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Let’s build statues for the masked enforcers of COVID tyranny
Think about all the statues the woke mob tore down in recent years with the same fury they now reserve for firebombing Teslas. On the fifth anniversary of COVID-19’s medical, legal, and ethical failures, I have a few ideas for heroes worthy of new monuments.
Idaho alone deserves at least two. In September 2020, police arrested Gabe Rench for peacefully singing hymns at a public protest against the city of Moscow’s strict mask mandate. A court later ruled in his favor. Then, in April 2020, officers handcuffed Sara Brady in front of her children for letting them play outside at a park in defiance of a stay-at-home order. She, too, was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing.
We should build statues and monuments to remind future generations of how science and dignity were cast aside for cultish hysteria and blind fear.
It took until 2023 for justice to prevail in both cases, delayed by a swarm of overzealous Karens and Keystone cops who failed to learn from history’s authoritarian follies. Instead, they seemed eager to replicate them.
They deserve statues too — depicted in their masks, rigidly marching six feet apart, blindly enforcing fraudulent “safety” measures. They can stand near Rench and Brady, a permanent reminder of the goose-stepping hysteria that defined the era.
The statues should defy logic, evoking disbelief and confusion. Children will gaze at them, instinctively pitying the absurdity and disgrace of the era they represent.
“How did they let it come to this?” they will ask. And wiser adults of a future age will answer, “Because they were morons, child. Utter morons.”
Todd Erzen, my book editor, envisions a mural in downtown Des Moines capturing his experience in April 2021. That day, he took his young daughter to a small restaurant to pick up a pizza. Inside, diners sat freely eating and chatting without masks. But when Erzen walked in for two minutes to grab his order, the Stasi guard working the cash register insisted that he wear a mask.
When Erzen pointed out the absurdity — customers raw-dogging the air all around him for an entire meal were somehow "safe," yet his brief presence required a hazmat-level response — the restaurant workers refused to give him the pizza. Then they called the cops.
Erzen hopes the mural will provoke a question from future generations: If someone truly feared infection, why would they prolong an argument with a supposed biohazard instead of simply handing him his pizza and ending the interaction as quickly as possible?
The mural would be called “Trust the experts!”
Not so fast, proclaims the New York Times. This week, the paper ran an op-ed with a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, headlined “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.” What in the name of Wuhan is that nonsense? Misled by whom? Where was that level of skepticism when Joe Biden declared COVID-19 a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? Where was it when Sweden stayed open and defied predictions of mass death and disaster? Or when ivermectin — a Nobel Prize-winning treatment — was suddenly banned overnight, nearly costing my friend Bill Salier his life?
Yes, we should build statues and monuments to remind future generations of how science and dignity were cast aside for cultish hysteria and blind fear. Let them see a grand sculpture of Salier, measuring out “horse medicine” in a desperate bid to save himself, while a smug pharmacist and the likes of Terry Bradshaw mocked him.
Our monuments to the scamdemic should be as absurd as the reality they reflect — a cause for both mockery and lamentation. They should remind us of a similarly stiff-necked people who once worshipped a golden calf instead of the one true God and thus help us vow to do a much better job teaching future generations to smash their idols instead of allowing them to be brought to us by Pfizer.
The untold story of LA’s underground COVID-era speakeasies
“It’s closed. Let’s get out of here.”
My Israeli friend had picked me up from Woodland Hills and parked in the dimly lit back lot of a seedy hookah lounge in Canoga Park, a Los Angeles neighborhood where one doesn’t want to be caught on the wrong street at the wrong time.
These moments of frustration shattered trust in government and reignited a core American belief: Those in power should not live by a different set of rules than the people they govern.
It was June 2020. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” had overstayed its welcome by three months, and my friend was one of many Angelenos who refused to accept that empty streets, boarded-up businesses, and “parking lot hangouts” were the “new normal.” We were both in need of a hit of normalcy, and he said he knew a place.
“Just wait,” he assured me.
I was skeptical. Restaurants didn’t have the luxury of attempting to accommodate California’s stringent social distancing standards like Target, Walmart, and other big-name “essential” businesses. Opening their doors was illegal — and had been for months.
After we knocked on the side door, an enormous Lebanese bouncer poked his furrowed brow over the threshold.
“Welcome,” he said quickly, ushering us in.
