Americans are too willing to bow to authoritarianism and sacrifice their rights for 'the greater good'

There is a moralistic public supposition that lockdowns are the correct and upstanding thing to do. The sentiment is that we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good, and because the new definition of greatest good is making sure no one gets sick from the coronavirus, we have to take drastic measures. But what we're doing by sacrificing our rights on the altar of the greater good is destroying western civilization.

As Americans blame the president for the Covid deaths in the US, they typically say that he should have acted sooner. Contender Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris say this.

Should Trump have invoked a martial law scenario where lockdown measures, social distancing restrictions, and mask wearing were enforced? Do Americans even understand what that looks like? And if they do (they don't), do Americans understand that implication of federally enforced restrictions on our natural rights and freedoms spells the destruction of the western way of life?

"Politicians don't care about destroying the western way of life because they believe that so long as we prevent one more person from dying from coronavirus we will have achieved our objective," Toby Young, author, founder of the Free Speech Union and Lockdown Sceptic, told The Post Millennial.

Civilization is fragile and our collective leaders are intent on destroying it. The American news media reinforces this idea, and the elected leaders reinforce the media view. Big tech companies parrot the talking points inciting fear and terror that the politicians and media continue to wield against the public and their freedoms.

"It's unbelievable the way big tech companies have been behaving," Young said. "They just want to align themselves with the authorities. This isn't how they billed themselves when they walked onto the scene, tech companies didn't think they would become a tool to help the authorities tell us what the line was and then show us how to toe it."

This intentional alignment with the views of the authorities doesn't leave room for any kind of  self-awareness. "When the authorities change their minds," Young said, "tech companies turn on a sixpence and start banning people for being anti-mask, for example, when they just were banning people for being pro-mask."

Indeed, at the beginning of the pandemic, the WHO, CDC, and Dr. Anthony Fauci all claimed that mask wearing was not a super helpful tactic for virus avoidance. Then they changed their minds. Twitter and Facebook just followed along, as though the new truth had always been the truth.

"There's no independent thought or sticking up for independent thought," Young said. "Whatever the authorities say, that's what they do. And we're supposed to do it too."

World leaders who haven't locked down have been said to have bungled their handling of the coronavirus, while those like Jacinda Ardern, who took extreme measures to secure her population in their homes, are praised for having taken swift, rights-squashing action.

Boris Johnson locked down England again on Nov. 1, and the assurances of when that will be over sound just as meaningless as his past broken promises. Yet he's being blamed by press for not re-locking down sooner, with the logic that it would then be shorter. This supposition, too, is based on no evidence.

There's scant evidence to suggest that these lockdowns, which in reality are an authoritarian set of restrictions designed to separate people from their ability to take care of themselves, and engender within the public a state of terror, are even effective anyway.

In Sweden, where the vulnerable were isolated while everyone else went about their lives, the impact of the virus is greatly lessened, both on the population and in economic terms. South Africa's attempted lockdowns resulted in herd immunity. "So many people began to starve," Young said, "that they ended up having to wait in long queues for food and aid, and while in queues everyone gave each other coronavirus."

In Victoria, Australia, which has been absolute in their enforcement, there have been 111 days of enforced lockdown. Protestors against the lockdown were arrested, including a pregnant mother who was arrested in her pajamas at home in front of her children for having posted on Facebook her intention to have a socially distanced, face masked protest against the lockdown.

Enforced lockdowns against travel resulted in four dead infants whose parents weren't allowed to take them across state lines to get the life saving care they needed. In an effort to protect people, authorities let babies die. The citizens stood for it. Protest has been squashed. Speaking up has been met with fines and arrests. All people can do is whisper to their neighbours and watch their rights disappear.

We are living in a reality where the progressive mindset is clamoring for less rights, and it's not just in the realm of coronavirus-inspired restrictions, but as regards so many of our rights and freedoms, which we are meant to give up for an amorphous greater good.

"The way the left has taken advantage of the crisis has been breathtaking to behold," Young said. "Conservatives are reeling from the shock, in a stupor. The left have made 60 years of progress in six months. They've just won. And that win means the end of western civilization as we know it, to be replaced by some kind of medical-industrial dystopia."

In the UK, police have been authorized to break up Christmas dinners. If citizens are found to be unlawfully congregating with their families during Christmas, the police will come break it up, using force if necessary.

