As we consider the unprecedented bludgeoning of our Constitution over the past two years, it’s worth pausing to remember the smallpox epidemic that stalled Washington’s army during the Revolution and the malaria contagion that culled the Army of Virginia. Though both alerted the Framers to the deadly and disruptive potential of infectious disease epidemics, the Framers nevertheless opted to include no pandemic exception to the United States Constitution.
Yet today, the pandemic is being used to create a string of new exceptions to our Constitution. We are given just one rationale to explain everything that is happening: COVID. For just a brief moment, let’s look away from the ostensible reason things are happening, and focus instead on what is happening.
Those controlling the levers of power vilify dissenters and punish every attempt at questioning, skepticism, and debate. Like all tyrants in history, they ban books, silence artists, condemn writers, poets, and intellectuals who question the new orthodoxies. They have outlawed gatherings and forced citizens to wear masks that instill fear and divide communities, and atomized any sense of solidarity by preventing the most subtle and eloquent nonverbal communication for which God and evolution gave humans forty-two facial muscles.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.