Editor’s Note: What’s happening in America today is a clear and present danger to the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America. Wake Up or lose your freedoms forever.
You’re being scammed by enemies of America who occupy powerful positions in government and the media. November 2020 is the way we, the people, can fight back. Know your enemy. Ditch the masks. Rise.
Source: YouTube
By Tristan Justice
It was just more than a week ago that crowds gathered at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks to enjoy the Memorial Day weekend. With the celebrations however, came sharp criticism over the lack of social distancing featuring fearmongering elites shaming those relishing the springtime sunshine.
Former Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill was among those quick to demonize the apparent selfish behavior as “embarrassing” for her home state.
“Hope none of them have parents fighting cancer, grandparents with diabetes, aunts and uncles with serious heart conditions. Because clearly they could care less,” McCaskill wrote on Twitter.
When it comes to the massive protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody however, McCaskill is cheering them on, retweeting somber images of the demonstrations and calling Missouri’s decision to deploy the National Guard to Washington D.C. after days of rioting as “disgusting.”
The densely crowded protests would soon draw the attendance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, both over the age of 65 putting them at higher risk of serious complications from the Chinese virus.
The sudden disregard for social distancing from avid lockdowners expose the extreme measures that tanked the nation’s economy and destroyed the nation’s psyche to be nothing more than deeply unserious methods to combat a virus that poses nearly no danger to low-risk groups.
More than 40 million Americans have now filed for unemployment. An estimated 100,000 small businesses have already permanently shut down. About 1 in 3 Americans are experiencing signs of clinical anxiety and depression. Thousands of others have put of critical health procedures so hospitals could build adequate capacity for an overwhelming surge in cases that never came in most of the country.
Yet while thousands gather in protest against police brutality across the country, no one seems to care about the ongoing public health pandemic after chastising those who dared break social distancing rules to reopen their states and reclaim their livelihoods.
In today’s America, churches can’t host socially distanced sermons including more than ten people but a violent mob can burn it down in the name of social justice. States had already made their priorities clear providing bars and casinos with greater freedom than houses of worship it deems nonessential, illustrating just how far we’ve strayed from faith even as millions of Americans desperately need it.
Floyd’s funeral is slated to take place in Houston on June 9 and is expected to draw an attendance of thousands, including prominent figures such as former Vice President Joe Biden. Many in the rest of the country however, were barred from properly saying their goodbyes to lost loved ones because the government declared it too dangerous, even this week and in the coming days.
But the media doesn’t care. Before downplaying the violence from days of lawless anarchy terrorizing a dystopian nation because the message fit their own progressive agenda, legacy media painted the anti-lockdown protestors as heartless grandma killing rubes. These Americans, the media said, were reckless, selfish, dangerous, suicidal, racist because they could spread the virus to black people, and didn’t deserve medical attention. One would be hard pressed to find that kind of reporting on even larger protests today, because it doesn’t exist.
If nothing else is clear in the aftermath of these time-defining protests, it’s past time to end the lockdowns. Shut down the nursing homes, insulate the at-risk population and move on.
Source: The Federalist
By Ryan McMaken
Six weeks ago, when thousands around the nation took to state capitols to protest the human rights abuses inflicted by coerced “stay-at-home orders,” lockdown supporters reacted with sanctimonious outrage.
Declaring the protestors to be “covidiots” who failed to appreciate the virtue and necessity of police-enforced lockdowns, news outlets and lockdown advocates on social media declared the protests would cause outbreaks of disease, and nurses declared the protests were “a slap in the face” to those trying to treat the disease. One political cartoon featured an image of an emergency room nurse saying “see you soon” to anti-lockdown protestors.
Now, with far larger numbers of protestors amassing in larger groups, we hear none of the lofty moralism coming from the media or lockdown enthusiasts in social media. Yes, there are still some token attempts to express worry over how the riots and protests of recent days might spread the disease. But the tone is quite different. Concerned over COVID-19 are now phrased in the formula of ” if you protest, take these measures to minimize risk. ” It’s all very polite and deferential to the protestors.