Young talked about the impact of the lockdowns in the UK, and how many more people are suffering from the effects of lockdown than from the actual illness itself.

"One of the most hard to understand aspects of the way in which governments have managed it is that the harm caused simply in public health terms will outweigh the virus ten to one," he said.

"Over here, tens of thousands of people will die needlessly because our health service has become a COVID only service, it's a weird obsession to minimize death from one cause to the exclusion of everything else."

Across Canada, under provincial government rules, private gatherings are prohibited, in addition to closures of any other public gathering place. Enforcement is with fines, and if people refuse to comply, officers can get a warrant for judicial intervention. Additionally, authorities are able to gain telewarrants, which allow them to enter people's homes. And non-mask-compliance will be met with fines.

When Americans say that the federal government should have acted sooner, do they mean that federal law enforcement should have been granted the authority to enter homes to break up private gatherings? To issue large fines for non-compliance? To force people to wear masks under penalty of law? To break up Christmas dinners? To allow babies to die rather than permit them to be transported to hospitals outside of their designated zone?

Do Americans believe that the federal government should have stopped protest activity because the risk of contagion was too great? Do they believe campaign rallies should have been disallowed?

"It's testimony to just how effective the propaganda campaigns have been that media and politicians have persuaded people that it's a deadly plague, that it's Ebola— and it just isn't. People can see that yet they ignore the evidence in front of them and believe the shit they've been sold," Young said. "There's been very little dissent."

When Americans, when Biden, Harris, and the media blame the federal government for the deaths of more than 250,000 of their fellow citizens, do they think that a fair exchange for those lives are our rights to free speech, free press, free assembly, free religion, and our ability to tell the government they are doing badly?

Wales just popped back into a lockdown despite having the lowest case and fatality counts across the UK. During the lockdown, everyone in Wales must stay home. Essential workers can leave for work, and people can go exercise. Getting together with those not in your household will not be permitted, either inside or outside. Those who live alone can join with one other household. Businesses in the region were confused and didn't know what they were supposed to do.

US states each had their own plans for how to deal with lockdown enforcement, and in no instance did the federal government have authority or jurisdiction over those states—nor should it. The US federal government simply does not have that kind of authority.

There can be no one solution for the entirety of the United States. Each time the Biden/Harris campaign or their surrogates offer their solutions for how they would have handled the coronavirus, it amounts to their concept that they would have done something better and they would have done it sooner.

But what they would have done, if they are being honest, is to forcibly separate Americans from their rights, at the federal level, and while at first they would have said the measures were temporary, we know—from what we are seeing globally—that we would still be divorced from those rights. "It's been sold to us as temporary but that's so clearly a lie," Young said.

The question becomes, as Young says, not how we got to this place, but how we protected and maintained our freedoms for so long.

"The British people, who are supposedly these stout defenders of their ancient liberties dating back to the Magna Carta, have reacted so willingly to lockdowns," Young lamented. "We have embraced authoritarianism. People don't seem to value liberties previous generations fought and died for."

"The default position of human beings is aggressive intolerance for any dissent at all. If you challenge the sacred values of your community, the default response of most people is to tear you limb from limb. That's how dissenters and mavericks were treated throughout the ages because dissent was seen as a threat to the moral cohesion of a community."

"The question isn't why are we in the midst of this," Young said, "but how we managed to preserve our rights for so long. It takes an enormous superhuman effort to convince people to protect their rights. To resist the arrogation of power by our political leaders is important." Young said.

"And we'll have to do it all over again. A hundred years of progress has been reversed in six months, and we're at risk of descending into authoritarian dystopia across the world."

The way we maintained our natural rights, first in Britain, and then in the US, is that we prioritized them as paramount. We proclaimed to anyone who would listen that our rights are more important than safety, than protection, than health. What we have done now is determine that a crisis requires that we sacrifice those rights, and as we do so, we hear about new crises on the horizon that will require further sacrifice of our rights.

This is not acceptable. There is nothing on earth more important than maintaining and defending our natural rights. If we prioritize anything above that, if we willingly give over our rights to any authority for any purpose we risk losing them permanently. When a government authority steals the people's rights, they will not willingly give them back. We will need mettle and stamina to wrest them back, I hope we have it.