John & Nisha Whitehead began their Feb. 21 WorldNetDaily column by rehashing the tired right-wing narrative that those who worked to protect the public during the COVID pandemic were just auditioning for creating an authoritarian government:
The government never cedes power willingly.
Neither should we.
If the COVID-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”
We’re still allowing ourselves to be fully distracted by circus politics and a constant barrage of bad news screaming for attention.
Four years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave world governments (including our own) a convenient excuse for expanding their powers, abusing their authority, and further oppressing their constituents, there’s something being concocted in the dens of power.
The danger of martial law persists.
Any government so willing to weaponize one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security will not hesitate to override the Constitution and lock down the nation again.
You’d better get ready, because that so-called crisis could be anything: civil unrest, national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
In reality, none of this is happening. But the Whiteheads must manufacture fear to keep donations to their right-wing Rutherford Institute, best known for its lawfare against President Clinton in the 1990s. They then went Godwin, invoking China’s hardline attempts to stem the pandemic there as no different from what the Nazis did to their political enemies, with the clear implication that anyone in America who did even the mildest thing to fight the pandemic was exactly the same:
If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.
Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable or simply noncompliant.
While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals.
Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”
How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to COVID quarantine centers?
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots.
You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Actually, the kind of dot-connecting the Whiteheads are doing is very much the realm of conspiracy theorists. They offered no evidence any official who tried to fight COVID was solely on a power trip, and the fact that COVID restrictions went away as the pandemic eased disproves their conspiracy-mongering. Never mind, of course, that WND has long complained about people making Nazi references about Donald Trump, so it’s utterly hypocritical for it to permit the Whiteheads to do the same to others deemed enemies to the right-wing agenda.
Still, the Whiteheads wouldn’t stop:
COVID-19 was merely one crisis in a long series of crises that the government has shamelessly exploited in order to justify its power grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial law disguised as emergency powers.
Everything I have warned about for years – government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on – has become part of the government’s arsenal of terrifying lockdown powers should the need arise.
What we should be bracing for is: what comes next?
A lot more fear-mongering from the Whiteheads, presumably. That’s what pays their bills, after all.