Tag: civil liberties

Vaccine Passports Are A Serious Threat To American Civil Liberties

With the advent of the deceptively named “vaccine passport” concept, coronavirus vaccines have quickly turned from savior hailed by an American populace desperate for a return to some semblance of normalcy into a cudgel with which to beat the vaccine heterodox into submission. Add the relentless desire for Big Tech to collect all data it can suck into a rapacious corporate maw to be digested into more profits and more power over our lives, and you have a perfect storm of tyranny.

Currently, the COVID-19 vaccines are not U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved, but authorized only for emergency use. As an investigational product, the statute governing emergency use authorizations provides that the recipient be advised of his or her option to accept or refuse administration of the vaccine, something a DC District court considered in a 2003 case that ruled against forcing soldiers to take the then-experimental anthrax vaccine (suspiciously, the vaccine was deemed “safe” not long after the court enjoined mandatory vaccination, although there are numerous claims that the anthrax vaccination program has led to debilitating side effects).

President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine development program was unprecedented. It normally takes several years for FDA approval of a vaccine and several phases like an exploratory stage, clinical trials, and quality control. While many are comfortable taking the vaccine now, others may wish to wait, or decline altogether.

Some had the disease and survived it with antibodies. Some have physical limitations that do not allow inoculation, and others have religious and moral objections. For example, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine was developed using a retinal cell line developed from an electively aborted fetus in 1985.

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Biden Administration Urges Supreme Court To Let Cops Enter Homes And Seize Guns Without A Warrant

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear oral argument in Caniglia v. Strom, a case that could have sweeping consequences for policing, due process, and mental health, with the Biden Administration and attorneys general from nine states urging the High Court to uphold warrantless gun confiscation. But what would ultimately become a major Fourth Amendment case began with an elderly couple’s spat over a coffee mug. 

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The War on Porn Is Back

“If you want better men by any standard, there is every reason to regard ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle,” declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a 2018 column bluntly headlined “Let’s Ban Porn.”

In this, as in many things, Douthat was ahead of the conservative intellectual curve by a year or two. And in this, as in many things, he was dangerously wrong.

In due course, Douthat has been joined by the folks at the Christian journal First Things, who have taken up the anti-pornography banner as part of their peculiar subvariant of a resurgent interest in nationalism among traditionalist conservatives. In last year’s manifesto, “Against the Dead Consensus,” a clutch of First Things friends and familiars reject “economic libertarianism” and “the soulless society of individual affluence” and add that they “respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism.” Which makes it all the more disconcerting when they turn around and immediately kneel before the scolding ghost of Ed Meese.

As attorney general, Meese sought to deliver on Reagan’s 1987 threat to “purveyors” of obscene material that the “industry’s days are numbered.” It was Meese who pulled together the first National Obscenity Enforcement Unit. (One surprising and familiar name also crops up in the tale: then–assistant attorney general and recent Libertarian Party vice presidential pick William F. Weld, who was given the task of bringing together various agencies for the task force.)

Meese’s bill of grievances against the relatively constrained pornography of his day—which he credited in a speech to a report from a federal Commission on Pornography convened the previous year—will sound alarmingly familiar to readers of Douthat and First Things. He asserts “that violence, far from being an altogether separate category of pornography, is involved with almost all of it; that there are empirically verifiable connections between pornography and violent sex-related crimes; that the pornography industry is a brutal one that exploits and often ruins the lives of its ‘performers’ as well as its consumers, and that the ‘performers’ often include abused children and people plied with hard drugs; that whether or not it is directly imitated by those who consume it, pornography has a deleterious effect on what its consumers view as normal and healthy.”

The effort was, in some sense, successful. By 1990, the Department of Justice had managed to use obscenity statutes to force seven national porn distributors out of business. But the decades that followed were boom times for porn as the industry moved into new forms of distribution, so the success was far from permanent.

In a rare moment of sanity in 2011, the Justice Department shuttered what had come to be known as the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, resulting in the delightful Politico headline “Holder accused of neglecting porn” and a harrumph from peeved conservatives, who vowed to reverse the Obama administration’s decision as soon as they could.

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REVEALED: Parler’s New CEO Wants Convention That Would Let George Soros Rewrite The Constitution

Mark Meckler, the new interim CEO of Parler, currently supports a Convention of States that could give George Soros and other interests the power to rewrite the Constitution.

Meckler, who was appointed as interim CEO of Parler following the removal of founder John Matze, currently runs the Convention of States Project, a supposed “grassroots” organization pushing for a convention under Article V of the Constitution.

The project describes itself as a “national effort to call a convention under Article V of the United States Constitution, restricted to proposing amendments that will impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress,” which initially sounds appealing.

However, a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argued that such a restriction on an Article V convention would be impossible, with states unable to control what a convention could and could not discuss, and nobody else having clear constitutional control over the convention.

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2020: The Year In Which Comforting American Myths Were Ravaged

Thanks in large part to Covid lockdowns, this year has left vast wreckage in its wake, with ten million jobs lost, more than 100,000 businesses and dozens of national chains bankrupted or closed. Up to 40 million people could face eviction in the coming months for failing to pay rent, and Americans report that their mental health is at record low levels. But the casualty list for 2020 must also include many of the political myths that shape Americans’ lives.

Perhaps the biggest myth to die this year was that Americans’ constitutional rights are safeguarded by the Bill of Rights. After the Covid-19 pandemic began, governors in state after state effectively placed scores of millions of citizens under house arrest – dictates that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly compared to “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery. Politicians and government officials merely had to issue decrees, which were endlessly amended, in order to destroy citizens’ freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of choice in daily life. Los Angeles earlier this month banned almost all walking and bicycling in the city, ordering four million people to “to remain in their homes” in a futile effort to banish a virus.

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