Politicians like Kamala Harris have even joined the protestors in the streets, thus doing what she demanded other avoid just a few weeks earlier. Where are the nurses denouncing these protests as a “slap in the face”? They’re nowhere to be seen.
Of course, those who support the current protests, but oppose last month’s protests, claim there is no equivalence. Many would likely say “we’re now protesting against people being killed in the streets!” followed by “those other protestors just wanted haircuts!”
The reality, of course, was far different. Most of those who oppose the COVID lockdowns are well aware that the lockdowns kill. They lead to severe child abuse, to more suicide, and to more drug overdoses. They lead to denial of medical care because lockdown edicts have ridiculously labeled many necessary medical procedures to be “elective.” Lockdowns have rendered tens of millions of Americans unemployed while robbing people of their social support from family and community groups. Lockdowns increased police abuse and harassment of innocent people who were guilty of no crime but leaving their homes or trying to earn a living.
Lockdown advocates, however, declared all of this to be “worth it” and demanded that their ideological opponents just shut up and “#stayhome.”
Lockdowns for Thee, But Not For Me
But now the current spate of protests and riots have made it clear that lockdowns and social distancing are all very optional so long as the protestors are favored by a leftwing narrative.
While the pro-lockdown/anti-lockdown conflict can’t be defined by any neat left-right divide, it is nonetheless largely true that the most enthusiastic advocates of COVID lockdowns are found on the left side of the spectrum.
And that’s why things have now gotten so interesting. It was easy for the pro-lockdown left to oppose protests when those protest were seen as a rightwing phenomenon. But now that the protests are favored by the left, then it’s all perfectly fine outside of a handful of politely expressed “concerns” that protests might spread disease.
The left’s about-face on the sacredness of social distancing will have significant effects on the future enforcement of stay-at-home orders and social distancing laws.
After all, on what grounds will governors, mayors, and law enforcement officers justify continued attacks on religious groups who seek to assemble in the usual fashion? If one group of people are allowed to gather by the hundreds to express one set of beliefs, why are other groups not allowed the same?
Politicians will no doubt soon invent new rationales for this inconsistency. Indeed, we already have one case. New York mayor Bill DeBlasio has come right out and said people who protest racism are allowed to assemble. DeBlasio likes them. But how about religious gatherings? DeBlasio doesn’t like those, so they’re still prohibited.
The Moral Authority of the Lockdown Advocates Is Gone
The current riots and protests have accelerated this sort of disregard for coerced social distancing, although things were already headed in this direction anyway.
The lockdowns initially were imposed with so little resistance because the legacy media and government bureaucrats managed to convince a sizable portion of the public that virtually everyone was in grave danger of death of serious disability from COVID-19. Many people believed these experts.
By May, however, it had become clear the doomsday scenarios predicted by the official technocrats greatly overstated the reality. Certainly, there were many vulnerable groups, and many died of complications from disease, just as many died during the pandemics of 1958 and 1969. But there’s a difference between a spike in total deaths, and a civilization-stopping plague. The experts promised the latter. We got the former. And we would have gotten the former even without lockdowns. Those jurisdictions that imposed no general lockdowns — such as Sweden — never experienced the sort of apocalyptic death predicted by lockdown advocates. Yes, they had excess deaths, but Sweden’s hospitals never even went into “emergency mode.” In the US, those states that imposed limited lockdowns for only a short period never experienced overloaded hospitals and overflowing morgues and was claimed would happen.
Could this yet happen in the future? It’s certainly possible, but how will we know? The lockdown advocates have already been so wrong about masks, about fatality rates, about the models, and about so much more, that we have no way of knowing if we should believe them the next time they show up and swear “this time, the situation is truly dire!”
But we’re not out of the lockdown woods yet. This fall, politicians and other lockdown advocates are likely to start up again with demands that new laws be passed requiring people to stay home, shut down their businesses, and otherwise put life on hold in the name of stopping COVID-19.
But it’s unlikely the public will fall for the same routine twice in a row. At least not to the same extent. The reaction of many will likely be “we’ve heard this song and dance before. Besides, social distancing didn’t matter to these experts very much back during the riots. Why should we believe them now?”
