By John W. Whitehead
We have become one Nation under house arrest.
You think we’re any different from the Kentucky couple fitted out with ankle monitoring bracelets and forced into a quarantine at home?
We’re not.
Consider what happened to Elizabeth and Isaiah Linscott.
Elizabeth took a precautionary diagnostic COVID-19 test before traveling to visit her parents and grandparents in Michigan. It came back positive: Elizabeth was asymptomatic for the novel coronavirus, but had no symptoms. Her husband and infant daughter tested negative for the virus.
Now in a country where freedom actually means something, the Linscotts would have the right to determine for themselves how to proceed responsibly, but in the American Police State, we’ve only got as much freedom as the government allows.
That’s not saying much.
Indeed, it’s a dangerous time for anyone who still clings to the idea that freedom means the right to think for yourself and act responsibly according to your best judgment.
In that regard, the Linscotts are a little old-school in their thinking. When Elizabeth was asked to sign a self-quarantine order agreeing to check in daily with the health department and not to travel anywhere without prior approval, she refused.
A few days after being informed that Elizabeth’s case was being escalated and referred to law enforcement, the Linscotts reportedly found their home surrounded by multiple government vehicles, government personnel, and the county sheriff armed with a court order and ankle monitors.
“We didn’t rob a store,” Linscott said. “We didn’t steal something. We didn’t hit and run. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
That’s the point, of course.
In an age of excessive criminalization, when the law is wielded like a hammer to force compliance to the government’s dictates whatever they might be, you don’t have to do anything wrong to be fined, arrested, or subjected to raids and seizures and surveillance.
Watch and see: Just as it did in China, this pandemic is about to afford the government the perfect excuse for expanding its surveillance and data collection powers at our expense.
On a daily basis, Americans are already relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are, their biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.
COVID-19, however, takes the surveillance state to the next level.
There’s already been talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, and snitch tip lines for reporting rule- breakers to the authorities.
This isn’t exactly uncharted territory.
It follows much the same pattern as every other state of emergency in recent years, legitimate or manufactured, that has empowered the government to add to its arsenal of technologies and powers.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset-forfeiture schemes, road-safety schemes, school-safety schemes, eminent domain: All of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and since have become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.
It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be, civil unrest, the 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, as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.
It’s hard to know who to trust anymore.
In this highly-partisan age, when everything from the COVID-19 pandemic to police brutality to football is being recast in light of one’s political leanings, it can be incredibly difficult to separate what constitutes a genuine safety concern versus what is hyper-politicized propaganda.
Certainly, it is not the first crisis to pit security concerns against freedom principles.
In this post-9/11 world, we have been indoctrinated into fearing and mistrusting one another instead of fearing and mistrusting the government. As a result, we’ve been forced to travel this road many, times with lamentably predictable results each time: Without fail, when asked to choose between safety and liberty, Americans historically tend to choose safety.
Failing to read the fine print on such devil’s bargains, “we the people” find ourselves repeatedly on the losing end as the government uses each crisis as a means of expanding its powers at taxpayer expense.
Whatever these mask mandates might be, authoritarian strong-arm tactics or health necessities to prevent further spread of the virus, they have thus far proven to be uphill legal battles for those hoping to challenge them in the courts as unconstitutional restrictions on their right to liberty, bodily autonomy, privacy, and health.
We can spend time debating the mask mandates. However, criticizing those who rightly fear these restrictions to be a slippery slope to further police state tactics will not restore the freedoms that have been willingly sacrificed on the altar of national security by Americans of all political stripes over the years.
As I’ve warned, this is a test to see how whether the U.S. Constitution, and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights, can survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.
It must be remembered that James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the fourth president of the United States, advised that we should “take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”
Whether or not you consider these COVID-19 restrictions to be cause for alarm, they are far from the first experiment on our liberties. Indeed, whether or not you concede that the pandemic itself is cause for alarm, we should all be alarmed by the government’s response to this pandemic.
By government, I’m not referring to one particular politician or administration but to the entire apparatus at every level that conspires to keep “we the people” fearful of one another and under virtual house arrest.
It is what we’ve all been reduced to: prisoners in our skin, prisoners in our homes, prisoners in our communities, forced to comply with the government’s shifting mandates about how to navigate this pandemic or else
Right now, COVID-19 is the perfect excuse for the government to wreak havoc on our freedoms in the name of safety and security, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, don’t believe for a minute that our safety is the police state’s primary concern.
—The Rutherford Institute