Yesterday in “The Latest” section of this website I excerpted and linked to Mark Glennon’s article “Indifference to Illegality of Illinois Stay-at-Home Order is Frightening.” Below is Dennis Prager on the same topic. (Attention conservatives! You’re still not reaching enough people!)
(Oh, and here’s another from Prager: “The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History.”)
The greatest threat to liberty since America’s founding.
All my life, I have dismissed paranoids on the right (“America is headed to communism”) and the left (“It can happen here” — referring to fascism). It’s not that I’ve ever believed liberty was guaranteed. Being familiar with history and a pessimist regarding the human condition, I never believed that.
But the ease with which police state tactics have been employed and the equal ease with which most Americans have accepted them have been breathtaking.
People will argue that a temporary police state has been justified because of the allegedly unique threat to life posed by the new coronavirus. I do not believe the data will bear that out. Regardless, let us at least agree that we are closer to a police state than ever in American history.
“Police state” does not mean totalitarian state. America is not a totalitarian state; we still have many freedoms. In a totalitarian state, this article could not be legally published, and if it were illegally published, I would be imprisoned and/or executed. But we are presently living with all four of the key hallmarks of a police state:
No. 1: Draconian laws depriving citizens of elementary civil rights.
The federal, state, county and city governments are now restricting almost every freedom except those of travel and speech. Americans have been banned from going to work (and thereby earning a living), meeting in groups (both indoors and outdoors), meeting in their cars in church parking lots to pray and entering state-owned properties such as beaches and parks — among many other prohibitions.
No. 2: A mass media supportive of the state’s messaging and deprivation of rights.
Read more: Frontpage Mag
Image credit: www.frontpagemag.com.