It’s a good question.
Source: Ron Paul Institute & MISES
By Johnny Liberty, Author of the Global Sovereign’s Handbook
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
So sorry, but my “liberal/progressive” friends who blindly hate Trump have lost their minds (and their souls in the process).
My friends are so deceived by digesting and parroting years of negative, liberal/leftist media (e.g, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc) that they are no longer able to think outside the box of their own mental conditioning.
The critical thinking skills of many of my liberty/progressive friends are impaired. They do not think for themselves. They do not read news sources from a conservative perspective. They do not read Trump’s tweets directly. Thus they are blind to what’s actually going on.
My friends have willingly given up their sovereignty and now complain daily about everything beyond their control. They believe they are victims instead of empowered individuals with the power to make a difference.
My friends place their daily angst on Trump and use him as a convenient scapegoat for all that’s wrong in our world (and there are many more powerful players than Trump). They forget who is actually responsible for what’s wrong in our world. We the People are responsible.
My friends can believe it or not, but Trump is a freedom fighter, the first sovereign President in your lifetime who has pledged his life and honor to defend this country against its many enemies, both foreign and domestic. Other Administrations have come and gone, but they’ve all been cohorts amongst those globalists bent on destroying this country.
Now, many of my “liberal/progressive” friends are now domestic enemies blindly and foolishly allied with these forces towards destroying this country ~ the last free country on this earth.
My friends, take a good look at where you stand!
The violence ravaging the streets of America is no longer a protest about race. This is a declaration of war by forces bent on destroying the USA, a country which has blessed you with the right to freedom and liberty your entire life.
Take notice of who is allying with these forces.
These riots are an organized attack against the people of the USA and my “liberal/progressive” friends are on the wrong side of this battle contributing en masse to America’s destruction.
Would you prefer living in Nazi Germany or Communist China? Do you wish for your children to live in The Matrix wired to a machine like a robot without a soul?Take a good look at where you stand.
For without freedom and sovereignty in the USA there will be hell to pay for many generations beyond your life. Take a hard look at where you stand.
I stand for freedom and liberty.
I stand for sovereignty for all the people.
I stand for sovereignty for the USA and every nation of the world.
Where do you stand?
~ Johnny Liberty, Author of the Global Sovereign’s Handbook (who dedicated thirty years of his life fighting for your freedom and sovereignty)
Source: Liberty International
By Spiro Skouras
This report is a follow-up to one where I cover how Michael Ryan of the WHO stated in a press briefing how the WHO (which is of course in the pocket of Bill Gates) now believes it is time to start removing people from their homes.
I know many people, especially those of you who are in the US, think that could never happen here … well, those are probably the same people who thought just a couple months ago that it would be impossible to lockdown the entire country because people would never put up with it and because we have rights… right? This is being said even as we are ON lockdown.
For those of you who can’t wait for the government to lift the lockdowns, as many states are preparing to do, remember that we were told things will not go back to normal until there is a vaccine and the entire planet has largely received it… we have also been told about how we must embrace the new normal.
Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: This is the third and final interview between Brian Rose and David Icke. After the first and second interviews which he exposed the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity for the Global Power Structure, or cult as he calls it, to impose their decades long New World Order (NWO) agenda to destroy the sovereignty of nations.
Their ultimate goal is to undermine freedom, destroy independent small businesses, reduce the human race to a starving population fighting each other for survival and impose a an absolute totalitarian control system which includes mandatory vaccines laced with microchips/nanobots. All this is run robotically with the rollout of 5G networks.
Immediately after the second interview, David Icke was banned from Facebook and YouTube for violating “community” standards (and daring to air a controversial perspective the Global Power Structure doesn’t want you to hear about).
You can believe Icke’s perspective or not, but it’s your sovereign right (i.e., human right) to be able to hear his perspective and decide for yourself. For anyone knowledgable in his field of research, you would know Icke is speaking truth if the technocrats have to go to the extreme measures of squashing/censoring the message to stop his message from getting out to the uninformed. Friends of Liberty, do listen and decide for yourself, but under no circumstances bury your head in the sand. This is the turning point of human civilization and our individual awareness and collective decisions will determine the fate of all humanity.
