A Silver Lining

Who will fight for your rights?

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

…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

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 hypothesis 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.

Stay sane.

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