Abandonment of Law and Order
At the height of the COVID pandemic we were all dealing with mask mandates, senseless lockdown rules, fearmongering about hospitals being overloaded, and a host of other daily warnings and alerts. Politicians like former New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo—who later resigned in disgrace to avoid being impeached after he was accused of sexually harassing nearly a dozen women—were treated as rock star lifesavers for imposing restrictions on the freedom of people in their states. At the same time, progressives were setting the stage for a surge in crime. New York State’s “bail reform law” eliminated the bail requirement for people charged with many crimes. New York City joined New Jersey, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other jurisdictions across the country implementing what would become the precursors to a crime surge.
CBS News reported on the predictable results for the first year of freeing defendants without requiring them to post bail in New York: “Starting in the summer [of 2020], there was an overall spike in crime, mirroring trends seen in cities across the nation. The year ended with a 97% increase in shootings, a 44% increase in murders, 42% increase in burglaries and 67% increase in car thefts in the city. The NYPD made arrests in 32% of shooting incidents.”50
In 2022 crime continued to rise. The New York Post reported crime “skyrocketed” that year by 37 percent. “Grand larceny has shot up 49% so far this year over last year as of Sunday—from 18,058 to 26,908. Auto theft has spiked by 46.2%, from 4,855 to 7,100. Robbery is up 39.2%, from 6,530 to 9,091, and burglaries increased by 32.9%, from 6,251 to 8,305, the numbers show. Felonious assault rose by 18.6% and rapes saw an 11% increase so far this year over 2021.”51
There are no signs of the crime wave stopping. In 2023 felony crime reports were up 6.4 percent from the previous year. As for those blaming the pandemic for the crimeapalooza happening in blue cities with no-bail policies, that 2023 statistic represents a 35.6 percent jump from the prepandemic period.52
Americans experience the impact of rising crime on their lives every day. The good news is more of us are realizing the deleterious impact of defunding the police and other liberal policies and attitudes. Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner reports, “With violent crime hitting home across the nation, more people are coming to the defense of police to decry the liberal ‘defund’ movement. In a new survey . . . the National Sheriffs’ Association found that 60% oppose defunding police operations, 44% ‘strongly.’ And the reason is simple: Crime is up. In fact, the new NSA/TIPP Survey showed that 42% blame the defund movement for reduced community safety.”53
Keeping people unstable financially with higher prices, controlling their movements through fear of random crime and violence, afraid of being silenced if they utter an unapproved political opinion, or even visited by the FBI or arrested if they dare to participate in local politics, is a despicable package that Huxley and Orwell would not be surprised to see. After all, they also saw it all in the first half of the twentieth century.
A Warning from Justice Gorsuch
It will likely take years for any complete investigation into the federal government’s COVID debacle. One thing is for sure, it is serving as a prime example of government using and creating fear to force people to comply with orders that otherwise make no sense. But as we know, once we’re conditioned with fear, logic-based decision-making goes out the window as emotion takes over.
In the meantime, the government received a scathing review from Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch about the handling of COVID in general, noting “fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces.” The court was addressing a lawsuit related to the ending of the Title 42 public health order in March 2020 allowing the US to quickly expel immigrants at the border during the pandemic. Gorsuch took the opportunity to comment about what the government had done and the impact on our civil liberties. Fox News reported on his statement: “One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat,” the justice wrote. “A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree.”
Gorsuch then gave examples of how the US may “have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” noting:
Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent. . . . The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government.54
Gorsuch understood completely what politicians and government were doing with COVID, and the opportunistic use of fear to gain power and crush the human spirit. He also knew there must be a statement denouncing it. That this passionate defense of personal freedom and condemnation of outrageous government action would come only from a justice decried by liberals as a conservative menace tells you all you need to know about the condition of today’s supposed progressive agenda. Once again, we are blessed to have one person in a particular position on whom we can rely to do the right thing, while reminding the country what’s at stake.
A Global Cult Menace
For the left, groupthink is key. No matter what country they inhabit, no matter the background, leftists surround themselves with like-minded people, believe they have sole possession of the truth, demonize those who think differently, forbid and condemn debate, and punish those who dare to challenge ideology and public narratives. We see this cultlike behavior from the left and progressives everywhere in our society and around the world. It explains the rise of cancel culture, censorship, and the increasing inclination to destroy that which does not conform.
What we’re dealing with in the United States is not exclusive to us—it is part of a global menace. I often mention to my radio and television audiences that if you want to know what the left has planned, just look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, London, and Canada. The reliance on fear is also not new to our generation; it has been recognized as a tried and true element of power for millennia. Aristotle describes the universality of the emotion that was as relevant when his Rhetoric was written in 350 BC as it is to us today:
To turn next to Fear, what follows will show things and persons of which, and the states of mind in which, we feel afraid. Fear may be defined as a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future. Of destructive or painful evils only; for there are some evils, e.g. wickedness or stupidity, the prospect of which does not frighten us: I mean only such as amount to great pains or losses. And even these only if they appear not remote but so near as to be imminent: we do not fear things that are a very long way off: for instance, we all know we shall die, but we are not troubled thereby, because death is not close at hand. From this definition it will follow that fear is caused by whatever we feel has great power of destroying or of harming us in ways that tend to cause us great pain. Hence the very indications of such things are terrible, making us feel that the terrible thing itself is close at hand; the approach of what is terrible is just what we mean by “danger.” Such indications are the enmity and anger of people who have power to do something to us; for it is plain that they have the will to do it, and so they are on the point of doing it [emphasis mine].55
Little did various Masters of the Universe in the United Kingdom know how they were proving Aristotle right. Keep in mind, what the leftist establishment does in London (or Los Angeles and New York) is a window into what the worldwide left is planning or is already implementing. In this case, courtesy of a powerful investigative series from the UK’s Telegraph newspaper called “The Lockdown Files,” the British people were finally informed about the incompetence and malevolence fueling pandemic decision-making among officials and ministers.