By David Rose & David Icke
The Broadcast They Don’t Want You To See… The Ideas They Don’t Want You To Hear…
On May 3, 2020 at 5pm UK time, David Icke is LIVE on the DIGITAL FREEDOM PLATFORM for the largest LIVESTREAM of a conversation in human history. This single broadcast could change the course of humanity.
If we get the information now, we can act on it, we can change course.
If We Are Silenced, It Could Be The End of Humanity As We Know It.
WE NEED YOU!
Based on the popularity of our previous Icke I and II interviews, we expect to have a MILLION PEOPLE ACCESSING THIS LIVE.
As a member of the London Real Army you can make a difference by sharing this link and sharing this video.
Be Brave. Stand Up. Fight For Your Freedom.
What Will You Tell Your Grandchildren You Did During The Removal Of Civil Rights During The Great Pandemic?
Did You Stay At Home And Did What You Were Told? Or Did You Fight For Your Freedom Of Speech?
Join Us And Let’s Change The World.
WE WILL NOT BE CENSORED.
WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED.
WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED.
JOIN THE RESISTANCE.
JOIN LONDON REAL.
Source: London Real
Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: After reading this expose’ I realized why the race for 5G dominance is also a race for which political system will prevail – capitalism or communism. China has taken the lead in 5G and already dominates the marketplace. Unless the USA steps up along with its telecommunications partners and has the ability to compete in a free market with China, it will lose the battle for freedom as well. This does not imply that I wholeheartedly support 5G especially with regards to the untested health and safety issues. Already we know that millimeter radiation damages human health, but the industry refuses to study or mitigate these. It’s a grand experiment which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths which were falsely attributed to COVID-19.
By Bonnie Evans
As calls to decouple U.S. industries from dependency on manufacturing in China are growing, President Donald Trump has helped prepare the ground for a shift from China by taking a more skeptical approach to relations with the regime in Beijing than his predecessors.
While globalists are pushing back against the efforts to decouple, the key telecommunications technology of 5G shows the limitations of their approach, according to one expert.
The argument for protecting the deeply intertwined U.S.–China economic relationship is widely supported in some circles.
Last December, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, who served the George W. Bush administration as U.S. trade representative, asked a gathering of the U.S.–China Business Council, “Are you ready for this?”
“The 20th century painted a shocking picture of industrial age destruction; do not assume that the cyber era of the 21st century is immune to crack-ups or catastrophes of equal or even greater scale,” Zoellick said.
“You need to decide whether you think the United States can still cooperate with China to mutual benefit while managing differences, and if so, how.”
The Financial Times said that Zoellick’s words “captured the fears—particularly within parts of Washington’s economic and foreign policy establishment—that U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war against Beijing has paved the way for an irreversible ‘decoupling’ of the world’s two largest economies.”
Zoellick was responsible for completing the negotiations that brought China into the World Trade Organization.
Zoellick’s views are echoed by other trade and China specialists.
Harry G. Broadman, an economist who has worked in key U.S. government, international organization, private sector, and academic roles during his 30-plus-year career, wrote in Forbes in September 2019 that decoupling from China potentially presents “worldwide negative spillover impacts.”
Of those consequences, Broadman suggests, “technological bifurcation, which could fundamentally jeopardize harnessing global benefits from advances in science and technology,” is one of the riskiest aspects of taking the United States out of China.
In plain English, Broadman’s argument is that without globalization, which is largely underpinned by the U.S.–China relationship, technologies go their own way, developing standards and specifications for the regions in which they emerge, rather than under a globalized standard common throughout the world.
“He’s mistaken,” Robert Spalding said, referring to Broadman’s views on technological bifurcation. Spalding is a retired Air Force brigadier general and architect of the U.S. National Security Strategy, which named China as an adversary. He is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, and author of the recent book “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept.”
