Vaccine Passports: The End Of American Liberty

Argument, Conservatism, COVID-19, Democrats, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, Liberty, Republicans

An invasion of bodily autonomy, one of the most fundamental rights we have.–Glenn Greenwald

How disturbing is it when not even Tucker Carlson frames the extent of the violation that is a vaccine passport in severe enough terms.

While Tucker did “call the idea ‘Orwellian,’ [he] asked Glenn Greenwald if he felt like the idea would work to convince more Americans to get the vaccination.”

Utilitarianism is common among the punditry: judge a policy by its aggregate positive outcomes, and not by whether it is just or unjust, violates rights or not.

Sean Hannity reduced the vaccine compulsion to privacy: a matter between a doctor and his patient. This is better than utilitarianism, for at least Hannity pinpointed an individual right.

However, only journalist Glenn Greenwald said what needs saying (this daily Caller report is not good; some of the stuff “reported” or inferred was not said or meant, although this next was):

“Well, I think you have to start with noting how draconian of an invasion this is in three different ways,” Greenwald said. “Number one, coercing citizens to put a substance into their body that they don’t want in their body, a pretty grave invasion of bodily autonomy, one of the most fundamental rights we have. Secondly, gathering a new database that can track people in terms of their health, that can easily be expanded as government programs often do into a whole variety of other uses, and then thirdly, you are restricting people’s movement. Freedom of movement is one of the most fundamental rights we have. It’s actually guaranteed in the Constitution.  …

Herd immunity will be arrived at eventually.

“Why is it necessary to stigmatize [those choosing not to vaccinate] and create a caste system?” Greenwald asked. ”

Typically, Sen. John Kennedy, with his contrived Southern act (he’s Ivy League) and rehearsed, overwrought cracks, puts Trump’s party back decades. On March 9, 2021, he told “Fox News Primetime” host Trey Gowdy that Americans love the 1 million legal immigrants coming in annually, and object ONLY to illegal, Biden-created chaos on border.

On vaccine passport, Kennedy “shone” just as brightly. Hannity, who treats his mostly friendly guests as family members, was expecting an erudite objection from Kennedy about the coerced-vaccine plan. The senator representing Louisiana needs to rehearse to disgorge his faux Southern witticisms. Thus was he caught unawares by Hannity, a generally fawning interviewer.

To the question about vaccine passports, Kennedy the cretin replied with a non sequitur:

A vaccine passport would be “terribly unethical,” croaked Kennedy, and not because it would threaten an individual’s dominion over his body, but because “EVERYBODY DOES NOT YET HAVE ACCESS TO THE VACCINE.”

 

George Floyd’s Cause Of Death: Clear. Chauvin’s Criminal Intention: Harder To Prove.

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Race, Racism

“In the case of Mr. Derek Chauvin, a mindset of depraved indifference seems to jibe with the video of George Floyd’s expiration.” (From “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!“)

Judging from the known facts, …  the chilling video recording in which Floyd expired slowly as he pleaded for air… Floyd begged to breathe. But the knee on his neck—“subdual restraint and neck compression,” in medical terms—was sustained for fully eight minutes and 46 seconds, causing “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

There are laws against what transpired between former Officer Derek Chauvin and Mr. Floyd.

And the law’s ambit is not to decide whether the offending officer is a correct-thinking individual, but whether Mr. Chauvin had committed a crime.

About Officer Chauvin’s mindset, the most the law is supposed to divine is mens rea—criminal intention: Was the officer whose knee pressed on Floyd’s neck acting with a guilty mind or not?

For fact-finding is the essence of the law. The law is not an abstract ideal of imagined social justice, that exists to salve sensitive souls. …

Considerations to tease apart are in, “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!”

Comments from readers can be followed on this blog post: “UPDATED (8/22/): NEW COLUMN: Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!”

Derek Chauvin’s trial is live, on USA Today.

UPDATED (3/27): NEW COLUMN: America’s Radical, Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa!

Cultural Marxism, Foreign Policy, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN is “America’s Radical, Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa!” It is currently on WND.COM, the Unz Review, CNSNews, “Americans Should Recall How Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa.

And, newly on the great Townhall.com.

