‘Pandemic’ Is Not a Password to Ditch Constitutional Rights | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Mitch Kokai.

    Thomas Lifson writes for the American Thinker about government officials' misuse of people's fears about the coronavirus pandemic.

• Forget about the Constitution and the God-given rights it affirms, at least according to St. Anthony Fauci and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Over the weekend, they announced that due to the less lethal but more contagious Delta Variant of COVID-19, those rights mean nothing. Hysterical fear has always been the wannabe tyrant's best friend.
• Appearing on ABC TV's This Week, responding to a set-up question by substitute host Jonathan Karl that positioned Republican governors as villains standing on the way of mask and vaccine mandates, the highest-paid bureaucrat in the federal government averred that "the spread of infection" impacts everyone, "when you are dealing with a public health situation... a person's individual decision.... You very well may infect another person.... So in essence, you are encroaching on their individual rights."
• The Speaker of the House, meanwhile, tweeted out yesterday that the widely distrusted CDC has the power on its own to deprive landlords of their contractually due rent payments from tenants. This, after she failed to get an extension of the moratorium passed by the elected legislative body she leads.

    Neither of these developments should surprise those who have followed Pelosi and Fauci during the course of the pandemic. The "Locker Room" offered Tristan Justice's assessment of the good doctor back in May.

• Few events have accelerated Western institutional decay as the coronavirus pandemic, and it's been Dr. Anthony Fauci's foot on the gas.
• As the pandemic sunsets on the United States, the nation stands far weaker, rocked by a public health emergency driving up debt and division amid a polarizing presidential election while political elites capitalized on the virus for ulterior ends. Legacy media got more irresponsible, big tech got more unfair, and half the population comfortably shut down their neighbors' livelihoods in seeking an impossible life with zero risk, as if the virus had the potential to wipe out the human race.