The real danger, Spalding told The Epoch Times in an extensive interview, is in the ongoing struggle for dominance in fifth-generation—5G—mobile technology and standards that are already beginning to change how data is collected and used around the world.
“The U.S. was the first to develop the smartphone in 4G,” Spalding said. As a result, “we dominate the information market.”
But as the world moves into 5G, the risks are greater if the “concept of open data” and “open data markets” of those 4G networks are maintained. In Europe, the open data concept has already “created concern for privacy protection.”
In China, however, open data markets create a global opportunity.
“In the hands of China,” Spalding said, open data “lets the state take hold of power that Google and Amazon have.”
The “state” in China is led and run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“The ability of these companies to pinpoint your location and the things you’re doing and buying is incredibly powerful and counter to privacy concerns and counter to the principles of our liberal democracies,” Spalding said.
Spalding pointed out that “as Android and Apple become less of dominant players in 5G, now Tencent and Alibaba and DJI and Hikvision can begin to dominate that data space. So we move from a world centered on the U.S. to one centralized on Baidu and Tencent.”
All five companies are Chinese technology companies with ties to the CCP. Alibaba and Tencent generally rank in the top 10 internet companies in the world by market capitalization.
“That’s why he’s mistaken [about the problem of technological bifurcation]. It’s positive if we move to a data system that is focused on privacy and security and sovereignty and deploying secure 5G,” Spalding said.
Referring to Broadman, Spalding said that “what he’s advocating is that China dominate the technological space.”
Already, Spalding said, 3GPP, the umbrella body under which the key telecommunications standards organizations in the world operate and coordinate, is heavily dominated by China.
Since American network equipment manufacturers “are not expected to survive,” that leaves only four companies in the world that will make the networking equipment for the 5G future.
Those companies are Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and China’s Huawei—all subject to the standards that are being so heavily influenced by Chinese technical specifications.
Functionally, therefore, Spalding points out that even though Ericsson and Nokia are Swedish and Finnish respectively, and Samsung is South Korean, they end up building the same system as Huawei.
“Essentially,” Spalding said, “everybody is building a Chinese network based on open data, not on a secure network. That’s why he’s incorrect. His theory promotes China,” Spalding said.
This means, Spalding said, that China’s “acquisition of intelligence” and “ability to influence societies” is greatly enhanced both in China and abroad, including in the United States.
Statistics from the Institute of Electronics and Electronic Engineers support Spalding’s claim.
In a March 17 post titled “Strategy Analytics: Huawei 1st among top 5 contributors to 3GPP 5G specs,” Alan Weissberger reports that “even though there are more than 600 member companies participating in 3GPP, their 5G specification process is actually led by only a few leading telecom companies. … New research from Strategy Analytics … finds that 13 companies contributed more than 78% 5G related papers and led 77% of the 5G related Work Items and Study Items.”
Of those 13, the top five are, in order, Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, and China Mobile.
“By allowing China to be in the global trading system, you’re actually undermining the foundational premises” of that system, Spalding said. That global trading system has “a market-based approach to both capital allocation and trade.”
“China is not a market-based economy,” Spalding said. China, Spalding has said earlier, is not “a centrally planned economy, but it is centrally resourced.”
“When the state is providing resources and capital to a company, that’s not a market-based solution,” he said.
“Prices are set by China, not by the market.
“If you really want to have a free trading system … then China can’t be a part of it because they don’t believe in it.”
Source: The Epoch Times
By Andrew Joseph
In a stunning turn of events, Surgeon General Jerome Adams explained in an interview on live XM radio, that the Coronavirus Task Force has, effectively, dumped the Bill Gates/CDC/WHO predictive contagion model, and is now working with the real data.
He explained on the Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow, that given the new data, businesses will begin to re-open as early as May, others in June.
This runs contrary to the out-and-out fear-mongering of Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates who have made a media tour, threatening the public that businesses may not re-open for six months to a year, or until and unless governments purchase their conveniently patented, big-pharma vaccination.
