2020 — The most horrific year for freedom

Happy New Year!

Many of us are so very thankful that 2020 is over. The year has changed but many of the worst aspects of the 2020 are still with us.

I decided to create Freedom Always because 2020 brings home with a vengeance how fragile a thing freedom is and how few seem to understand and uphold it. In the podcast, in video, and on the blog I will cover:

• the theory and justification of freedom
• what is the ethical foundation of freedom?
• what forms of government, if any, are and are not compatible with freedom?
• news of the day as viewed in the context of freedom
• sharing pro-freedom materials
• how we may gain, keep and enhance freedom from all those that deny our inalienable inherent right to it.

I somewhat feel the need to apologize for bringing up COVID-19. We are all sick and tired of hearing it blared from everywhere. Yet I must as the greatest attack on freedom the US has ever experienced was under the guise of combating it.

The lockdown to supposedly combat COVID-19 was the excuse for massively attacking freedom.

Businesses and entire lines of business were forced closed.

Churches and other religious gatherings were closed.

Travel was very severely restricted even between states in the US. In many cases you could only visit another state if you agreed to a two week quarantine on entry. This effectively destroyed business travel and tourism.

The government took it upon itself to say what jobs were and were not essential. This is something that is a hallmark of government control of your life and mine.

The government determined what is and is not essential travel.

The government determined what is and is not essential medical practice and procedures. It is unknown and probably incalculable how many suffered needlessly and died prematurely or at risk of dying prematurely because their preventative care and ongoing care was curtailed by government fiat.

The government even seized medical supplies and made itself the determiner of what states got what when. Free markets adjusting supply and demand and to what was actually needed were apparently considered inferior to politicians and political motives making the determination.

Before last March it was unimaginable that leisure, dining, travel, profession, education, worship, freedom of association would be curtailed by the government and largely without protest by the people.

In short your inherent inalienable right to live your live as you please, respecting and never going against the right of others to do likewise was suspended. Your freedom was suspended as if freedom itself is “not essential”.

It is the most terrifying and demoralizing of all that the American public for the most part went along with all of this. People were so panicked on purpose by media and the government that they went along. People alse went along thinking it would be “only temporary”, that it was “a few weeks”. Here we are over nine months later!

Of course freedom is not something that is optional, it is not at the whim of government. It does not take a break for any reason whatsoever if we really understand that it is inalienable and inherent to being a human being.

At the most freedom can be restricted as to particular actions that are proven, not merely asserted, to be harming others. Even there a civil action is often more consistent with freedom than government criminalization actions.

There are well defined procedures for determining such harms and if needed making relevant law. This did not happen with COVID-19. Instead we found our freedom severely curtailed by mere highly capricious orders that were not law passed by a legislature but orders from government officials — right down to a small town mayor.

This is counter to freedom and counter to the rule of law.

They tried to excuse it by various emergency measures at state level. Many of emergency power measures did not at all excuse this level of hit on freedom. They were not intended for dealing with a viral pandemic. Some have been challenged in court and cases won that such emergency power measures as were on the books did not give authority for such draconian practices.

And where is the proof that these lockdowns were justified? Where are the real numbers on “cases” and on deaths? Can we even get the real numbers? It is not clear this is possible. Government policies by CDC have made it so that all deaths that list COVID, even if it is not the primary cause of death, are counted as COVID-19 deaths. The CDC even published guidance that COVID-19 should be listed as involved even if it it was only “suspected”. What does even mean? Isn’t that totally subjective? To their credit the CDC did also estimate that as little as 6% of reported COVID-19 deaths could be shown to be actually deaths that occurred primarily because of COVID-19 and would not have occurred otherwise.

The test themselves according to experts run too many PCR cycles to be considered reasonably accurate. This practice results in a very large number of false positives. The positive results are all taken to be a “case”. This is quite different from how other diseases in the corona virus family such as flu cases are counted. Normally a case is an infection with serious symptoms. It does not include asymptomatic infections.

This entire approach to pandemic response is completely medieval. Not since medieval times has it been considered correct to lock down entire
populations and try to hide from a disease. The modern approach has long been to not panic the population or disrupt all of life. Instead the disease
was to be studied looking for cures and effective treatments, noting what sub-populations were most susceptible and attempting to protect them, quarantine of the actually sick if likely infectious, and creating a vaccine. Otherwise it was life as normal. This has been considered the scientific and most humane way to deal with viral pandemic for most of the 20th and 21st century. So why are we using a pre-scientific method?

Did the lockdowns and the rest provably have beneficial results? Study after study shows no correlation whatsoever between how soon and how thoroughly an area locked down and deaths per million from COVID-19.

For this freedom was thrown out the window??

There were dissidents to all of this medieval approach and to low quality testing including many top medical professionals. Were their voices heeded? No! Instead they were hounded mercilessly and their reputations damaged without reason. Some were de-platformed from even having a voice in widely visited venues such as major media, social media
and YouTube. In today’s Cancel Culture it is all too easy to ruin or shutdown a person by mere accusations with no process of due diligence or justice.

All of this for a disease that to date, after nearly a year since it first surfaced as killed 0.02% of worldwide population. In the US it has killed 0.1% of population. This is of course presuming that the report COVID-19 deaths actually are primarily from COVID-19 which we have seen is a very shaky premise.

This disease kills predominantly the old and even there largely those with other serious health issues. It rarely kills the young or adults under 45 or so.

So how does it make sense to lock up everyone and everything?

It doesn’t. In my opinion there must be some other anti-freedom agenda afoot. I don’t know exactly what it is yet but we may begin by looking into the results of these policies and asking what agendas benefit. Qui bono?

So Freedom Always is started in a highly embattled state with freedom severely under fire. We have our work cut out for us to help turn this around.

Originally published at https://freedomalways.net on January 4, 2021.