{"id":20979,"date":"2024-10-28T20:40:48","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T00:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=20979"},"modified":"2024-10-28T20:43:52","modified_gmt":"2024-10-29T00:43:52","slug":"history-rhymes-freedom-from-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/28\/history-rhymes-freedom-from-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"History Rhymes: Freedom from Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>History Rhymes: Freedom from Fear<\/a><\/h1>\n
By \"JamesJames Bovard<\/span><\/a> <\/span>\u00a0 October 25, 2024\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

“Freedom from fear\u201d was a prime justification for many of the most oppressive Covid pandemic policies. As Georgetown University Law professor Lawrence Gostin declared in late 2021, \u201cCOVID-19 vaccines are a remarkable scientific tool that enables society to live in greater freedom and with less fear. Using every tool\u2014including mandates\u2014to achieve high vaccination coverage enhances freedom<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

While many Covid vaccine skeptics were astounded to see the intellectual contortions of mandate advocates, \u201cfreedom from fear\u201d has been a favorite invocation of political charlatans for almost a century. Providing \u201cfreedom from fear\u201d has become one of the most frequent political promises in this century.<\/p>\n

Politicians routinely portray freedom from fear as the apex of freedom, higher than the specific freedoms buttressed by the Bill of Rights. While presidents have defined \u201cfreedom from fear\u201d differently, the common thread is that it requires unleashing government agents. Reviewing almost a century of bipartisan invocations on freedom from fear provides good cause to doubt the next bombast on the subject.<\/p>\n

\u201cFreedom from fear\u201d first entered the American political pantheon thanks to a January 1941 speech by President Franklin Roosevelt. In that State of the Union address<\/a>, he promised citizens freedom of speech and freedom of worship\u2014two cornerstones of the First Amendment\u2014and then added socialist-style \u201cfreedom from want\u201d and \u201cfreedom from fear.\u201d FDR\u2019s revised freedoms did not include freedom to dissent, since he said the government would need to take care of the \u201cfew slackers or trouble makers in our midst.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor did FDR\u2019s improved freedoms include the freedom not to be rounded up for concentration camps, as FDR ordered for Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Three years later, FDR amended his definition of freedom by championing a Universal Conscription Act to entitle government to the forced labor of any citizen.<\/p>\n

Richard Nixon, in his acceptance speech<\/a> at the 1968 Republican National Convention, promised, \u201cWe shall re-establish freedom from fear in America so that America can take the lead in re-establishing freedom from fear<\/a> in the world.\u201d Nixon asserted: \u201cThe first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence, and that right must be guaranteed in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

But with the Nixon scorecard, government violence didn\u2019t count. He perpetuated the war in Vietnam, resulting in another 20,000 American soldiers pointlessly dying.\u00a0 On the home front, he created the Drug Enforcement Administration and appointed the nation\u2019s first drug czar. The FBI perpetuated its COINTELPRO program, carrying out \u201ca secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order<\/a>,\u201d as a 1976 Senate report noted.<\/p>\n

President George H.W. Bush told the National Baptist Convention on September 8, 1989: \u201cToday freedom from fear\u2026means freedom from drugs.\u201d To boost public fear, a DEA informant arranged for a knucklehead to sell crack cocaine<\/a> to an undercover narc in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Bush invoked<\/a> the sale a few days later to justify a national crackdown. Bush informed the American Legion: \u201cToday I want to focus on one of those freedoms: freedom from fear\u2014the fear of war abroad, the fear of drugs and crime at home. To win that freedom, to build a better and safer life, will require the bravery and sacrifice that Americans have shown before and must again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Foremost among the sacrifices that Bush demanded was that of traditional liberties. His administration vastly expanded federal power to arbitrarily confiscate Americans\u2019 property and boosted the role of the US military in domestic law enforcement. In a 1992 speech dedicating a new DEA office building, Bush declared, \u201cI am delighted to be here to salute the greatest freedom fighters any nation could have, people who provide freedom from violence and freedom from drugs and freedom from fear.\u201d The DEA\u2019s own crime sprees, corruption, and violence were not permitted to impede Bush\u2019s victory lap.<\/p>\n

On May 12, 1994, President Bill Clinton declared: \u201cFreedom from violence and freedom from fear are essential to maintaining not only personal freedom but a sense of community in this country.\u201d Clinton banned so-called assault weapons and sought to ban 35 million semi-automatic firearms. Gun bans in response to high crime rates mean closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. Citizens would presumably have nothing to fear after they were forced to abjectly depend on government officials for their own survival.<\/p>\n

In February 1996, Clinton, seeking conservative support for his reelection campaign, endorsed forcing children to wear uniforms at public schools. Clinton justified the fashion dictate: \u201cEvery one of us has an obligation to work together, to give our children freedom from fear and the freedom to learn.\u201d But, if mandatory uniforms were the key to ending violence, Postal Service employees would have a lower homicide rate.<\/p>\n