According to Dr. Adams:
“What the American people need to know now is we actually have data, and so we’re tracking that data,”
Before this about-face, which appears to have come as an order from the Trump administration in consultation with the findings of Dr. Adams, the task force was working with’predictive models’, which had been created by the Bill Gates dominated WHO and CDC. Dr. Fausti’s control over the CDC has been criticized in the past for its for-profit motive in handling a range of illnesses from HIV to H1NI.
In those inflated, ‘fear-based’ models, the deaths of millions worldwide, and hundreds of thousands in America, were touted. These were used as the basis for what many experts have termed a ‘grossly disproportionate response‘.
Previously, the task force was working with predictive models, frequently criticized because of their tendency to exaggerate the possible effect of the virus on the United States. Models predicting the deaths of millions and hundreds of thousands in America appear to be overblown, as the real-time data is showing the death count much lower.
Adams said that the models usually took data from different cultures and places around the globe, but they were able to track more accurately what could happen in the United States based on real data gathered in places such as California and New York.
“We’re following this data every single day, and we’re giving that data to communities so that they can make informed and intelligent decisions about when and where to reopen,” he said.
A significant indicator for communities being allowed to reopen, Adams said, was actual testing data, not a predictive model.
“I feel confident that some places will start to reopen in May and June. Other places won’t; it will be piece by piece, bit by bit, but will be data-driven,” he said.
Adams praised South Korea and Singapore, which closed their borders early, just like the United States did with travelers from China. But he said there are lessons learned across the board.
Source: Fort Russ News
Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Libertarians, as you can see from the Foundation for Economic Education’s annual freedom ranking of the fifty U.S. states, California ranks near the bottom with Hawaii and New York. Perhaps this correlates with the draconian lockdown orders coming from each of these states during the COVID-19 crisis.
By Jim Breslo
President Donald Trump is rightly talking about when we can reopen the country for business, noting that we cannot allow the cure to become worse than the disease. However, Trump does not have the keys to the shop. It is the country’s governors and mayors. Thus far they have not been expressing the same sentiment. If they do not loosen their shutdown orders within a reasonable time, we may have to turn to the courts. It turns out that many, if not all, of these orders would likely be struck down as unconstitutional.
The federal government thus far has only issued “guidelines,” not enforceable orders. Many states and cities, however, have issued enforceable orders whereby violation subjects one to fines or imprisonment.
Mark Meuser is a constitutional law attorney and former Republican nominee for California secretary of state. He reported this week on my Hidden Truth Show podcastthat the California Constitution does not permit state officials to order every resident, regardless of their individual health condition, to “self-quarantine” or “shelter in place.”
Article I of the California Constitution reads: “All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.” Most state constitutions contain similar language.
Neither the governor nor the mayors have the authority to suspend the state constitution, regardless of the emergency. According to Meuser, state officials may declare a state of emergency, and may quarantine individuals known to have the virus or known to have been in contact with those who had the virus pursuant to the state’s health and safety laws. But a sweeping ban prohibiting people from leaving their homes, according to Meuser, is a clear overreach. It arguably violates numerous parts of Article I, such as Californians’ “inalienable right” to be “free and independent,” enjoy “life” and “liberty,” to “acquire, possess, and protect property,” and pursue “happiness.”
California’s Appellate Court ruled on a case brought soon after the time of the Spanish Flu, stating, “A mere suspicion [that someone is infected], unsupported by facts giving rise to reasonable or probable cause, will not justify depriving a person of his liberty under an order of quarantine.” [Ex parte Arata (App. 2 Dist. 1921) 52 Cal.App. 380, 198 P. 814.]
Granted, the case involved imposing a quarantine on a single individual, not on the entire populace. But, think of it this way: If state or local officials required that just you stay home, even though you do not have the flu and have not been in contact with someone known to have the flu, your reaction would likely be, “You can’t do that!” Well, the directive is no more constitutional if it applies to everyone like you. It may seem more “fair,” and not violate the equal protection clause, but it would still equally violate individual liberty. A government violation of individual constitutional rights does not become less violative simply by applying it to more people.
Meuser argues in the interview that the orders are also a clear violation of the constitutional right to “protect property” since Californians are being prevented from tending to their property unless it happens to be deemed “essential.” If a Californian cannot visit, let alone operate, one’s business, it cannot be protected.
