THE AMERICAN MILGRAM EXPERIMENT - 2020

First Amendment

 Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 America has suffered through deadly pandemics and epidemics for well over 200 years and our Federal, state and local governments have never violated our fundamental rights guaranteed in the 1st Amendment as they have in 2020 regarding the Covid pandemic. They have violated our freedom of speech on social media if we differ with the oficial CDC view regarding this disease. Our right to peacefully assemble by limiting the size of groups or our ability to assemble at all has been limited. Especially in church. That is unless you are a BLM or Antifa rioter. Then you get a pass. According to these petty government tyrants the disease doesn't attack anyone in Wal-Mart, Cosco, Loews or Home Depot. It only attacks people in small to medium business establishments, churches, flea markets, and entertainment venues. They must be restricted or shut down.

In the first 15 years of our existence as a country we dealt with 7 smallpox epidemics that had a death rate of 30%. Over the years we have dealt with smallpox, plague, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, and the Spanish flu, all of which had a vastly higher death rate than Covid. We even dealt with the 1968 Hong Kong flu which killed 4.5 million people worldwide and the 1958 Asian flu which killed over 100,00 people in this country and we never suspended our constitutional rights. That is until now. As someone who has reached the biblical age of threescore and ten I am in the group that is supposedly the most vulnerable but even if I get it I have a 95% chance of surviving it. The last thing I want to do is suffocate to death and yes that thought scares me. Losing our freedom scares me even more, however. Because God has blessed me with a long life I have come to the realization that there are far worse things than dying.

How did we get to a place where the government thinks that it has a right to usurp our fundamental rights and why are we letting them do it? There were three Supreme Court cases that have established the legal precedent to do this starting in 1905. These court cases have formed the legal basis for where we find ourselves today. The first was Jacobson VS. the state of Massachusetts. It was a Federal Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state. Massachusetts was one of 11 states that had mandatory vaccination laws. Pastor Henning Jacobson was an immigrant from Sweden. He had been forced to take a smallpox vaccination in Sweden which resulted in horrible complications from the shot for him and his son. They did not want to risk those complications again. This was his motivation for filing the lawsuit.

The second case was Buck VS. Bell in 1927. It was a decision of the Supreme Court written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute, permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck was an 18 year old woman who had been institutionalized by the state of Virginia. The superintendent of the institution claimed that she had the intellectual capacity of a 9 year old. She had become pregnant out of wedlock and because of this and her family history, the superintendent considered her a threat to society because of her immoral behavior. It was later revealed that Buck had not been immoral but had been raped by a family member and this was a means of saving the family reputation. The idea of eugenics was popular in the U.S. and all over the world at the time. This was the same racial theory that Margaret Sanger, and later Adolph Hitler used to justify abortion and the genocide of the mentally unfit, and the supposed racially inferior people such as the Jews and others not of Aryan birth. Because of Buck VS. Bell this ruling would lead to the forced sterilization of thousands of poor White and Black women across the nation for many years, primarily in the South.

The third case was Korematsu v. United States. This was the 1944 Supreme Court decision upholding the expulsion of American's of Japanese descent from the west coast to internment camps because of the so-called security risks thy imposed during WW2. The ultimate lesson in all three cases is that our liberties can be suspended under emergency conditions. I totally disagree with this line of thinking and you should too.

In my view America is going through a 2020 version of the Milgram experiment that was conducted in 1961 by a Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram. The purpose of the test was to see how far people would go in order to be obedient before their conscience took over. Milgram had watched the Nazi war criminal trials after WW2 and the experiment was begun in July just after the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. The common excuse for the behavior of these war criminals was that they were just following orders. There were two rooms. One room held the test administrator and the teacher who were sitting at separate desks. Then there was a second room with a person who was supposedly hooked to a machine that would administer an electric shock. This person was the learner. The teacher could not see the learner but they would ask the learner a series of questions. Whenever the learner missed a question the teacher would send an electric jolt to the learner. The first jolt was 15 volts.

What the teacher didn't know was that the learner was a paid actor and he was not actually being shocked. Only the administrator and the learner were in on the joke. As the fake voltage increased the actor would scream out in pain until he was administered 330 volts. After that he fell silent. Four hundred and fifty votes was the maximum voltage that the learner could receive. There was a random group of unsuspecting people picked to be teachers. As the screaming became more intense some of the teachers asked the administrator if they could stop the tests but the administrator would sternly tell them that they must continue with the test. Surprisingly 65% of the teachers inflicted the the full 450 volts and did as they were told. Only 35% had the moral courage to end the test.

It is frightening to me how many people are willing to tread on our liberties and how many people are willing to allow it to happen As in the Carrie Buck case and in the lab experiment we are too willing to take the words of so-called professionals or the people wearing the white lab coats. On September 15th of this year a Trump appointed Federal judge in Pennsylvania named William Stickman IV finally ruled that the Covid restrictions imposed on the people of Pennsylvania were unconstitutional. The governor could no longer restrict the size of gatherings or for that matter who gathers. Stickman ruled that the Constitution cannot accept a concept of the "new normal" where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open ended emergency mitigation measures. Ultimately this is what this presidential election is about. Whether or not we continue down this path toward freedom or lose our freedom to the totalitarian left by electing a Harris-Biden ticket.