George W. Bush, like his father, alternated promising \u201cfreedom from fear\u201d with shameless fear-mongering. <\/strong>Prior to Election Day 2004, the Bush administration continually issued terror attack warnings based on flimsy or no evidence. The New York Times<\/em> derided the Bush administration in late October for having \u201cturned the business of keeping Americans informed about the threat of terrorism into a politically scripted series of color-coded scare sessions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet each time a terror alert was issued, the president\u2019s approval rating rose temporarily by roughly three percent, according to a Cornell University study. The Cornell study found a \u201chalo effect:\u201d the more terrorists wanted to attack America, the better job Bush was supposedly doing. People who saw terrorism as the biggest issue in the 2004 election voted for Bush by a 6-to-1 margin.<\/p>\n

The most memorable Bush campaign ad<\/a>, released just before the election, opened in a thick forest, with shadows and hazy shots complementing the foreboding music. After vilifying Democratic candidate John Kerry, the ad showed a pack of wolves reclining in a clearing. The voiceover concluded, \u201cAnd weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm\u201d as the wolves began jumping up and running toward the camera. At the end of the ad, the president appeared and announced: \u201cI\u2019m George W. Bush and I approve this message.\u201d<\/p>\n

One liberal cynic suggested that the ad\u2019s message was that voters would be eaten by wolves if Kerry won. Pat Wendland, the manager of Wolves Offered Life and Friendship, a Colorado wolf refuge in Colorado, complained: \u201cThe comparison to terrorists was insulting. We have worked for years, teaching people that Little Red Riding Hood lied.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bush\u2019s campaign to terrify voters into granting him four more years to rule America did not deter him from announcing in his 2005 State of the Union<\/a> address: \u201cWe will pass along to our children all the freedoms we enjoy, and chief among them is freedom from fear.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 2020 presidential race, Democratic candidate Joe Biden personally blamed President Donald Trump for every one of the 220,000 Covid deaths in the nation. Biden had a simple promise based on a simple message: \u201cPeople want to be safe.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 And the only way to survive was to put Uncle Joe in the White House and unleash him.<\/p>\n

Biden ran one of the most fear-based presidential campaigns in modern history. Biden talked as if every American family had lost a member or two from this pestilence. He routinely exaggerated Covid death tolls a hundredfold or a thousandfold, publicly asserting that millions of Americans had already been killed by Covid-19. Biden was helped mightily by fear-mongering media coverage. CNN ramped up the fear with a Covid Death Counter always on the screen. But the death count was statistical garbage. Individuals who died of gunshot wounds were counted as Covid deaths if a postmortem showed any Covid trace.<\/p>\n

A Brookings Institution analysis noted: \u201cDemocrats are much more likely than Republicans to overestimate [Covid] harm. Forty-one percent of Democrats\u2026answered that half or more of those infected by COVID-19 need to be hospitalized.\u201d At that time, the rate of hospitalization was between 1% and 5%, but Democratic voters overestimated the risk up to twentyfold. A CNN exit poll found that the \u201crecent rise in coronavirus cases\u201d was the most important factor for 61% of Biden voters. Biden won the presidency as a result of only 43,000 votes in three swing states.<\/p>\n

In June 2021, Biden proclaimed that everyone must get a Covid vaccine so that America could have \u201cfreedom from fear.\u201d<\/a> He said that people should \u201cexercise your freedom\u201d to get vaccinated with a drug approved on an emergency basis six months earlier. He declared: \u201cWe need everyone across the country to pull together [i.e., submit] to get us over the finish line.\u201d The following month, Biden promised that anyone who got the injection would not get or transmit Covid. After the government coverup of failing vaccine efficacy collapsed, far more people balked at getting the shot. Biden responded by dictating a \u201cget the jab or lose your job\u201d mandate for 100 million American adults. (The Supreme Court later struck down most of that mandate.)<\/p>\n

\u201cFreedom from fear\u201d apparently requires maximizing hatred of anyone who fails to submit. In an October 2021 CNN town hall, Biden derided vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted \u201cthe freedom to kill you\u201d with Covid. Biden continued to proclaim that Covid was an \u201cepidemic of the unvaccinated\u201d long after government data revealed that most individuals who caught Covid were vaccinated. NIH posted a 2022 article that blamed \u201cfearmongering and scare tactics\u201d by anti-vaccine activists for the reported adverse side effects of Covid vaccines.<\/p>\n