Mayor Eric Garcetti’s order requires “all residents of the City of Los Angeles to stay inside their residences.” The order expressly prohibits, “Travel to or from a vacation home outside the City.” In other words, Angelenos are prohibited from going to their own garage, getting in their own car and driving it to their own vacation home. Such conduct, according to the order, is punishable by “fine or imprisonment.”
The orders may also violate the United States Constitution. The First Amendment prohibits both state and federal government from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion or “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” Clearly, the orders prevent people from engaging in religious gatherings or joining in any group activity. Since the bans are not narrowly tailored to those with the virus or known to have been subjected to it, they likely violate the First Amendment. Further, the orders violate at least the intent of the Fifth Amendment, which provides, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Shutting down businesses for the public good arguably requires the state to provide compensation to those businesses.
It is certainly up for debate whether shutdown orders in California, New York and other states is the smart thing to do. It seems that about half of people support them, and half do not. They are wreaking economic havoc on businesses and employees, while at the same time no doubt slowing the spread of the virus. Only with time will we be able to know whether the trade-off was worth it. We make similar trade-offs between freedom and health all the time. The most obvious example being the choice to allow people to drive automobiles despite the fact that they cause about 40,000 deaths every year in the U.S. Importantly, the coronavirus has killed far less than that worldwide, yet we are restricting people to their homes, a far more restrictive measure than prohibiting people from driving.
But whether the trade-off is smart or not, it is irrelevant to the question of whether it is constitutional. The orders clearly are not. State and federal constitutions provide a vital backstop to protect the people against government overreach, which often comes at times of crisis. We saw this happen after 9/11. It is human nature to panic and to overreact out of fear. The Constitution, which we all swear an oath to by nature of being citizens, stands on guard to protect us against such overreach in times like this. This is not the time to abandon it.
Source: WND
Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: For almost thirty years we fought to preserve your freedoms in America from the encroachment of national, state and local governments only to have one, overstated “pandemic” destroy all of them in one large swath of overreaching power. Americans are still asleep at the wheel and have lost the enthusiasm for preserving their freedoms. The U.S. Constitution and your Bill of Rights has been quarantined.
By Robert Barnes
Do we really think “it can’t happen here” in America? Could we quarantine the constitution? Are we doing it already?
Panics from pandemics unleash unchecked governmental power. The very premise of popular films like V for Vendetta reveal this: a group uses a virus to seize power and create a totalitarian society. Anyone could witness this from far-off lands, watching the news about China locking people up in their own homes and then removing them screaming from those homes whenever the state wanted. World War I and the Great Depression birthed virulent forms of governments with leaders like Hitler, Mao, Mussolini and Stalin.
Governments across America already used the pandemic, and the media-stoked panic around the pandemic particularly, to limit, restrict or remove First Amendment freedoms of speech and free association, with officials complaining about the potential restraints the freedom of religion imposed upon them. Others denied or declared the right to deny Second Amendment rights of gun purchase for personal safety (at a time governments are issuing no-arrest and no-detention orders for a wide range of crimes in their community while publicly freeing inmates from jails and prisons). They want to coordinate with tech companies to surveil and spy on your everyday movements and activities, in violation of the Fourth Amendment and potentially waive, unilaterally, your medical right to privacy in multiple contexts. Stay-at-home orders deprive you of your profession, occupation, business and property, without any due process of law at all beyond an executive fiat in violation of the Fifth Amendment right to due process. Governments request the authority to involuntarily imprison any American on mere fear of infection without any probable cause of crime or clear and present danger of harm by that person’s volitional conduct, deny access to personal counsel in an unsupervised, un-surveilled manner in violation of the Sixth Amendment, and act as judge, jury and executioner in violation of the Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury, as jury trials themselves get suspended around the country in the nation’s quieted courts and fear-muted public.
The real pandemic threat is here. It’s the panic that will quarantine our Constitution.
First Amendment Quarantined?
