A Silver Lining
By Robert Gore
A guest column from:
https:gellerreport.com/2020/05/who-will-fight-for-your-rights.html/
Who will fight for your rights?
…we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the
stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases,
while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage
of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Ayn Rand, Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, Appendix, “The Nature
of Government,” 1967
A guest column from:
https:gellerreport.com/2020/05/who-will-fight-for-your-rights.html/
We are no
longer fast approaching the stage of the
ultimate inversion, we’ve arrived. It is the stage of which every would-be
dictator dreams, where his whims are absolute, and everything everyone else
says, does, or thinks must comport with those whims, even—impossible though it
would be—when they are contradictory.
Science is anti-whim. Nature, as Francis Bacon observed, to be commanded must be obeyed. Nothing illustrates the ultimate inversion of the official coronavirus response better than its leaders’ assault on science in the name of their “science.”
Doctors have been discouraged or prohibited from administering
hydroxychloroquine, by itself or in conjunction with other medications,
vitamins, and zinc compounds, to treat Covid-19. They have observed and
documented the effectiveness of such remedies—mitigation or elimination of the
disease’s symptoms—but their observation and documentation are dismissed. Only
the validation procedure mandated by the medical bureaucracy—the expensive and
complex multistage tests required of new drugs to establish their efficacy and
safety—will suffice for official permission. It’s what their “science” demands
of a cheap and seemingly effective remedy that’s been on the market for years
as a treatment for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and malaria.
So where were the tests and control-group studies for the
pandemic models, lockdowns, social distancing, masks, flattening the curve,
closing businesses, and contact tracing that have been the official coronavirus
responses? Projections are hypotheses, but only one class of hypotheses was
officially accepted—disaster scenarios that fed panic and paved the way for
further expansion of governments’ power. The doomsday models have been
discredited; cases and deaths have been orders of magnitude less than
projected.
Countries that haven’t instituted lockdowns have fared no worse
than countries that have. Andrew Cuomo, governor of hard-hit New York, recently
expressed surprise that two-thirds of hospitalized coronavirus patients had
been sheltering in place. As if locking people down—often families under close
quarters—in apartment buildings that can’t control cockroaches would somehow
protect dwellers against a microscopic, easily spread, fast replicating, and
virtually infinite virus.
No science at all supports social
distancing; six-feet is an arbitrary construct (i.e., whim) of some
medical would-be dictator. Masks force the rebreathing of your own respiratory
waste, weakening your immune system for the
dubious benefit of that all-powerful totem: public health. The health you’re
supposedly protecting is certainly not your own. It’s like eating your own
feces or drinking your own urine for a purported public benefit.
Flattening the curve to ensure adequate
hospital space for the wave of coronavirus patients that hasn’t happened has
flattened the hospitals, leading to empty rooms and wards and layoffs for
medical workers. Bankruptcies will follow.
Lost jobs and shuttered businesses are just collateral damage
for our would-be emperors, who have waged senseless wars and inflicted grievous
collateral damage on other countries for decades. Now the devastation and
misery they’ve left in their wake have come home. Americans who’ve never asked
themselves how it felt to be a victim of their government’s senseless wars are
now victims of their government’s senseless war on a germ. After an
unsustainable debt-propelled respite, the Greater Depression has resumed (it
started in 2008) and will last for years. Its poverty and devastation will
sicken and kill multiples of the people who will ultimately be afflicted by the
coronavirus.
All this supposedly guided by “science,” yet its proponents
commit the most unscientific offense—they corrupt their own data. By their own
admission the tests they use give both false negatives and false positives. By
their own admission they’re corrupting the death count. Doctors have been
instructed to list Covid-19 as a cause of death if the deceased had any of the
symptoms associated with Covid-19, even though those symptoms characterize a
number of other diseases that singly or in combination kill people, especially
people with compromised immune systems. Hospitals have a financial incentive to
perpetuate this fraud. They receive $13,000 from Medicare for each Covid-19
patient and $39,000 for each patient put on a ventilator (Links here and here).
The coronavirus tyranny has nothing to do with science,
medicine, or health, and everything to do with establishing that ultimate
inversion: the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only
by permission. These past few weeks we’ve seen how our rulers
attempted to discard the last fig leaf—democracy—covering their creeping, now
galloping, totalitarianism and complete lack of legitimacy.
A camarilla within the nation’s intelligence services, the
Department of Justice, and members of the previous administration, including
Barack Obama, attempted to depose the democratically elected president of the
United States. Such coups are the province of two-bit plotters in banana
republics that make no pretense of observing or protecting rights, where might
alone makes right. The United States has gone full banana—the stage of rule by brute force.
Democracy is tyranny of the majority, a system that inevitably
destroys individual rights. For the history-challenged, individual rights were
the still revolutionary concept on which the idea—although not always the
reality—of the United States was established. The logical consequence of the
full protection of individual rights is the freedom to live your life as you
see fit, as long as you don’t abridge the rights of others. Society or any
other group of people has no rights apart from the rights of the individuals
that comprise it. Governments have no rights, only the duty to protect the rights of individuals to live peaceably and
freely. Government must be the servant, not the master, of its citizens. (See
the Ayn Rand Appendix cited above, “The Nature of Government,” for a more
detailed exposition of the proper role of government.)