A 2022 Rasmussen poll found that 59% of Democratic voters favored house arrest for the unvaccinated, and 45% favored locking the unvaxxed into government detention facilities. Almost half of Democrats favored empowering government to \u201cfine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing Covid-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.\u201d\u00a0 A massive covert federal censorship regime was also deployed to suppress criticism of Covid policies or even jokes about Covid vaccines.<\/p>\n

For his reelection campaign, Biden milked \u201cfreedom from fear\u201d in a Pennsylvania speech on what he labeled \u201cthe third anniversary of the Insurrection<\/a> at the United States Capitol.\u201d Biden planned to turn the November 2024 election into a referendum on Adolf Hitler, accusing Donald Trump of \u201cechoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.\u201d CNN reported that Biden campaign aides planned to go \u201cfull Hitler\u201d on Trump. Biden spent half an hour fear-mongering and then closed by promising \u201cfreedom from fear.\u201d This was the famous Biden two-step<\/a>\u2014demagoguing to his heart\u2019s content and then closing with schmaltzy uplift lines, entitling the media to rechristen him as an idealist.<\/p>\n

Biden did not survive the Democrats\u2019 version of the \u201cNight of the Long Knives\u201d and Vice President Kamala Harris was designated the party\u2019s presidential flag-bearer. Harris painted with an even broader brush than Biden. At a Juneteenth Concert this summer, she condemned Republicans for a \u201ca full-on attack\u201d on \u201cthe freedom from fear of bigotry and hate.\u201d Harris implied that politicians could wave a psychological magic wand to banish any bias in perpetuity.\u00a0 How can anyone have \u201cfreedom from fear of bigotry\u201d unless politicians perpetually control everyone\u2019s thoughts?<\/p>\n

In August, the Democratic National Convention whooped up freedom in ways that would qualify as \u201cauthentic frontier gibberish,\u201d as the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles<\/em> would say. A campaign video promised \u201cfreedom from control, freedom from extremism and fear.\u201d So Americans won\u2019t have true freedom until politicians forcibly suppress any idea they label as immoderate? The Democratic Party platform<\/a> warned: \u201cReproductive freedom, freedom from hate, freedom from fear, the freedom to control our own destinies and more are all on the line in this election.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the whole point of politics nowadays is to preempt individuals from controlling their own destinies. Hillary Clinton told the convention crowd that, thanks to the cracks in the glass ceiling, she could see \u201cfreedom from fear and intimidation.\u201d Hillary also boasted of seeing \u201cfreedom to make our own decisions about our health\u201d\u2014after everybody shuts up and gets Covid Booster #37, presumably.<\/p>\n

\u201cFreedom from fear\u201d is the ultimate political blank check. The more people government frightens, the more legitimate dictatorial policies become.\u00a0 Pledging \u201cfreedom from fear\u201d entitles politicians to seize power over anything that frightens anyone. Giving politicians more power based on people\u2019s fears is like giving firemen pay raises based on how many false alarms they report.<\/p>\n

Politicians\u2019 promises of \u201cfreedom from fear\u201d imply that freedom properly understood is a risk-free, worry-free condition. It is the type of promise that a mother would make to a young child. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham epitomized that mindset when she proclaimed at the Democratic National Convention: \u201cWe need a president who can be Consoler-in-Chief. We need a president capable of holding us in a great big hug.\u201d And continuing to hold us until we officially become psychological wards of the State?<\/p>\n

\u201cFreedom from fear\u201d offers freedom from everything except the government. Anyone who sounds the alarm about excessive government power will automatically be guilty of subverting freedom from fear. Presumably, the fewer inviolable rights the citizen has, the better government will treat him. But as John Locke warned more than 300 years ago, \u201cI have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why not simply offer voters \u201cfreedom from the Constitution?\u201d \u201cFreedom from fear\u201d means security via mass delusions about the nature of political power. Painting the motto \u201cfreedom from fear\u201d on shackles won\u2019t make them easier to bear. Perhaps our ruling class should be honest and replace the Bill of Rights with a new motto: \u201cPolitical buncombe will make you free.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

An earlier version<\/a> of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History Rhymes: Freedom from Fear By James Bovard \u00a0 October 25, 2024 “Freedom from fear\u201d was a prime justification for many of the most oppressive Covid pandemic policies. As Georgetown University Law professor Lawrence Gostin declared in late 2021, \u201cCOVID-19 vaccines are a remarkable scientific tool that enables society to live in greater freedom and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2124,10,51,2349,236,4393],"class_list":["post-20979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biden","tag-bush","tag-clinton","tag-covid","tag-fdr","tag-fear-lying"],"yoast_head":"\nHistory Rhymes: Freedom from Fear - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Covid crackdowns epitomized absurd "freedom from fear" policies\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/28\/history-rhymes-freedom-from-fear\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"History Rhymes: Freedom from Fear - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20981,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20979\/revisions\/20981"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}