By Michael Lesher

Suppose I tell you in advance that the essay you are reading is meant to startle you. And suppose I suggest, by way of demonstration, that two people as loosely connected as the leader of the “COVID Crisis Group” and Joe Biden’s “Special Envoy To Monitor and Combat Antisemitism” – both of whom have recently offered recommendations for improving political life in the United States – are in fact determined to unravel American freedoms.

Would you be surprised?

Well, if so, that is exactly the startling fact I am trying to bring to your attention. True, you may not have heard that the 34 COVID-19 “experts” headed by one Philip Zelikow (last seen justifying the concealment of information about the 9/11 attacks) and anti-Semitism “ambassador” Deborah Lipstadt – perhaps best known for slandering scads of Jewish survivors of the Nazis as “soft-core” Holocaust deniers because they objected to the massacre of 1,462 of Gaza’s civilians nine years ago – are both out to dismantle the Bill of Rights. But if you haven’t, it isn’t because they’ve been coy about their objectives.

Take the Zelikow panel. Its new book on “the lessons learned from COVID-19” openly conflates the federal government’s management of a respiratory virus with “wartime” – thus rationalizing the executive branch’s preemption of democratic government.

<snip>

Because the truth is that condemning freedom is now so entirely respectable that it’s happening practically everywhere – under every possible pretext, almost any day, from just about any left-liberal institution that claims to care about the public good. Close your eyes, and you can hardly tell whether what you’re hearing is coming from a Democratic Party stalwart or from an old-line Soviet apologist explaining why Andrei Sakharov or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Yuri Orlov is really, notwithstanding the accuracy of what he’s been saying, a threat to the state who deserves to be muzzled or jailed.

And the media’s silence about it all is as ominous as the Orwellian nattering of the freedom-haters themselves.

https://off-guardian.org/2023/05/10/theyre-coming-to-take-you-away/