Joe Biden is telling the unvaccinated that the time for waiting is over.
In his signature ‘get-off-my-lawn!’ old-man yelling voice, the exhausted 78-year-old Commander-in-Chief dutifully tried to read a teleprompter full of COVID-19 talking points on Thursday.
In addition to signing an executive order requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated (with the possible exception of 650,000 postal employees who handle those wonderful mail-in ballots), Joe’s six-pronged plan went even further:
‘The Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their work forces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.’
Of course, it would not be a Biden speech without a healthy dose of Neanderthal-shaming. He sternly lectured the non-compliant grandma-killers that these mandates are not about their ‘freedom or personal choice’.
He is wrong. All the draconian diktats over the past 18 months, whether vaccine mandates, mask requirements or lockdowns, have been more or less about personal freedom — mostly more.
There is a reason why a woman was Tased at a middle school football game in Ohio for not wearing a mask and why anti-mask parents are tossed out of or even prohibited from attending their local school board meetings across the nation.
When Americans sense they are being deprived of their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, many tend to fight back.
Not all though. Plenty of Americans eagerly follow orders, especially if they’re being issued by people in white lab coats, or Democrats, or even better, both. In fact, these ‘Karens’, as they have been dubbed, regardless of gender, have become like middle-school hall monitors tattling on their classmates.
‘Karen’ doesn’t understand why everyone can’t be as obedient as she is. Follow the science, she endless hectors on Facebook, and in the aisles of your local supermarket.
Erstwhile iconoclast Howard Stern recently harrumphed, ‘When are we gonna stop putting up with the idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated? Fuck ’em. Fuck their freedom.’
It is very frustrating for the multi-millionaire radio host that his fellow citizens aren’t as accustomed to following orders as he is.
The upcoming debate over liberty and governmental overreach will garner plenty of attention. Books, thinkpieces and lawsuits are coming. So are rallies, and quite likely, civil disobedience. And not just among deplorables. Remember, the lowest vaccination rates are among blacks, Hispanics and, yes, PhDs. Paging Karen…
But beyond the questions of personal choice and freedom, another question emerges — will these mandates work?
If history is any guide, the answer is…perhaps.
In late July, President Emmanuel Macron implemented vaccine passports in France.
Though he was met with fierce backlash from protesters, his plan did push people to finally get jabbed.
As Fortune wrote in August, ‘Across Europe, a series of sticks of varying severity has led to a pronounced rise in vaccine uptake, pushing the European Union further ahead of the US in a process Washington once led. Today, 63.6 percent of the EU population has had at least one shot, compared with 60.4 percent in the US, and that gap is growing.’
While that certainly bodes well the Biden administration, France’s trajectory in no way guarantees the US will yield the same results. But what if the virus continues to, as the ‘experts’ say, mutate?
As Dr Fauci has often pointed out, we Americans can be a bit stubborn.
In November 2020, America’s highest paid federal employee was whining about the unsophisticated masses that make up the US to his fellow ‘top doctors’, as Biden always calls them:
‘I was talking with my UK colleagues who are saying the UK is similar to where we are now, because each of our countries have that independent spirit. I can understand that, but now is the time to do what you’re told.’
That independent spirit that Fauci is referencing used to be the envy of the world. It is why the French revolutionary Lafayette, after helping Americans defeat the British in the War of Independence, wrote back to France that, ‘Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.’
But even the protesters, the resisters and the independent spirits have their limits.
Americans outside the Acela corridor can get worn out too. Perhaps that is what Joe Biden and his minders are hoping for: that soon all the spiritual descendants of the Sons of Liberty fighters will become as physically and mentally spent as he so conspicuously is.
