The president is announcing a plan to force all federal workers to get a COVID-19 shot, and major employers to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for their workers or test them weekly, with crippling fines for those who don’t comply.
“This is not about freedom or personal choice,” said Biden. Indeed it’s not. It’s about total federal control over what the administrative state has come to view as its subjects, not citizens to whom it must answer. In the tyrannical worldview of the president and his advisors, nothing can stand in the way of government coercion, not even federalism. “If these governors won’t help,” said Biden, “I will use my powers as president and get them out of the way.”
Bin Laden, who correctly foresaw disaster and eventual defeat for the invading Americans in Afghanistan, could not have guessed that by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, America’s ruling elite would have become this fascist. Indeed, when a regime uses the power of the state to compel major corporations to enforce its mandates and enact its agenda, that’s actual textbook fascism. Hitchens might have called it “fascism with a bureaucrat’s face,” or “bureaufascism,” if he were alive to see it.
Biden’s vaccine mandate is of course just one example, plucked from yesterday’s news cycle, of the left’s hatred of America and the freedom of its people. Over the past year-and-a-half of the pandemic, we have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of rule by executive fiat, with governors and mayors and public health officials wielding powers too often directed against churches and independent businesses.
Beyond the pandemic, the left holds almost everything about America in contempt. We are told in our workplaces — and our children are taught in their schools — that the United States is irredeemably racist, founded on violence, and that our constitutional experiment amounts to nothing more than a massive crime. We are called upon to repudiate our past and pull down monuments to our forebears — not just Confederate generals but also our Founding Fathers.
We are instructed that men can be women if they so choose, and those who disagree should probably lose their jobs and be ostracized. If you object to your daughter being forced to compete in school sports with boys who claim to be girls, you’re a bigot who must be silenced.
The reductive, totalizing ideology of the left has seeped into nearly every institution of American life, and dominates our culture and our politics. It is profoundly anti-American, and in the final analysis, it is a far greater threat to the future of our republic than even the wildest plots and most murderous fantasies of all the world’s jihadists combined.
When it comes to tearing down America, brick by brick, the Islamofascists have nothing on those who command the heights of our culture, or purport to rule us from Washington.