Lockdown speakeasies
Lebanese, Israelis, and Jordanians packed the place front to back as menthol- and mango-scented smoke curled toward the dimly lit ceiling. Who knew a shared frustration over California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns could forge such peaceful relations?
“My gosh,” I thought. “This is a legit speakeasy” — and it wasn’t the only one.
Newsom’s draconian lockdown orders forged a slew of COVID-era speakeasies, welcoming customers through word of mouth, usually via Signal groups created by other Angelenos who craved a return to routine.
This evening of blissful familiarity — albeit with a Middle Eastern twist — was interrupted by a visit from the police. Their visit lasted all of 30 seconds. “Hey, guys. Someone reported you, so we had to show up. You all have a wonderful evening.”
The degree to which law enforcement enforced Newsom’s COVID restrictions varied from county to county, even within the same departments. Thankfully, the police in Canoga Park refused to force small-business owners to choose between putting food on their families’ tables and obeying Newsom’s dictates.
The price of defiance
Other neighborhoods weren’t so lucky. Novo, an Italian restaurant just 10 minutes north in Westlake Village, had to choose between remaining closed under Newsom’s indefinite restrictions or shutting down permanently due to lack of revenue. The owners risked defying the former to avoid the latter. Every day they remained open, Los Angeles County slapped them with a hefty fine — but the community rallied around them. Every night, the restaurant was packed with locals risking fines themselves to keep the business afloat — refusing to watch another small business in their community go under.
Five miles up the road from the Italian restaurant, a local pastor, Rob McCoy, was held in contempt and fined for illegally holding a church service with fewer congregants than people frequenting the Target across the freeway.
Within this context, I got my first gig as a writer — five years ago this very week — interviewing small businesses in the service industry for a local newspaper in the months following their government’s broken promise that they needed to close their doors for only “two weeks to flatten the curve.”
Some, like the owners of a small deli in Dos Vientos, tried to toe the line by serving burritos to customers in their parking lot. Others, like a cigar lounge in Thousand Oaks, became a hub for police officers who refused to enforce Newsom’s restrictions.
Regardless of their posturing during lockdown, one-third of all restaurants in Los Angeles County met the same fate: permanently closing their doors.
A double standard
Business owners — from both sides of the political aisle — already felt cheated by their government. But government officials' partisan double standard for themselves rubbed salt in the wound.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti joined thousands of protesters against the death of George Floyd, marching through the streets of downtown during the height of lockdown — while his administration issued crippling fines for small businesses serving their clientele.
The protests turned violent during the infamous “Summer of Love.” National Guard troops patrolled the streets at night while the rest of Los Angeles County was under strict curfew. A family-owned Indian food store in Thousand Oaks boarded up the business with plywood ahead of an imminent Black Lives Matter protest, which had been the catalyst for mass looting and millions of dollars in damages in neighboring Los Angeles suburbs. A gym in Agoura Hills reopened after BLM-affiliated rioters stormed and looted stores across Santa Monica en masse.
“Does the virus skip over the rioters?” the gym owner asked, tongue in cheek.
Despite the chaos erupting out of California’s major city centers, the most scathing image to emerge during lockdown was Gavin Newsom and California’s Democratic elite dining — maskless — at the French Laundry, one of America’s most acclaimed restaurants.
“Let them eat cake” didn’t work for the French, and it certainly didn’t work for California’s small-business owners, even longtime Democratic loyalists.
Turning point in American politics
“Two weeks to flatten the curve” became arguably the most transformative cultural moment in modern American history. Partisan lines blurred — even in deep-blue Los Angeles County — uniting people around the definitively American sentiment: What gives you the right to tell me what to do?
These moments of frustration weren’t just passing irritations. They fundamentally shattered trust in government and reignited a core American belief: Those in power should not live by a different set of rules than the people they govern.
And now, five years later, Newsom wants the country to forget he was the man behind the lockdowns. Embarking on a desperate campaign to depict himself as a moderate — likely with eyes on the White House — Newsom has never once fessed up to his failed leadership during the pandemic.
But small-business owners haven’t forgotten. The families who lost everything haven’t forgotten. And voters shouldn’t either.
If history tells us anything, it’s that those who trample on freedom once will do it again — especially if they think no one is paying attention.
