COVID-19 Lockdown Compared to Actions of a Police State | Eastern NC Now

Publisher's note: The author of this post is Mitch Kokai for the John Locke Foundation.

    Dennis Prager writes for the Daily Signal that government's response to COVID-19 offers a "dress rehearsal" for a police state.

• 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. ...
• ... 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. ...
• ... No. 3: Use of police.
• Police departments throughout America have agreed to enforce these laws and edicts with what can only be described as frightening alacrity. ...
• ... No. 4: Snitches.
• How do the police dispatchers learn of lawbreakers such as families playing softball in a public park, lone joggers without face masks, etc.? From their fellow citizens snitching on them.

    Follow Carolina Journal Online's continuing coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic HERE.