I confess. Sean Hannity gets on my nerves, but last night he redeemed himself with his monologue about how our president and his administration have totally obliterated our sacred right to decide our own medical treatments or to keep our medical history to ourselves. The veil of the "greater good" has fallen from the Democrats' hypocrisy-scarred faces and they have replaced it with the iron nightstick of brutal federal overreach as they now attempt to remove the last vestiges of sovereignty over our own bodies.
For decades, the Left's war cry was "Your body, your choice" when it came to protecting a woman's right to choose (to destroy a human life growing in their wombs). That's all changed with the imposition of Joe Biden's new COVID-19 six-point plan. It now proudly reads: "Your body OUR choice" and it's coming to your neighborhood, your workplace and your children's schools at breakneck speed.
Watching the president rip the bandage off his previous promises not to impose vaccination mandates and a one-size-fits-all solution on Americans was both frightening but also expected. Why? Because we all knew his previous statements about protecting states' rights were out and out lies. The only thing sacred to our hypocritical Catholic president (aside from his support for aborting babies) was turning the screws on our personal freedoms to insure the success of a complete hegemonic political power grab. Going forward, the administration has reached back in time and is channeling Theodore Roosevelt and is adopting his approach to governance, "When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." In the case of the Bidenites, their new mantra is, "Take their arms (with vaccinations) today and their total compliance will follow tomorrow."
I'm wondering just who is advising this man who sits behind the Resolute desk? Whoever he/she/they are, they must surely believe that we, the 74 million-plus who voted against him last November, must have the world's shortest memories or be charter members of the sap of the month club. Can this leader, or any leader for that matter, really expect to reverse his positions on such fundamental issues as the rights of the people to choose their own medical treatments (or non-treatments) and expect to stay in power long? If not this latest assault on our freedoms what will it take for patriotic Americans to stand up and resist such blatant authoritarian actions? That's no longer a rhetorical question. It's a sobering, honest and time-sensitive one. Have we become so weak and feckless as a people that we simply roll with the punches and roll up our sleeves and do nothing when we're sucker-punched in our body politic by a chief executive who's unfit to serve?
If we do nothing and stand idly by while our constitutionally protected civil liberties are systematically whittled away by men and women who have turned their backs on our laws and have deemed our freedoms to be nothing more than relics of the past then maybe we deserve to be treated like serfs of the "new Left aristocracy." If that's the case, then we might as well give up the rest of our rights while we're at it. The right to dissent? Gone. The right to gather in groups? Gone. The right to choose our leaders? Gone.
That is not the America I grew up in. It's not the America that shed blood on battlefields in foreign wars to protect the rights of oppressed people on the other side of the world. It's not the America of the abolitionists that stood up for equality of the races nor is it the America of hope and opportunity for all regardless of their origins, languages, customs or religious beliefs. It is the America of the vanquished spirit, of blind loyalty to a deceptive duplicitous conventional wisdom perpetrated by traitors to true American ideals. To acquiesce is to submit to a phony moral ethic that purports to follow the theory of liberty and not its practice. We still have a choice for now, but the window is closing fast.
Stephan Helgesen is a former U.S. diplomat and author of 11 books, four of which are on American politics. He can be reached at: stephan@stephanhelgesen.com
