The neverending cries of crisis

Rahm Emmanuel was credited as saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” He was probably paraphrasing Machiavelli when he said it regarding the 2008 Financial Crisis, but he’s the one who used those words in that particular order.

And, to be fair, he’s far from the origin of the idea. Again, Machiavelli.

Still, in the history of the United States, various crises have been used as a pretext for any number of actions by presidents and/or Congresses that ultimately resulted in an upending of the constitutional order.

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Abraham Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus, even going against a Supreme Court ruling saying he couldn’t, all so he could arrest people believed to be Confederate sympathizers. He censored the press. He set the stage for presidents doing things and Congress having to “catch up” and provide authorization after the fact, a dangerous precedent.

Woodrow Wilson used World War I as a pretext to nationalize the railroads, introduce federal price controls, and push through the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which allowed him to arrest people who disagreed with him.

Then we have FDR and his use of food prices during the Great Depression to force farmers to grow fewer crops, even for their own use, in order to raise food prices, even as people were starving. In the process, and thanks to his threats of court packing, the Interstate Commerce Clause began the long process of being mangled so it could be used to justify almost anything. We also have his wartime censorship efforts, his unilateral restructuring and expansion of the federal bureaucracy, and so on.

Then we have the Patriot Act following 9/11 and the 2008 bank bailouts.

Through it all, no one has let a good crisis go to waste, and this was not intended to be an exhaustive list.

I was thinking about how we see a new crisis pop up as news broke this week about Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary. Sen. Rand Paul released it, and it makes it clear that Fauci is a hellacious liar, including knowing the virus was leaked from a lab, him telling people to shut things down then claiming he didn’t, and so on.

COVID-19 was a terrifying case study. Not because the virus was so deadly, necessarily—it was deadly enough, and I lost some friends because of it—but because of the response to it.

Yes, I stayed inside my home. Most of my family has a weight issue, and my son has asthma. It seems rational to me to err on the side of caution. What pissed me off, though, wasn’t that experts said to stay home. It was when we were told we had to. It was when things were dictated to us in the name of “public health.”

When Arnold Swarzenegger, a former Republican governor, said, “Fuck your freedom,” he was speaking for a lot of other people. Fear drove people to accept the lockdowns as not just necessary, but essential. More than that, though, they were willing to use the force of government to punish people who didn’t play along.

I remember the talk of “vaccine passports” and how the supposedly voluntary vaccinations weren’t that voluntary if you wanted to actually exist in society. People lost their jobs because they weren’t comfortable with the vaccine. They were kicked out of the military. Their lives were upended because they made a choice in the midst of the crisis, and that couldn’t be permitted.

I’d like to say that everything we’ve learned since then means it wouldn’t happen again. We found out that what had been labeled as “conspiracy theories” were, in fact, anything but. The running joke was that the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a realist was about six weeks.

And I wish it weren’t true.

The lab leak is a prime example. Even as Fauci wrote in his diary that the virus likely came from the lab in Wuhan, he was telling the public that it was nonsense and focusing on his own fame, rather than setting the record straight.

The unfortunate truth is that when people get scared, they’re willing to accept anything so long as the voice demanding it sounds like they’re going to make everything better. Government overreach is nothing new, but it makes bolder gains during a crisis.

And, when authoritarians realize that, all they need to do is create more crises to react to.

I’m not saying this is happening. I’m not saying there are plans in the works to create false flags that would scare the American public into supporting things they never would have otherwise.

I mean, it’s not like the military considered a plan to stage a terrorist attack in the United States in order to justify invading Cuba. That would be crazy talk.

Now, I’m not saying they’ve done it. I’m sure some incidents have been spun to justify all kinds of things, such as the sinking of the USS Maine or the Tonkin Gulf Incident, but I’m not saying that 9/11 was an inside job or anything.

No, I tend to be less of a conspiracy theorist than I might otherwise be, not because I trust the government, but because I believe them too incompetent to pull them off.

Still, when money and/or power can be found in the midst of a crisis, then there will be plenty of crises left to find.

Following COVID, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham decided, all on her own authority, that the level of “gun crime” in Albuquerque was a “public health crisis” and banned the lawful carrying of firearms in the city.

In other words, an anti-gun governor decided that something was a crisis and then grabbed for power that she most definitely did not have. After all, the Supreme Court, in NYSRPA v. Bruen, warned New York that it couldn’t make the Island of Manhattan a gun-free zone, so why did Grisham figure she could make Albuquerque one?

Because it was a “crisis.”

Now, thankfully, it backfired on her. However, I don’t think it backfired because of some great moral stand by Americans, but because the crisis was too localized.

But climate change isn’t. While most of us think it’s some degree of nonsense, especially since the models have never panned out as predicted, which tells you plenty, a lot of people buy it. Others may or may not, but they see it as the leverage they need to remake the world.

Remember, “You will own nothing and be happy?”

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Yeah, that was part of it, as is living in the pod and eating the bug. They want to force people into “approved” lifestyles, up to and including some terrifying controls on movement. Still others want to force you into electric cars that don’t have much range, but will also have to be recharged on electrical grids that can’t seem to handle air conditioning in the summer.

These aren’t conspiracy theories, either. These are their own words, their own desires expressed publicly in speeches or articles. This is what they want to force onto the world, and they’re using the “crisis” of climate change to justify it.

And we shouldn’t be surprised. Again, if we allow powers to be usurped during a crisis, are unsurprised when they’re not returned later, and refuse to hold people accountable for it, should we be shocked when suddenly, there’s a new crisis of the week?

So far, our only saving grace is that these people can’t seem to get united behind a single crisis enough to terrify the public sufficiently. If they figure out how to do that, we’re screwed, and I think we all know it.

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