The COVID Authoritarians' Cynical Hijacking of the Word 'Freedom'

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

The same people who advocated firing people for not getting vaccinated, who shuttered schools despite warnings of the catastrophic damage it would do to children's learning, and who threatened to jail people for not complying with silly rules about social distancing have spent the last four days trying to convince the American people they're the party of "freedom."

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"You never learn anything about anybody when times are easy," Maryland Gov. Wes Moore declared on Wednesday night. "You learn everything you need to know about somebody when times are hard and when the temperature gets turned up."

The hardest time in recent memory was the COVID-19 pandemic. And the response of Democrats from top to bottom was anti-freeom..

Some Democrats spoke enviously of the "Chinese Model" of zero COVID. Apparently, the idea of locking people away for weeks at a time appealed to their controlling nature. Others, like California Governor Gavin Newsom, became COVID hypocrites. Newsom locked people down and prevented restaurants from opening while enjoying private dinners with his fat-cat friends at exclusive venues.

The Dems' vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, proved the adage "absolute power corrupts absolutely." Months after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other GOP governors reopened their states and sent the kids back to school, Walz, according to the New York Times, took "the extraordinary step of banning people from different households from meeting indoors or outdoors, even though evidence has consistently shown the outdoors to be relatively safe."

"This prohibition includes indoor and outdoor gatherings, planned and spontaneous gatherings, and public and private gatherings," Walz declared at the time, applying the order to groups of any size, "even if social distancing can be maintained."

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Zieg Heil, baby.

Reason.com:

With that dystopian record on your resume, it takes a Lake Minnetonka–sized reservoir of shamelessness to proclaim, as Walz did last night, that "when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love, freedom to make your own health care decisions…[and] freedom to live the life that you want to lead."

Making your own health care decision to gather outdoors with the people you love is a freedom as fundamental as it gets. And Walz criminalized it.

No, we're not hearing anything about the Democrats' COVID record of authoritarianism. And what we do hear is ludicrously simple-minded lies.

"Thanks to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris," Rep. James Clyburn (D–S.C.) said Monday, "we reopened our schools, brought back our businesses, and restored our faith in the American can-do spirit."

It's instructive to recall what the New York Times said about school closures last year.

"Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting," the Times reported. "As experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students."

When it comes to the Second Amendment, the Democrats have had to do some fancy footwork to portray their actions as being consistent with "freedom."

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Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Walz’s freedom from being shot is another example. He’s endorsing, in euphemistic fashion, the government’s use of coercion to take guns off the street. The individual right to bear arms is conferred explicitly in the Second Amendment, as reinforced in multiple Supreme Court opinions.

Yet in Mr. Walz’s view, gun control—denying a right—becomes a form of freedom. Coercion is liberty. We suspect most Americans would define the freedom to go to school safely simply as the duty of government to control crime and provide for public safety.

It's never that simple with Democrats. The party of "big government" only wants the government to sit on you if you're not thinking correct thoughts or engaging in actions that they deem objectionable. 

Donald Trump and the Republicans have a lot of work to do if they're going to swat this hypocrisy down.

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