Five years ago, politicians and bureaucrats went berserk and pointlessly ravaged Americans’ freedom. The Covid-19 pandemic provided the pretext to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses, padlock churches, close down schools, and effectively place hundreds of millions of Americans under house arrest. Despite all the forced sacrifices, most Americans contracted covid and more than a million were listed as dying from the virus.

“Pandemic Security Theater Is Self-Destructive, And Won’t Make Us Safer” was the headline of my first salvo against the pandemic hysteria, published on March 24, 2020 in the Daily Caller. I scoffed at President Trump’s proclamations about being a “wartime president at war with an invisible enemy.” Wartime presidents too easily pretend they’re on a mission from God to scourge all resistance. I warned: “The pandemic threatens to open authoritarian Pandora’s Boxes. Permitting governments to seize almost unlimited power based on shaky extrapolations of infection rates will doom our republic.”

From the start of the pandemic, the Mises Institute was in the forefront of condemning policies that eradicated prosperity in the name of public health. In a May 19, 2020 Mises piece headlined, “Hacksawing the Economy,” I noted, “The political response to COVID-19 is eerily similar to Civil War surgeons’ rationales for hacking off arms and legs…. As long as politicians claim that things would be worse if they had not amputated much of the economy, they can pirouette as saviors.”

Living in the Washington area, I had a front row seat for many of Covid-19’s biggest absurdities. After federal officials whipped up panic, “I Believe in Science” lawn signs popped up like mushrooms, soon accompanied by “Thank You, Dr. Fauci” placards. Those signs looked to me like frightful decorations of a Halloween that never ended.

Thoreau provided my lodestar for the pandemic: “A man sits as many risks as he runs.” I knew that isolation would make me too ornery for my own good. I had survived the flu plenty of times in prior decades and I didn’t reckon covid would deliver my coffin nails. I was a co-leader of a Meetup hiking group which continued hiking almost every weekend throughout the pandemic.

But politicians made such jaunts more difficult. In February 2021, President Biden decreed that face masks must be worn in national parks. Probably 95 percent of the National Park Service’s 800+ million acres is uncrowded 95 percent of the time. The only “evidence” to justify the mandate was that many Biden supporters were frightened or enraged whenever they saw anyone not wearing a mask. The new mandate quickly became an entitlement program for junior Stasi members.

I told attendees on my hikes that masks were optional but kvetching about other hikers wearing or not wearing masks was prohibited. Biden’s edict helped turn the C & O Canal Towpath—one of my favorite hiking venues—into a hotbed of self-righteousness. That Towpath was ten feet wide in most places, but it was the principle of the matter. I had numerous people furiously screaming at me because I wasn’t wearing a facemask as I strolled outside. If mask hecklers were especially persistent, I would shrug and ask them: “How is your therapy going?”

Washingtonians pride themselves on being smarter and better educated than most other Americans (okay, maybe excepting San Francisco and Boston). They instinctively knew that total servility was the only hope for surviving the pandemic, and maximizing hatred was the key to compliance. After Biden ordered 100 million adults to get injected with the covid vaccine, Biden derided the unvaxxed as aspiring mass murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you” with covid. (The Supreme Court struck down most of that illegal vax mandate.)

Thanks to Biden’s fear mongering, almost half of Democratic voters favored locking the unvaxxed into government detention facilities, according to an early 2022 Rasmussen poll. The same survey showed that almost half of Democrats favored empowering government to “fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy” of Covid-19 vaccines on social media. The Biden administration unleashed a massive censorship campaign on social media and beyond that effectively muzzled millions of Americans who doubted the feds.

At that point, most American adults were vaxxed, but the injections were catastrophically failing against the latest covid variant. There were a million new covid cases per day—mainly among the vaxxed—and most covid fatalities were occurring among the fully vaxxed.

But “best and brightest” Washingtonians retained their absolute faith in a command-and-control response to the pandemic. District of Columbia Mayor, Muriel Bowser, decreed that anyone who was not vaccinated and carrying proof of the jab was banned from entering any restaurant, bar, gym, or meeting space in her domain. Affluent Washingtonians happily rushed to get free software apps so the government could track them and their health status. That new app had a spiffy logo that quickly became the ultimate status symbol.

I stopped hosting hikes within DC city limits: I would be damned if I would condone Bowser’s biomedical caste system. But I did venture into DC in early 2022 to pay respects to an editor who was fleeing southward. Exiting at the Dupont Circle metro station, I briefly stepped out of a torrential downpour into an upscale coffee shop. Every table hosted a hefty warning sign: “Masks on & Vaccine Cards out!” Patrons were hectored: “All cafes and restaurants… are REQUIRED by the Mayor’s Office to check vaccine cards of dine-in customers. Thank you for helping us comply with local regulations to remain open!” Why didn’t that establishment just advertise the slogan: “Come Sip with the Gestapo!” I skedaddled before anybody asked to see a vax passport.

I was mystified why people would pay $6.50 for a coffee to be treated worse than parolees. Dupont Circle was home to many of DC’s best educated residents. The more graduate degrees they amassed, the more submissive they became. Flourishing your vax card proved your moral and intellectual superiority over anyone who balked at bending over again.

But it was a different story in Anacostia, the poorest part of the city, where one of the unsung heroes of the pandemic emerged. Blacks had a much lower vaccination rate and the mayor’s edict effectively made many of them second-class citizens. Bowser, Fauci, and a PBS film crew pounded on front doors in Anacostia and hectored residents to get injected. A guy in his 30s came to the front door of his row house, saw Fauci and the TV cameras, and condemned the entire covid carnival: “Y’all campaign is about fear. You all attack people with fear. That’s what this pandemic is.” He scorned the speedy vax approval: “Nine months is definitely not enough for nobody to be taking no vaccination that you all came up with.” Actually, the Biden White House had browbeat the Food and Drug Administration to unjustifiably grant final approval to the Pfizer vax. With the video cameras rolling, he angrily told Fauci and Bowser: “The people in America are not settled with the information that’s been given to us right now.” Watch the PBS Fauci “Vaccine Outreach” Anacostia brawl here.

Fauci and the PBS film crew probably thought that exchange exemplified the type of fools who refused to submit and be saved. Fauci justified covid mandates because average citizens “don’t have the ability” to determine what is best for them. But despite getting any and all boosters, Fauci was personally ravaged by covid at least three times. Fauci’s frauds began to be exposed, including his role in covertly bankrolling the reckless gain-of-function research that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and killed seven million people worldwide. Instead of receiving a Nobel prize, Fauci was grateful that—on President Biden’s final day in office—he received a full presidential pardon for any and all of his crimes committed for the prior decade.

But what sort of savior scientist needs a presidential pardon, anyway?

A virus with a 99+ percent survival rate spawned a 100 percent presumption in favor of despotism. The government has no liability for the injections it mandates or the freedoms it destroys. The Covid-19 pandemic should teach Americans to never defer to “experts” who promise that granting them boundless power will keep everyone else safe. In the long run, people have more to fear from politicians than from viruses.

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