In a Nov. 19, 2021 address to Hillsdale College, its president Larry Arnn identified the three factors recognized by the Constitution as the natural rights of human beings: the right to earn a living, the right to raise our children, and the right to participate in government.
“These facts about nature,” he pointed out, “were well known during the American Revolution … It was the interference with the colonists’ natural rights by that former ruling class that led to the American Revolution.” Such interference, he argues, is occurring today on both a national and global scale.
Nationally, a bureaucratic colossus has taken control of regulative governance, as evidenced by the collective response to the COVID-19 virus: the isolation of the nation’s citizenry via lockdowns, a form of house arrest; the virtual destruction of the economy; and the collusion between Big Pharma, major corporations, government, medical agencies, mainstream media, and the education establishment. This vast and nefarious consortium has nullified what Arnn enumerated as the basis of life in a democratic polity— the three fundamental rights which the COVID mandarin class has stripped from its citizenry.
- The right to make a living has been ruthlessly and severely compromised. As is well known, small business has been decimated and millions of people thrown out of work or driven into bankruptcy. Whether this was part of a deliberate plan or a poorly thought-through strategy for dealing with the pandemic is an open question—but suspicions ramify. The vaccine mandates have only exacerbated the disaster.
- The right to raise their children as parents see fit has been overridden by government edict and/or agency control. Children, who are effectively immune to the virus, are forced to wear masks in order to attend school and are being injected with entirely unnecessary and potentially harmful vaccines. Witness, too, the imposition of Critical Race Theory on school curricula by school boards and government fiat across the nation. In my own country, Canada, Bill C-4 prohibits what is called conversion therapy, making parents’ concern about transgender indoctrination of their children and intervention in the process a criminal offense. In all such cases, the state insists on acting in loco parentis, reducing parents to the status of daycare operators.
- The right to participate in government has been stifled by oppressive and unnavigable bureaucracies whose regulative incontinence has closed almost every avenue of individual involvement in the apparatus of governance. Political authority has become both unrepresentative and unaccountable. Indifference to citizen opposition regarding policy measures and legislative enactments is the official version of a barricaded street.
Fortunately, resistance to such tyrannical policies has been gathering momentum. As Roger Kimball writes at American Greatness, “The hissing sound you hear is the sound of political legitimacy escaping from the institutions that, bloated with too much power and too little accountability, are beginning to deflate in the face of widespread popular unrest.”
- Small business is still hamstrung by COVID mandates, but many entrepreneurs are beginning to feel that enough is enough and are starting to act independently. For example, the market across my street has defiantly reversed its enforcement sign, which now reads that masks are recommended rather than required. Others are following suit. Local governments are also beginning to lift most COVID restrictions.
- Parents have rebelled against their school boards and many of these despotic entities and compromised individuals have been voted out or forced to drop their curricular abominations—the Loudoun revolution in action. Critical Race Theory is on the way out in many jurisdictions. Masking is gradually becoming a thing of the past. Regrettably, Bill C-4 remains in force in Canada, which is not surprising given the autocratic nature of Canadian governance. The reclamation of parenthood is a work in progress.
- Participation in government has taken on a new and muscular form, thanks to the spreading phenomenon of epic trucker convoys—a return for the time being to direct democracy as a result of the failure of representative democracy to adequately reflect the will of a substantial portion of the citizenry. Of course, direct democracy is temporary since it can function only in circumscribed groups or polities, like the classical Greek city-states, but it has become a catalyst for the return of genuine representation.
It is obvious, or should be, that when the core rights of gainful labor, parenthood, and citizen representation are wrested from a people, the result can be nothing other than a coercive and monolithic state where democratic freedoms become a distant memory and the misery of the multitudes is preordained. The politically motivated COVID tyranny under which we have suffered these last two years was clearly purpose-built to smooth the way to this end. Mandate-prone and unresponsive government intent on crushing the three basic rights that define the nature of democratic life is and always was the real pandemic, infectious, transmissible, and globally replicable.