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Posted on 09/22/2026 4:26:11 AM PDT by MtnClimber
After the lockdowns, what did the government teach me about government power?
COVID changed the way I hear the word “temporary.”
Before 2020, 'temporary' was temporary. Something happened, you dealt with it, and eventually you went back to living your life.
Then came COVID.
Most of us remember the rest. The empty streets. The closed businesses. The masks. The six-foot circles on the floor. Schools closed, churches restricted, nursing homes became nearly impossible to visit, and governments suddenly had an extraordinary amount to say about what ordinary Americans could and could not do.
I don’t need to make a list of everything that happened. You lived through it.
So did I.
What interests me now isn’t relitigating every lockdown decision or deciding which governor got which decision right. It is what the whole experience taught us about government power.
We learned that “temporary” can become a remarkably elastic word.
We also learned how quickly people will surrender ordinary freedoms when the circumstances are frightening enough.
I understood the fear. I had elderly people in my family, and I wanted to protect them. That’s why I eventually took the COVID shot.
I don’t regret doing it for them.
But I remember watching government move from telling us to be careful to telling us what we could do. At one point, OSHA tried to impose a vaccine-or-test requirement on businesses with 100 or more employees, covering roughly 84 million workers. The Supreme Court stopped it.
That was the moment the issue became especially clear to me.
This wasn’t simply about where I could go anymore. Government was reaching into the relationship between an employee and an employer.
That’s a lot of power.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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No - we all took the polio vaccine to protect the young via herd immunity. We did the same for small pox, rubella, measles, etc. Getting a shot to protect others was not an innovation of COVID. Getting an untested shot manufactured under dubious conditions? That was new.
The difference is it’s no longer a novel virus. So just about everyone has immune systems that are prepared for the next strain that is just a little different from the last. That wasn’t the case in 2020 when 99% of Americans had never been exposed to a similar virus before.
It’s clear at this point that *NOT* locking down would likely have produced not significantly different mortality outcomes, but not locking down would certainly have saved us from the worst of the economic catastrophe. The lockdown was a disaster.
I am reminded that I was vaccinated and still caught Covid from someone who was also vaccinated. So the whole “save grandma” narrative was a joke.
I should add, third chapter, there was this credulous, ignorant, fearful, selfish idiot named Eve who was a threat to the freedom of everyone around her - and this other guy named Adam who was a credulous, ignorant, fearful, selfish idiot who was a threat to the freedom of everyone around him.
The rest of the book reads pretty much the same way.
Give power hungry deep state globalist commie child trafficking islamophiles an inch and they'll take a mile.
So don't. Ever!
Oh - completely agreed - but that’s because it was an untested and unproven technology and it was designed wrong from the beginning. It focused on the spike protein. Typical vaccines, which use dead or weakened viruses, train your immune system on pretty much the whole virus. So when one part of the virus mutates you still have protection from that mutated form because your immune system still recognizes several other parts of the virus that didn’t mutate yet.
So it was a poorly effective vaccine. But the reasons why it was argued to get the vaccine weren’t any different from other vaccines.
Our local Home Depot allowed 54 people in at any given time. On walkie-talkies they monitored the entrance and exit. 20 miles south at Menard’s they allowed up to 2000. And the titty poles were worked daily. Our government hates Americans.
No, I was given the polio vaccine as a child to keep from getting polio. My wife didn’t get it and she got polio. Fortunately she somehow recovered but has been pretty much paying for it her whole life. Others getting that shot didn’t do anything for her.
I remember a restaurant asking us, before seating, for our phone number as it was REQUIRED by the State.
We turned around and left.
A list of “what was the worst” might be good:
* Firing people from jobs because they wouldn’t take an unproven DRUG for an overhyped virus
* The Shutting down of “non-essential businesses” - which were absolutely essential for those that owned them (plus the stupidity of then making everyone go only to the SAME stores)
* Putting infected people into nursing homes while knowing the elderly were the most vulnerable
* Denying MEDICAL CARE if you hadn’t had the shot
* Continuously asserting that “masks work” when they clearly don’t (leading to people being assaulted and treated as less than human if they weren’t wearing one)
* Politicians that benefitted from it all have never been made accountable.
None of this aligns with our Constitution or our concepts of freedom. All done without any authority, done just by saying the magic word “emergency”. I’m surprised Biden didn’t extend his powers by just issuing “emergency powers” in everything D’s don’t like (guns, energy, etc.).
It’s insane to look back on - I think we tend to block it out.
I think we tend to block it out too.
Umm - both?
The only known vector of poliovirus transmission is person-to-person. There is no known reservoir in animals. So if blanket vaccine dosing had been started a year or two earlier, the likelihood your wife would have gotten it would have decreased. Until we wipe it out, it’ll never be zero, but the chance of an unvaccinated child in the US getting it are very low.
Of course this opens up another discussion. The only part of the world there is still a significant presence of poliovirus in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So, if you let untold numbers of Pakistanis and Afghanis in, then your previously established herd immunity is destroyed.
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