Let’s play, “Who said it, and when?”
“…the American people have accepted centralization of government, regimentation of activities and restriction of liberty to a greater extent than ever before in their history.”
Need a hint? The first part of the first sentence is, “In the process of winning this war…”
While 30 seconds of perky and mildly suspenseful music plays, let’s think.
Is the quotation about the war on terror after 9/11, with its full-body searches at the airports and permanent government collection of everybody’s phone data and electronic communications?
Is it about the war against COVID, with Americans ordered not to leave their homes, businesses fined for being open, vaccine mandates, closed schools and Zoom funerals?
Excellent guesses, but wrong.
The quotation is about World War II. It’s a statement by the 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, published in the January 1944 Reader’s Digest. Willkie died later that year.
But before he went, he left us this statement for the ages: “At the end of the war the freedoms we have lost must be rewon and restored, not part, but all of them; not sooner or later, but sooner. If we fail to do that, then history will write it down that in this war – as in many others – the victors were the vanquished.”
The liberties lost in the war on terror are mostly still lost. You can now keep your shoes on at the airport. That’s about it.
But the reckoning over the COVID war, that’s another story.
In what a screenwriter might script as the start of the big finish, President Donald Trump released a statement on September 1 demanding that “the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs.” Trump wrote that “Pfizer, and others” have shown him “information that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not???”
“With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW,” the president wrote.
Americans who rely for their news on TV shows or publications heavily sponsored by pharmaceutical advertising may not know what this is about. But people who warned early and often about the scientific mistakes and civil rights violations of the pandemic response know exactly what it’s about, and you’ll never guess where they are now. No need to play the suspenseful music again, I’ll just tell you.
They’re in the Trump administration.
In no particular order, a few highlights.
Harmeet Dhillon, the California superlawyer who battled the Biden administration over vaccine mandates, is the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Justice.
Julie Hamill, the Palos Verdes attorney who represented angry parents in a lawsuit challenging the Los Angeles County Public Health Department’s indefensible policy of forcing little kids in school to wear useless masks that caused learning and speech delays, among other problems, is now a civil rights assistant United States attorney.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the highly regarded Stanford professor of medicine and health economist who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for a more focused and less damaging response to COVID that recognized the scientific fact of natural immunity, and who was slandered by a Biden administration official as a “fringe epidemiologist” for it, now has that guy’s job, director of the National Institutes of Health.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who like Bhattacharya was censored on social media over statements related to COVID and sued the Biden administration for running the censorship operation with public funds and faux security claims, is the secretary of Health and Human Services.
Andrew Bailey, the Missouri attorney general who led the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit over the administration acting hand-in-glove with social media companies to censor critics of the federal COVID policies, including Bhattacharya, is the co-deputy director of the FBI.
John Sauer, the Missouri solicitor general who represented the plaintiffs in that censorship lawsuit, is now the solicitor general of the United States.
Dr. Marty Makary, the Johns Hopkins University oncology and gastrointestinal surgeon and professor who was a prominent critic of vaccine mandates and COVID public health policies, is the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
Physician and scientist Dr. Robert Malone, the much-criticized critic of mRNA COVID vaccines whose opinions were inconvenient for the Biden administration because his name is on several patents related to the development of mRNA technology, was appointed by Kennedy to serve on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the CDC panel that makes recommendations on vaccine policy.
Sept. 18-19, and again Oct. 22-23, the ACIP panel is scheduled to meet “to review scientific data and vote on vaccine recommendations,” according to the CDC website. Meetings are open to the public and can be viewed on a live webcast.
“Public engagement and input are vital to ACIP’s work,” the CDC says on its site.
Seems like the public has already had quite a lot of engagement and input. Elections have consequences.
But the old regime is not going quietly. Bureaucrats fired from the CDC are raging in op-ed pieces and TV interviews. In a Senate hearing on Thursday, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and others screamed at Kennedy over his policy and personnel changes.
Kennedy roared back as if Hulk Hogan had bequeathed to him the rights to his character.
“This morning I got the latest numbers from CDC that 76.4% of Americans now have a chronic disease,” he said, calling it “stunning” and pointing out that in 1950 it was 3%. “We are the sickest country in the world,” Kennedy told the senators. “That’s why we have to fire people at CDC. They did not do their job.”
Still to come this month: Kennedy’s report on causes of autism, and whatever reports the COVID vaccine manufacturers will finally release to the public under presidential pressure.
The battle is on to reclaim “the freedoms we have lost.” Sooner, not later.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley