I couldn’t rightly just slap Rupert Darwall’s headline up as mine, right? Mine’s just a bit more specific
Covid, Climate Change, and Government Coercion
Covid-19 has seen democratic governments exercising coercive powers over their citizens on a scale never imagined. Their justification: Your freedom is someone else’s risk of catching a potentially fatal disease. Having deployed the instruments of social control, politicians and government bureaucrats won’t quietly put them away when the crisis passes – not when other opportunities exist to wield their newfound powers.
Consider, for example, a similar justification for state coercion on environmental protection: Your carbon footprint is my climate change.
The link between Covid control measures and climate change has already been made by the head of Britain’s Committee on Climate Change, a body established in 2008 to hold the government accountable for meeting net-zero emissions targets. (Joe Biden has pledged a similar “enforcement mechanism†by the end of his first term.) “The government has stepped in in a quite extraordinary way to our way of life,†committee chief executive Chris Stark says.
In a powerful philippic against government-by-Covid-decree, Lord Sumption, a former justice on the British Supreme Court, observed that fear has always been the most potent instrument of the authoritarian state. “Fear was deliberately stoked up by the government: the language of impending doom; the daily press conferences; the alarmist projections of mathematical modelers; the manipulative use of selected statistics.â€
This is the Doomsday Cult of Climastrology: always attempting to scare people into compliance. Hilariously, none of the disciples ever seem to realize that this stuff will apply to their own lives. That’s what indoctrination does. They’ll be real surprised when it hits their own lives. They’ll be real surprised when they realize their lives will be controlled just like during lockdown.
I’ll let you read all the middle stuff, up to the ending
And here we see the common theme between Covid and climate change. Thanks to the virus, governments now know that they can impose draconian restrictions on their citizens. “The government has discovered the power of public fear to let it get its way,†Sumption argues. Net-zero will shrink people’s choices and curtail the lives they wish to lead. Consider Covid a warning of what might yet come.
This is, quite frankly, what I’ve been saying since the early 2000’s, when I realized I had been duped and that this was not about science but control. And they know they can get away with it. My goodness, look at Michigan. Despite the massive crackdown on the citizens by their Democratic Party governor, plus doing nothing about the riots, the state is leaning Democrat right now for the returns. Not just Biden over Trump, but Peters over James in the Senate Race. Of course, a lot of that is being driven by 6 out of 14 districts, the big urban area ones. 13 (Rashida Tlaib’s district, full of transplants who like authoritarian government) and 14 are up around 77% to 19%. We should start by implementing hardcore climate restrictions in places like that. These people seem to love authoritarianism.