Already, governments in America suspended the First Amendment freedom of millions of citizens with shutdown, stay-at-home, curfew orders that prohibit obtaining a petition for a public protest, or even being physically present for a public protest. Indeed, even meetings in “more than ten” are prohibited by various governing jurisdictions within the United States. Surprising places like Missouri did so. Towns like Hartford did so. Maryland soon followed suit. The effect of the stay-at-home orders of New York, California, Nevada, Illinois and Pennsylvania effectively achieve the same outcome. Other governing officials recognized the dubious lawlessness of these orders, but remain outliers. Remember the Hong Kong protests? Gone. Remember the Yellow Vest protests? Soon to be gone. Seen any protests on American streets today? A pandemic is here. Protests gone. Constitution quarantined.
Second Amendment Quarantined?
But that is not all. Under the guise of “unnecessary businesses,” “emergency powers,” or simply by furloughing or reducing staff in the background checks department, governments show the willingness to limit Second Amendment rights as well as First Amendment protections. Mayors declare the right to ban gun sales, governments declare no background-check personnel to process a background check, delaying gun sales indefinitely, and other governments simply shut down all gun sales businesses entirely. Most worrisome, this happens while governments release inmates into the streets, and discuss releasing even more, and, at the same time, issue no-arrest and no-detention orders from Philadelphia to Fort Worth for a wide range of criminals. Want to defend yourself, give yourself a deep sense of personal protection that comes with gun ownership for many, as the Second Amendment safeguards? Well, no luck, according to too many of our governing overlords. A pandemic is here. Self-protection sacrificed. Constitution quarantined.
Fourth Amendment Quarantined?
Few protections are more American than the right to privacy against coerced, compelled, secretive, subversive invasion. The government operates like a virus in a case of a pandemic panic, infecting our minds and bodies, monitoring speech, association and movement, with tools of surveillance unthought-of to the founders. Coordinating with private companies (unrestrained by the Fourth Amendment; why do you think NSA uses them to gather all your emails, conversations, texts, and internet searches, at the first stage?), governments used the panic about the pandemic, a panic the government itself stoked with aid of a compliant, complicit press, to waive your medical privacy and invade your personal privacy, looking for tools to monitor your every movement, associations, activities, and behavior. The watching eye in the sky can now be the Alexa in your home, the camera on your computer, and the phone in your hand. A pandemic is here. Privacy ended. Constitution quarantined.
Fifth Amendment Quarantined?
The protection for our right to make a living arises from the Fifth Amendment right to property without deprivation by due process of law, and the obligation for the government to compensate any such takings. Yet, governments across America did just that to millions of businesses, workers, and property owners, stripping them of their ability to make a living, or even to engage in a free market of commerce, by shutdown orders, curfews, and stay-at-home orders. The political and professional class ensconced in its work-from-home environs fails to appreciate the hardship this imposes on working people. No compensation. No substitution. No wages. No revenues. No opportunity. Labor lost that can never be recovered, ever, while it leaves our economy teetering on the edge of a worst-ever depression. The foundation of government is to protect the pursuit of happiness. Now all we get to pursue is Netflix-and-chill and hope miracles happen to pay next week’s bills, and pray the market doesn’t crash like in 1929. A pandemic is here. Opportunity & property gone. Constitution quarantined.
Conclusion
Our founders were intimately familiar with pandemics, viruses and plagues, yet they did not allow any to suspend our Constitutional liberties. Not one word in the Constitution about plagues or pandemics to exempt the government from any of our Bill of Rights. Why do our current courts allow it? Because the public is asleep at the wheel. Think the pandemic threatens to kills us all? A review of the data shows the pandemic is more panic than plague.
Time to wake up. Maybe it is time in the motto of V for Vendetta, to “Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot.” As that film’s lead character well said: “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.” Only when an awake public asserts their human liberties to protest the loss of their liberties will, then, governments quit using public health crises to seize power that does not belong to them. The answer to 1984 is still 1776.
Reprinted with permission from RT.
The author is an American constitutional lawyer representing high-profile clients in civil and criminal trials, and known for his prescient political prognostications in American and international elections.
Source: Ron Paul Institute
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