Americans, Choose Freedom and Take Off the Mask

Americans, Choose Freedom and Take Off the Mask
People gather in Central Park in New York on May 22, 2021. (Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)
Michael Walsh
7/26/2021
Updated:
7/27/2021
Commentary

In the midst of an 8,000-mile car trip around the formerly United—and now fractured—States of America, I arrived in Southern California a couple of weeks ago, just in time to fall victim to an indoor mask mandate jackbooted by Los Angeles County in the interests of leftist conformity, virtue signaling, and general fascist stupidity.

From New England, where my journey started, to central Florida and back again, thence from the Northeast to the Golden State by way of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, my drive was almost entirely mask-free, except for the occasional “Karen” sightings, sporting their slave muzzles as badges of submissive honor. It wasn’t until I got to Gallup, New Mexico, that masks and their ugly companions, closed restaurants taped up like crime scenes, became evident.

And then I got to Los Angeles—and once again, here in sunny SoCal, I got a glimpse into America’s future, unless we finally put an emphatic stop to this unconstitutional and irrational madness. To put it in terms that even an Antifa progressive can understand, and which conservatives need to adopt, we need to start resisting by any means necessary.

The collapse of personal autonomy and individual agency in the face of an onslaught of punitive, soul-corroding COVID-19 restrictions has been perhaps the most frightening and depressing development in modern American history. Given its minuscule—barely a blip above normal—death toll, COVID-19 is as close to a hoax as can be imagined. Advertised relentlessly as the second coming of the Black Death, it is instead the New Coke of viral diseases.

The damage it has done, however, is still considerable—not to the nation’s health but to its economy and, more important, to its psyche. Our country of yeoman farmers began disappearing into urbanism in the aftermath of the Civil War, but it was not until the twin catastrophes of World Wars I and II that authoritarian collectivism began to supplant personal initiative and liberty.

The postwar injection of Marxist poison by the red-diaper scholars of the Frankfurt School into our educational system is now serving to finish the transformation of our country into a third-rate, 1930s socialist fantasy.

National Character

Whether the CCP virus was deliberately weaponized in Wuhan, China, and then unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, the fact remains that it has resulted in the most destructive assault on the American economy—and, more importantly, the nature of the American people—in our national history. It cries out for retribution and revenge.

From “two weeks to slow the spread” to the current mantra of “masks now, masks tomorrow, masks forever,” the United States has undergone a profound change in national character. No longer, it seems, is there an instinctive mistrust of unchecked authority and top-down pronunciamentos masquerading as prophylactic and palliative “health care.”

A hitherto little-known, elderly doctor, Anthony Fauci, has incomprehensibly emerged as the de facto dictator of American life, having made a seamless career transition from the administration of President Donald Trump to that of President Joe Biden.

Who will rid us of this meddlesome hack? By turns, Fauci has demanded, prevaricated, changed his mind, hemmed and hawed, backfilled, and otherwise engaged in a campaign of bafflegab concerning every aspect of the virus—making clear at every step that his lust for power and his profound disinclination to ever let a captive nation literally breathe free again is all that matters.

Along the way, and in addition to making healthy Americans fear a relatively minor threat to their personal health, Fauci has managed to destroy our essential humanity, our joie de vivre, our love of our fellow man, the small, human pleasures of life and, almost as a byproduct of his misanthropy, the Trump administration itself. The former president’s extension of a bully pulpit to a power-mad bureaucrat was the greatest blunder of his presidency, one from which it will take us years to recover unless we act with great vigor immediately.

Power

From the start, it was obvious that slogans such as “two weeks to flatten the curve” were meaningless, and that once the entrenched lifers at the plethora of federal agencies to whom the American people have unwittingly surrendered their sovereignty tasted their first bite of untrammeled and almost wholly illegal power, they would never ever, ever, ever, ever let us go. And they haven’t.

For once, the Marxists were right: This was never about health. It is, and always was, about power. Which is all that matters to them.

Just how absurd the current drumbeat for the return of masks is, consider this: Fauci is now openly bruiting the possibility of bringing back national mask mandates even for those who have bitten the bullet and submitted to an essentially untested mass medical experiment using the American people as guinea pigs.

At the same time, everyone from the president on down—and very much including regime-friendly mouthpieces such as The New York Times—is pushing the vaccines with the hysterical desperation of a broke used-car salesman whose house is about to be repossessed, especially now that (as was entirely predictable) new “variants” have sprung up and thus given the media a new cause for fomenting panic.

The brutalists in and out of government, though, are now in a pickle. Having initially disparaged the vaccines because they were being developed under the hated Trump administration, they immediately jumped on the Biden bandwagon when the new president took office.

But if the vaccines are supposed to protect you from getting the virus, then why are “cases” (a new, meaningless metric, since almost nobody is dying from the variants) rising among the jabbed? What’s the point of almost certainly suffering from the vaccines’ side effects (including death) if you’re going to have to wear a mask anyway?

At this point, no one in his right mind would either get the shots or wear a mask. No one with any dignity and true American spirit, that is.

The solution, as always on the intellectually imported left, is blunt force. It doesn’t matter that the remedies are illogical—wear a mask to enter a restaurant, remove it to dine three feet away—arbitrary and whimsically applied. I’m happy to report many people here are simply ignoring the latest local government “mandate,” especially since the L.A. sheriff, Alex Villanueva, has said his department won’t enforce the entirely senseless edict.

Freedom

With much of the rest of the world succumbing to a second round of COVID hysteria—Australia, once a penal colony, always a penal colony, with its citizens’ movements severely restricted again—Americans have an opportunity to again lead the people of the world to freedom. Here’s how.

Just say no. No to further mandates. No to vaccine “passports.” No to the drumbeat of fear porn by the NY Times, NPR, and other statist media outlets with a vested ideological interest in keeping the population crippled by fear. No to the petty tyrants of state and local municipalities who blithely disregard their own unscientific nostrums while inflicting them on everybody else.

No to a “science” that is promulgated by fiat and fear. No to unconstitutional restrictions on freedom of speech by fascist social media; no to the closing of churches and temples; no to ukases against freedom of religion and assembly. No to superannuated careerists such as Fauci, no to intrusive government agencies such as the CDC, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the unconscionably long list of other government agencies who are all feasting on the “pandemic.”

Do you want to do an experiment? Fine, let’s try this one: it’s called freedom, whatever the consequences. Some might die so that the rest of us may live—but we will no longer live in artificial fear. Remind the swamp creatures that the rights enumerated or reserved to the people in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were given by God, and not by the State. Remind them that we—not they—are the boss.

And then fire them. Defy them, primary them, recall them, toss them out of office. Take off your masks and chuck them in the trash. Breathe the fresh air of free men and women, citizens of a Republic in which the people, not the doctors or the politicians, are sovereign. Teach them the hard way that the founding virtues of this country were defiance, not subordination; bravery, not cowardice; individuality, not socialism; freedom, not slavery.

After all, as a Democrat president famously said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” So what are we afraid of?

Do you want to live forever? Or would you rather that your country does?

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.
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