Leading the way off the cliff is a man called Matt Hancock, the now former health secretary who was directing the COVID response. It was leaked WhatsApp messages that exposed their reliance not on science, but on fear, to manipulate and control the people of England. The Telegraph reported:
Throughout the course of the pandemic, officials and ministers wrestled with how to ensure the public complied with ever-changing lockdown restrictions. One weapon in their arsenal was fear. “We frighten the pants off everyone,” Matt Hancock suggested during one WhatsApp message with his media adviser. The then health secretary was not alone in his desire to scare the public into compliance. The WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph show how several members of Mr Hancock’s team engaged in a kind of “Project Fear,” in which they spoke of how to utilise “fear and guilt” to make people obey lockdown.56
The WhatsApp messages in the Telegraph reveal deliberate, cynical, and shocking choices to manipulate the British people by frightening them as they pushed for a new lockdown. The conspiring to manipulate the country with how and when to “deploy the new variant” rhetoric to the media as the mechanism to “frighten the pants off everyone” as the excuse to continue the lockdown is astonishing. The Telegraph reported:
The conversation started with a discussion about a fear that Sadiq Khan, the London Mayor, could attack the Government for plunging the capital into its own lockdown—just as Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, had waged a battle in his city a few months earlier. . . . That led them into a discussion about when to “deploy” the new variant, although Mr Hancock was seemingly wary that it could have led to closing schools.57
Project Fear worked. A month later, January 2021, the country went into its third national lockdown.
Hancock resigned his post in June 2021 not because of his Monster-on-the-Hill decision-making as health secretary but because he had been exposed, on camera, cheating on his wife.58, 59 Doing the right thing in any job, and in life, is a moral choice. As is being faithful to your spouse.
UK Scientists Admit Using Fear Was Totalitarian
Using fear wasn’t exclusively the idea of Hancock or of the other fools in the UK and around the world who wouldn’t let a good crisis go to waste. People like Hancock had backup from the system, which isn’t hard to imagine. The bureaucratic state all throughout Western civilization is steeped in groupthink and relies on itself for protection and encouragement.
Scientists in the UK, however, are now admitting that their own actions and decision to use fear to control people during the pandemic was “totalitarian.” Once again, the Telegraph reported the news to the British people:
Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was “unethical” and “totalitarian.” Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s Covid-19 response. SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid-19 because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.”60 *
Members of that team spoke with Laura Dodsworth for her book A State of Fear, which examines the governmental reaction to the pandemic. One member was blunt with this confession to Dodsworth:
In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian. The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.61
But don’t worry, Dodsworth was reassured by another team member that although mind control can be bad, they used it in the good way: “You could call psychology ‘mind control.’ That’s what we do . . . clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past.”62 Got it.
In May 2021, the UK established the UK COVID-19 Inquiry,63 with public hearings scheduled to go through 2026, and a report not expected to be issued until the 2030s. How convenient for all those responsible as government scrambles to protect itself. “Inquiries,” as Americans know all too well (think Benghazi and Durham), may turn up important information, but rarely is anyone held responsible. It has been the ultimate Kabuki theater.
Canada’s Fake Wolves Fear Experiment
Conveniently, as COVID was disrupting daily life around the planet, the Canadian military decided October 2020 would be a good time to unleash a fear experiment on rural Nova Scotians.
A letter ostensibly from the Nova Scotia government was sent to residents warning them about wolves being released in the area. The problem was the letter was fake, and was eventually found to be the beginning of a Canadian military experiment on how the population would react to a fearful situation.64
Vice reported: “The Canadian military is taking heat after news broke that a mock letter, penned by ‘information warfare specialists’ in a reserve unit, made its way into the hands of civilians warning the public about a fictitious pack of grey wolves on the loose in the province of Nova Scotia. The incident also involved playing sounds of wolves howling in the woods through a loudspeaker.”65
Moreover, in the reporting by the National Post, which broke the story, it’s revealed the project was also training for the military to “hone its expertise for launching propaganda missions at home and abroad.”
Canada’s Department of National Defence sent out its own version of Baghdad Bob to address the controversy. He insisted “the fake letter wasn’t meant to be released to the public and an investigation is underway to determine how that happened. The letter was an aid for the propaganda training. [The spokesman] said he didn’t know why the loudspeaker was set up to transmit wolf sounds and that will be investigated as well,”66 according to the National Post.
If the letter wasn’t meant for the public, then for whom was it meant? With this absurd response, instead of setting up fear experiments targeting private citizens to hone their propaganda technique, perhaps the Canadian military and government should mandate training on how to ignore their inner fearmongering totalitarian.
What Should Be the Role of Government?