Excerpt:

Certain national-conservative governments in East Europe should be natural allies to conservative policy makers, stateside, if such unicorns existed.

Vladimir Putin’s, for example.

Before his death, from the safety of exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of Russia’s bravest and most brilliant sons, praised Putin’s efforts to revive Russia’s traditional Christian and moral heritage. For example:

In October 2010, it was announced that The Gulag Archipelago would become required reading for all Russian high-school students. In a meeting with Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Mr. Putin described The Gulag Archipelago as ‘essential reading’: ‘Without the knowledge of that book, we would lack a full understanding of our country and it would be difficult for us to think about the future.’ …
If [only] the same could be said of the high schools of the United States. (Via The Imaginative Conservative.)

The Russian president patiently tolerates America’s demented, anti-Russia monomania. And, as America sinks into the quicksands of Cultural Marxism, Putin’s inclinations are decidedly reactionary and traditionalist.

He prohibited sexual evangelizing by LGBTQ activists. He comes down squarely on the side of the Russian Orthodox church, such as when vandals, the Pussy Riot whores, obscenely desecrated the cathedral of Christ the Savior. The Russian leader has also welcomed as refugees persecuted white South Africans, where America’s successive governments won’t even officially acknowledge that they’re under threat of extermination. Also, policies to stimulate Russian birthrates have been put in place by the conservative leader.

Hungary is oh-so happy in its homogeneity and wants to keep it. But not if Washington can help it. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s motto is, “Procreation, not immigration.” Orban plumps for closed borders, and pro-Western, Christian, Hungarian-families-first policies. Yet his ongoing campaign against George Soros, an agitator for global government, was met by Donald Trump’s State Department with a stern rebuke to … Hungary claiming that its anti-Soros law will cost the country dearly.

Americans on the Right could only dream that, like Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic—the US would “shut its border to Islamic migrants to keep potential terrorists out.”

America: A Notion, Not A Nation

Perplexing as it may seem, American foreign policy has been informed less by what Samuel P. Huntington termed civilizational consciousness, than by the idea of the propositional nation. America, to her governing neoconservative and left-liberal elites, is not a nation but a notion, a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.

Yet to Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, and an old-school conservative—as well as, arguably, to the founders of the nation themselves—society was a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. It cohered through what Aristotle called friendship and what Christians call love of neighbor, facilitated by a shared language, literature, history, habits and heroes.

These factors, taken together, constitute the glue that binds the nation.

By contrast, the rather flimsy whimsy that is the American “creedal nation” is, ostensibly, united in “a common commitment to a set of ideas and ideals.” If anything, when expressed by the historical majority, the natural affinity for one’s tribe—a connection to kith, kin and culture—is deemed inauthentic, xenophobic, and racist, unless asserted by non-Occidentals.

… READ ON … NEW COLUMN is “America’s Radical, Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa!” It is currently on WND.COM, the Unz Review, CNSNews, “Americans Should Recall How Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa.

And, newly on the great Townhall.com.

UPDATED (3/27): People are getting it. Conservative press is doing wonders in radically questioning past dogma.

Readers at Townhall.com:

Avatar

Thanks for this profound column which pushed me to ponder America’s image abroad, as well as our own obvious moral decline. I have shared it with an Afrikaner relation & I await his views.

A very intelligent piece. Thank you.

 

 

NEW ON YouTube: David Vance In Conversation With ilana mercer

Argument, Britain, Conservatism, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, The West

Interested interviewers: I am laconic, not loquacious.—ilana mercer

A YouTube CHAT With UK’s illustrious and debonair David Vance: The lads (David and his producer) treated me so very kindly. (As in welcoming and mannered, rather than like other requests constantly received from ego-bound interviewers, concerned with rambling with me about their own views, which, being laconic, not loquacious, I cannot do.) We laughed hard, sharing that Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of humor.

The topics: The Systemic Racism irrational rot, deconstructed in columns, and my latest on the wussification of the West, as manifested in the book-burning Seuss saga and the conservative response thereto.

Hint: We both argue process—the right of freemen to think, speak and write impolite thoughts. We refuse to debate the content of those thought, because that would be conceding the Left’s Argument, as conservatives habitually do.

I was delighted to be asked by David to come on more regularly.