War benefits Leviathan. Abstract opposition allows leaders to seize power amid the fear of the unknown. These two forces converged in the response to Covid-19, resulting in a concentration of power and an assault on constitutional liberties.
Over the last two years, the Biden Administration has used wartime strategies to suppress freedom of speech. President Trump first used this tactic during his reelection campaign when he declared that the virus turned him into a “wartime president.”
Upon taking office, President Biden employed familiar wartime rhetorical ploys: lying to his constituents, dividing the public, baselessly accusing opponents of disloyalty to their countrymen, and punishing dissent in disregard for the First Amendment.
His vaccination initiatives typified this strategy.
He repeatedly misled the public to encourage conformity. In July 2021, he told a crowd in Ohio, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
While Covid was a novel threat to many Americans, the political response was reminiscent of the political power grabs that stripped citizens of their Constitutional rights during World War I.
In both eras, separated by a century of American history, Washington’s Leviathan seized its citizens’ First Amendment rights by slandering dissent as false and implying that it endangered the public.
Less than 6 months after narrowly winning reelection under the campaign banner “He Kept Us Out of War,” Woodrow Wilson entered the United States into what he called a “war for democracy and human rights.” He demanded of his countrymen, “We must all speak, act, and serve together!”
President Wilson’s demand for conformity was not rhetorical; he swiftly signed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 into law, making it a crime to use speech or writing in ways disloyal to the government.
The Supreme Court upheld Wilson’s censorious enactments in a series of cases at the end of his presidency. The fatuous and tyrannical orders are now remembered for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s slanderous and misleading example of “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
Like Wilson’s treatment of Debs, Biden stripped his opponents of their constitutional rights, maligned their reputations, and accosted them for insufficient loyalty to his edicts. And, like Wilson, the Biden administration carried out this assault on the Constitution while touting “democracy,” usurping the Bill of Rights with hubris and malice.
“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” President Biden said in December 2021. “The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated. That’s the problem.”
But Biden wasn’t speaking out of concern for his citizens’ health; he quickly turned to attacking the patriotism of those who defied his mandates:
“Everybody talks about freedom and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anyone else?”
In July 2021, President Biden attacked social media companies for not censoring discussions of Covid enough. “They’re killing people,” he told the press.
Biden later clarified his remarks, explaining that his comment was a call for censorship, not a personal attack. “My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying ‘Facebook is killing people,’ that they would do something about the misinformation,” he explained.
Rob Flaherty – the White House Director of Digital Strategy – demanded to know why Facebook had not removed a video of Tucker Carlson reporting that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was linked to blood clots.
Like banning publications from the mail a century earlier, the explicit aim was to reduce circulation of criticism of the regime.
“There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many?” Faherty complained, “How was this not violative… What exactly is the rule for removal vs. demoting?”
Just as Holmes had done a century before, Biden’s administration conflates “shouting fire” with “political offenses,” seeking to eradicate the latter with the excuse of public endangerment.
Meanwhile, the CDC used false data to recommend kids get the Covid vaccine. The agency drastically overestimated and over-reported the threat that Covid poses to young children in its presentation to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in June 2022. Based on the presentation of this false data, the ACIP voted to recommend Covid vaccinations to kids as young as six months old.
In 1969, the Supreme Court effectively overturned Schenck in Brandenburg v. Ohio.
Concurring in judgment, Justice Douglas wrote that the cases from the World War I era “show how easily” the precedent from Schenck “is manipulated to crush what [Justice] Brandeis called ‘the fundamental right of free men to strive for better conditions through new legislation and new institutions’ by argument and discourse.”
In January 2023, the Biden White House announced that Covid emergency declarations will end in May. This is unlikely to change any Americans daily routines, but perhaps it signifies the impending dissipation of Covid’s fog of war.
Dissenting, Olmstead v. United States,277 U.S.438 (1928).
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