We’re light years from that ideal. Individuals must receive
permission to, among other things, leave their homes, hold a job, assemble with
other individuals, attend houses of worship, visit parks and beaches, or
patronize businesses. The governor of my state, Michelle Lujan Grisham, just
decreed that masks must be worn by everyone outside of their own dwellings (I
wrote STOP MLG’S TYRANNY on mine). Breathing fresh air is now at the sufferance
of our overlords. Civilly disobedient soul that I am, I have yet to don my
mask. Don’t think sheep don’t get angry—I get murderous looks from
mask-wearers.
With every decree issued since this repression began, those who
advocate for their individual rights or actually exercise them by violating the
decree are denounced, shamed, censored, and in some cases arrested. Anyone who
disagrees by word or deed is “selfish,” unwilling to sacrifice for the common
good.
What do they mean by selfish? Is it selfish to fight for your
rights? Is it selfish to want to work and produce? Is it selfish to be more
concerned with your own welfare and the welfare of your family and friends than
with the welfare of strangers, the public, or the government that supposedly
represents that public? Is your desire for freedom selfish?
There are those who will tie themselves in intellectual knots
answering those questions in the negative, but nevertheless asserting that
individual rights and their exercise—free expression, free inquiry, free
production, and free exchange—can all be justified as conferring the greatest
public good. They then wonder why they never win arguments with those pushing
collectivized notions of the public good. When might makes right, the public
good is whatever the collective’s masters say it is—argument over.
Fighting for one’s freedom and all that flows from it is
selfish, profoundly so. If you don’t fight for that which is yours—the
individual rights that are the essential condition of your existence—who’s
going to do it for you? Anthony Fauci? Bill Gates? Nancy Pelosi? President
Trump? Joe Biden? George Soros? Jerome Powell? Adam Schiff? Mark Zuckerberg?
Eric Schmidt? Santa Claus? The Tooth Fairy? When was the last time you even
heard the term “individual rights” in polite, mainstream discourse? When
individual rights are mentioned at all, they’re treated as a quaint
anachronism.
And what do they mean by sacrifice? They mean that instead of
selfishly fighting for your rights and freedom, you are to unselfishly place
them on the sacrificial altar known as the public good. You’re selfish for
resisting the sacrifice of that which is rightfully yours, but those collecting
what is not rightfully theirs are selfless saints. If you voluntarily board
that cattle car, you’ll secure your spot in the Unselfish Hall of Fame, along
with millions of others who have lost their property, happiness, freedom, and
lives without selfish protest or resistance. You might even be designated a
Hero of the Public Good, posthumously of course.
If you find the world’s descent into evil unfathomable, it’s
time to rethink the premises that the selfless is the good and the selfish is
evil. Collectivist butchers, including the ones pushing the coronavirus hoax,
always demand fealty to some cause greater than one’s self. Fall for that one
and you’ve already lost two important parts of yourself—your self-respect and
your ability to reason.
The precautionary principle—that no risks can be assumed if
someone or something somewhere might be harmed—is
anti-mind and anti-life, absurdly evil on its face. That philosophical
abomination now excuses wholesale violation of individual rights and deadly
economic devastation based on projections, bureaucratic whim, and political
expediency. The precautionary principle would, if consistency applied, bring
human progress to a halt, eventually rendering the human race extinct. Nothing
is as unsafe as an insistence on absolute safety.
Risk is what makes life worth living—it’s the driver of human
knowledge and progress. Imagine the choices that confronted early humans as
they made their first choices. If we build a fire, will it warm us and cook our
meat…or consume us? If we eat oysters, will they nourish or kill us? Will the
canoe we’ve built float or sink? The forward steps of both our individual and
humanity’s journeys have always involved unanswered questions, hypotheses,
risk, experimentation, trial and error, tragedy, and triumph. It takes no
imagination at all to envision potential risks. Make fear and safety paramount
and none of those steps could have or will be taken.
To believe that risks can be eliminated by arbitrary edicts is
delusional; to enforce those edicts tyrannical; to comply with them suicidal.
Wars are always fought and tyrannies always established in the name of
somebody’s safety. The betrayal of individual conscience and surrender of
individual rights to a collective for safety’s sake never produces safety, only
misery, destruction, despair, terror and death. That’s a lesson we’re set to
relearn as we proceed through one of those darkest periods of human history.
There is a silver lining in all this: the curtain has been lifted, we now know exactly what we confront. Present
governments and their many bootlickers and minions do not recognize—much less
protect or hold themselves subordinate to the protection of—individual rights.
Nor should we expect that they will do so within our lifetimes. Absent their
replacement via revolution or abandonment via secession, we will continue to
live in a political order where they are free to do as they please while we may
act only by permission.
If we want our rights, our freedom, and our lives, we’re going
to have to fight for them with word and deed. It has ever been so; it will ever
be so. Those who choose to fight will have one important ally: rule by brute force is the agent of its own
collapse. It has always failed, it always will. Whether we have the virtue and
wisdom to replace it with it’s antitheses—freedom and individual rights
protected rather than destroyed by government—remains to be seen.
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