Curfews and Common Sense

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, Governor Newsom made a groundbreaking discovery regarding COVID-19 last week. Apparently, it has learned to tell time. Thus, acting under the strictest of scientific standards, he has ordered Californians to run home before 10 p.m., lock their doors, and hide from this insidious virus until daybreak.

Unfortunately, COVID doesn't seem to be following the curfew, so Newsom is now threatening yet another hard lockdown of virtually the entire State throughout the Christmas season. Don we now our plague apparel.

There is just one nagging question the Governor hasn't bothered to answer. If these lockdowns are so successful, why do we need to keep having them?

Now, we are told not to worry. We are cheerfully assured that the jobs that are being destroyed are nonessential. That is their term, nonessential.

Well, I have news for these self-absorbed elitists. If a job is putting food on your table and a roof over your head that job is essential for you and the family that depends upon you.

Last spring, I asked Anthony Fauci if he had taken into account the human cost of these lockdowns, the suicides, the drug and alcohol abuse, the domestic violence, the deferred health screenings and treatments, and the poverty related deaths that his policies were setting into motion. No, we really haven't considered that, he breezily replied.

Don't know, don't care.

But before Fauci and his followers took a wrecking ball to our Nation, poverty had dropped to its lowest rate since 1959. Unemployment was the lowest in 50 years. The income gap was narrowing. Wages showed their strongest growth in 40 years.

How many millions of these jobs have now been wantonly destroyed by autocratic officials who seem oblivious to the damage that they are causing?

Now, according to the CDC's best estimate, those under 50 have a 99.98 percent chance of recovering from COVID, if they get it at all; 99.98 percent. And 40 percent who get it don't even know they have it.

Even for the most vulnerable group, over 70, the survival rate is 94.6 percent.

Now, Sweden did not force its businesses to close. Sweden didn't shut down its schools and abandon its children to the streets. Sweden didn't even adopt a mask mandate.

Sweden did what free societies do; they gave the best advice they could, and they trusted their citizens to use their own good judgment of what measures made sense to them.

The result? Well, as of this morning, Sweden's mortality rate from COVID is 154 deaths per million below that of the United States. If we had Sweden's rate, that would mean over 50,000 fewer American deaths from COVID.

Meanwhile, Sweden has sustained a fraction of the economic damage that our lockdown leftists have inflicted on innocent Americans. Globally, the United Nations warns that 130 million people will starve to death around the world because of the economic damage caused by these measures.

Mr. Speaker, this has to stop. The good news is that more and more Americans are questioning the lunacy of these policies and the hypocrisy of those who impose them. Newsom's curfew order was met with spontaneous defiant demonstrations across the State. Elected sheriffs are increasingly refusing to enforce these autocratic orders. Pastors are reopening their churches. Businesses are reopening, even as their owners are taken away in handcuffs.

All mass hysterias are driven by blind fear, fanned by politicians and charlatans who see opportunity in them. And we have, sadly, learned that such fear can cause a free people to abandon their legacy of freedom and independence, their prosperity, and their common sense, but only for a while.

Every time in history that this has happened, there is always a moment when the fear fever breaks, and the hysteria suddenly burns itself out. The French Revolution, the Salem witch trials, the Communist hysteria of the 1950s all had a moment when the absurdity of it all became so apparent that it overcame the fear and the people turned on their tormentors.

Now, I don't know if the recent wave of business and religious persecutions, the unlimited home detention orders, and the demonstrated hypocrisy of those who have ordered them signals that moment. But every shopkeeper who defies these petty tyrants, every parent who confronts their school officials, every person who refuses to submit to the dysfunctional dystopian world created by the lockdown left brings us one step closer to that turning point. It can't come soon enough.

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