Tag: body integrity

Despotism Is The New Normal: Looming Threats to Freedom in 2022

“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution.”—Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America

Despotism has become our new normal.

Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.

These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.

This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.

The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual freedoms now and in the year to come.

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Mainstream Media Cares More About You Taking Ivermectin Than Biden Eviscerating Medical Freedom

On Thursday, the United States made a giant leap forward into a despotic and fascist future in which the government owns our bodies and can force us to do whatever they please. Thanks to the massive propaganda campaign waged by the mainstream media, half of Americans likely agree with it.

“We’ve been patient but our patience is wearing thin and your refusal has cost all of us,” Mein Führer President Joe Biden said on Thursday as he bypassed Congress and unilaterally ordered 100 million Americans to undergo a medical procedure against their will — or become unemployable.

“My job as president is to protect all Americans,” Mr. Biden said Thursday. “So tonight, I’m announcing that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.”

“The bottom line — we’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers,” he said, completely disregarding the fact that natural immunity to the virus is exponentially more effective than the vaccine.

He also completely ignored the Constitution, the Congress, and essentially every single check and balance the government has ostensibly set up to prevent tyrants like him from making such broad and overreaching dictates.

It’s no wonder that #IwillNOTComply and #MassNonCompliance began trending immediately after the dictator on high delivered this chilling speech. In fact, they continued to trend into Friday morning highlighting the mass resistance to such tyrannical madness and the terrifying precedent that it sets.

Simply put, individuals own their bodies and have rights over them — including what they choose to eat, inject, or otherwise consume — that other individuals, groups, and governments may not violate. Biden’s mandate violates this most sacred of rights and it must be resisted en masse.

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The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) surprised even many of its harshest critics this week when it strongly defended coercive programs and other mandates from the state in the name of fighting COVID. “Far from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” its Twitter account announced, adding that “vaccine requirements also safeguard those whose work involves regular exposure to the public.”

If you were surprised to see the ACLU heralding the civil liberties imperatives of “vaccine mandates” and “vaccine requirements” — whereby the government coerces adults to inject medicine into their own bodies that they do not want — the New York Times op-ed which the group promoted, written by two of its senior lawyers, was even more extreme. The article begins with this rhetorical question: “Do vaccine mandates violate civil liberties?” Noting that “some who have refused vaccination claim as much,” the ACLU lawyers say: “we disagree.” The op-ed then examines various civil liberties objections to mandates and state coercion — little things like, you know, bodily autonomy and freedom to choose — and the ACLU officials then invoke one authoritarian cliche after the next (“these rights are not absolute”) to sweep aside such civil liberties concerns:

[W]hen it comes to Covid-19, all considerations point in the same direction. . . . In fact, far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties. . . . .

[Many claim that] vaccines are a justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity. That may sound ominous, because we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others. . . . While vaccine mandates are not always permissible, they rarely run afoul of civil liberties when they involve highly infectious and devastating diseases like Covid-19. . . .

While limited exceptions are necessary, most people can be required to be vaccinated. . . . . Where a vaccine is not medically contraindicated, however, avoiding a deadly threat to the public health typically outweighs personal autonomy and individual freedom.

The op-ed sounds like it was written by an NSA official justifying the need for mass surveillance (yes, fine, your privacy is important but it is not absolute; your privacy rights are outweighed by public safety; we are spying on you for your own good). And the op-ed appropriately ends with this perfect Orwellian flourish: “We care deeply about civil liberties and civil rights for all — which is precisely why we support vaccine mandates.”

What makes the ACLU’s position so remarkable — besides the inherent shock of a civil liberties organization championing state mandates overriding individual choice — is that, very recently, the same group warned of the grave dangers of the very mindset it is now pushing. In 2008, the ACLU published a comprehensive report on pandemics which had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics.

The title of the ACLU report, resurfaced by David Shane, reveals its primary point: “Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health – Not a Law Enforcement/National Security – Approach.” To read this report is to feel that one is reading the anti-ACLU — or at least the actual ACLU prior to its Trump-era transformation. From start to finish, it reads as a warning of the perils of precisely the mindset which today’s ACLU is now advocating for COVID.

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ACLU Says the State Forcing People to Take Vaccines is a Victory For Civil Liberties

The ACLU has published an article in the New York Times followed up by a tweet which asserts that the government forcing people to take vaccines is a victory for civil liberties.

No, this isn’t out of the Babylon Bee.

“Far from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” the organization’s tweet ludicrously claimed. “They protect the most vulnerable, people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated, and communities of color hit hard by the disease.”

The tweet linked to a New York Times opinion piece written by ACLU staffers which further amplified claims that the government forcing people to take a vaccine under threat of them losing their jobs, social lives and potentially in the future the right to buy and sell was actually a boon for civil liberties.

What’s next? Maybe the ACLU will call for the government to forcibly incarcerate Americans for their controversial political opinions because it might ‘prevent harm’.

Respondents on Twitter were swift to ridicule the organization’s absurd hypocrisy.

“The government forcing a needle in your arm is actually them furthering your civil liberties” is quite the take even from Marxists like you. Thank you for dropping the mask to reveal yourselves though,” remarked Robby Starbuck.

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