was most certainly not onboard.  “The last thing — the last thing — we need is the Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine, take off your mask. Forget it. It still matters,” the President told reporters in March.  Supposed health experts agreed, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters that “now is not the time to release all restrictions,” claiming the next two months were “pivotal” to slowing the spread as they had for over a year at that point.  “How this plays out is up to us,” she added.  When Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who appeared to have been specifically targeted by this incendiary accusation, tweeted “no insults from the President will stop us from leaning towards freedom” none of the current champions of freedom stepped up and agreed with him.  Nor did they have much to say when the Biden-Harris Administration colluded with teacher’s unions to continue keeping schools closed long after the evidence revealed in-person education had no impact on the overall spread of the disease.  As late as May 5, 2021, almost 18 million students were still consigned to either purely virtual or limited hybrid education despite promises to open schools as soon as possible.  According to US News and World Report, about a seventh of students nationwide remained completely virtual.  Burbio, an organization that monitors and reports on 1,200 school districts, including the 200 largest in the United States, found that 16.3% of K-12 students were purely virtual, 30.6% were hybrid, and 53.1% were back in school full time, meaning almost 50% of students were still not permanently back in class.  This was despite studies published six months earlier that revealed how disastrous these policies were.  For example, Bellwether Education Partners found that  3 million students had completely disappeared with the largest impact on already on marginalized communities.  In Los Angeles, “15%-20% of English learners, students in foster care, students with disabilities, and homeless students didn’t access any of the district’s online educational materials from March through May.”  In Washington, DC, “back-to-school family surveys found that 60% of students lacked the devices and 27% lacked the high-speed internet access needed to successfully participate in virtual school.”  In Miami-Dade County, “16,000 fewer students enrolled this fall compared with last year.”  The Bellwether study continued, “The long-term consequences of this crisis are difficult to estimate without seeming hyperbolic. Once a student leaves school, it is difficult to reenter. One study of a large, urban district found that two-thirds of high school dropouts never reenrolled, and among those who do, about half drop out again.”  This is in addition to the impact on even enrolled students mental health, such as the dramatic suicide spike in Las Vegas.

Though the data was overwhelmingly clear, it didn’t prevent President Biden and Vice President Harris from allowing major teacher’s unions to sacrifice the right to an education.   The New York Post was the first to report how “The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show.” We should also remember that when it came time to actually support the country during an unexpected coronavirus surge in late 2021, the Biden-Harris Administration completely failed despite their own obsession with the virus otherwise.  As CNN reported at the time, “Biden is dogged by a testing shortage he had vowed to fix.”  “President Joe Biden is closing out his first year in office facing one of the same problems he entered the White House vowing to fix: a persistent shortage of Covid-19 testing that, if resolved, could provide a way out of the still-raging pandemic.  The inability to secure enough timely tests for the number of people who want them has led to a new reckoning for Biden’s Covid-19 response. An enhanced strategy that includes distributing 500 million free at-home tests didn’t come in time to prevent major disruptions to holiday travel, and it remains unclear when those tests will reach Americans who want them.”  They continued, “the failures surrounding testing have led to accusations that the White House failed to anticipate the pandemic’s course and overemphasized vaccinations as a solution to ending the crisis, even as outside experts warned of a looming test shortage directly to administration officials.  Biden’s team insists they took what steps they could in the fall to build up testing capacity but acknowledge that a surge in demand and relatively recent emergency use authorizations from the US Food and Drug Administration have made stockpiling at-home tests a challenge.”  In summary, they savaged everyone who disagreed with them, undemocratically and unconstitutionally attempted to force everyone to comply, and felt free to limit long-held freedoms at a whim, but when it came time to deliver on their promises and actually do something, they weren’t up to the task.  Now, however, they expect us to forget all this and accept without question that they are the champions of freedom and democracy itself.  It should be a classic impossible circle to square given the lengths they went to proudly and without remorse, but given the amnesia about the entire pandemic, they might well succeed.  If only someone would ask them the question, how can you possibly claim to champion democracy and freedom when you crushed it without a thought a mere four years ago?