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Faith and family are keys to resisting tyranny’s grip
The evil doctrines of Marxism have infiltrated many institutions in the United States, leading conservatives to frame cultural and political battles as a contest between individualism and collectivism. On the surface, this makes sense. Marxism, as the ideology of communism, promotes state-enforced equality where individual agency is subordinated to a top-down notion of the collective good.
Many past conservative thinkers recognized this as a false binary, however. They understood that individualism, if left unchecked, can foster conditions that pave the way for tyranny. Lower-order organic identities — such as family, faith, and community — have repeatedly proven to be the only effective forces against the imposition of top-down despotism. The true battle is not between individualism and collectivism but between ordered liberty and disordered tyranny.
Framing our current opposition to Marxist dogma as a conflict between individualism and collectivism is a mistake.
In his classic work “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville explored the rise of individualism during the democratic age following the American and French revolutions. De Tocqueville believed a democratic trajectory was inevitable for France and sought to understand how Americans had managed to curb its worst impulses.
He observed that individualism often led people to focus solely on their own lives and interests, leaving them indifferent to the well-being of their neighbors and their communities. This lack of civic engagement, he argued, made it easier for despots to establish tyrannical rule. A despot thrives on individual apathy and the absence of civic virtue. He wrote:
Despotism, suspicious by its very nature, views the separation of men as the best guarantee of its own permanent rule and usually does all it can to keep them in isolation. No defect of the human heart suits it better than egoism; a tyranny is relaxed enough to forgive his subjects for failing to love him, provided that they do not love one another. He does not ask them to help him to govern the state; it is enough that they have no intention of managing it themselves.
How did Americans preserve a spirit of individualism while avoiding its corrosive effects on civic life? For de Tocqueville, the answer lay in their impulse to build free institutions and engage in voluntary associations. He observed that Americans had an instinct to form committees, community organizations, and charities to address almost every problem.
In the United States, individuals did not need to be ruled by a powerful despot because citizens were expected to actively contribute to the collective well-being of their communities through voluntary efforts. This approach was individualistic in that it arose organically and was not compelled by the state. But it was also collectivist in that individuals felt a profound duty to their families, churches, and communities.
Even when problems required government intervention, governance in America was primarily local. The national government remained small, and local matters were handled by elected officials who were familiar with the specific character and needs of their communities. According to de Tocqueville:
American legislators did not believe that a general representation of the whole nation would be enough to cure a disease so natural to the frame of democratic society and so fatal. They also thought it appropriate to give each area of the territory its own political life so as to multiply without limit the opportunities for citizens to act in concert and to let them realize every day their mutual dependence. This was a wise plan.
Despite their individualistic tendencies, the American system encouraged citizens to recognize their interdependence and address issues affecting their communities at the local level. The collective identity of the polis enabled them to resolve problems more effectively without formal government involvement.
Even when government action was necessary, it was limited in scope, shaped by the community’s identity and political structure. The state did not need to enforce collectivity because communities formed naturally, allowing individualism to thrive without descending into tyranny.
The greatest evidence of this principle can be found in the tactics used by communist regimes to centralize power. Marxists routinely advocate the destruction of the family, church, and even ethnic identity because these lower-order bonds obstruct the centralization of authority. As de Tocqueville observed, the isolated individual is most vulnerable to despotism.
Totalitarian regimes seek to ensure that all relationships are mediated between the individual and the state, leaving each person dependent on the central authority for assistance and conflict resolution. By contrast, people bound by organic ties of faith, family, and community are far more likely to resist the arbitrary dictates of a despot.
When Western governments attempted to create biomedical security states in the wake of COVID-19, it was almost exclusively communities of faith that had the courage to resist. Religious groups possessed an identity and allegiance that extended beyond individual material benefit. This collective identity gave them both the courage and community support needed to stand firm against the dictates of the regime. These communities were able to defend their liberty because they exercised it collectively, united in purpose.
The American tradition embodies individual liberty practiced in service to the collective good. It is a liberty ordered toward a higher purpose, pursued through the establishment of free institutions and voluntary associations. Framing our current opposition to Marxist dogma as a conflict between individualism and collectivism is a mistake.
Instead, we should understand that by practicing individual virtue in service to our organic communities, we can avoid the tyrannical state that Marxism prescribes. This ensures that liberty is not just a personal right but a shared responsibility to uphold the well-being of our families, faith, and communities.
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