“It’s just a mask,” they said. “How can you complain about wearing something so simple that saves lives? If you don’t want to wear it, you’re selfish and you want to kill your loved ones.”

“We’re not horrible people,” most of us thought. “It’s just a short-term precaution. We’ll wear it and all will be normal again soon.” It all seemed so simple, and it felt so foolish to resist. Why would we equate simple compliance with a medical mandate to be an assault on freedom? It was just necessary for the individual to sacrifice a little freedom for the good of the collective. And so it began.

Anyone who has seen the movie Dante’s Peak might remember the Harry Dalton character stating that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out immediately. Harry went on to say that if you put a frog in cold water and gradually increase the heat, it will sit in the water until it boils to death. The mask wasn’t the cold water, but it was a seemingly insignificant increase in temperature.

Any group wanting to control the masses isn’t stupid enough to try to strip away all freedoms at once. That would never work. A massive rebellion would ensue. However, they know that if they can erode our freedoms bit by bit and give seemingly reasonable, logical reasons for these intrusions, they can take our freedom with our blessing.

Prior to Covid-19, you probably (hopefully) would have asked how anyone could take our freedom with our blessing. The answer should now be painfully obvious: fear. Yet fear by itself would not have been enough to destroy the fiercely independent and individualistic American society in which those of us that remember life prior to 1990 grew up. There was a time when Americans valued freedom above their own lives. Somewhere along the way, that too was eroded. Somewhere along the way, we were told that life is the most precious commodity that we possess, and that preserving life is worth any cost. That was the big lie that set up the other lies. That was the beginning of the death of freedom.

Our founding fathers understood that only people willing to die for freedom could ever actually live free. They understood that no government has ever given any people freedom and that no government has ever ensured the freedom of its people. It is the nature of government and of those corruptible people that run it to curtail freedom, to regulate freedom, and to oppress the populace. Our founders knew that only the people could guarantee their own freedom from tyranny, from slavery, and from oppression. Those that fancy themselves the elite ruling class understand that as well, and they have launched a long and savage campaign to undermine it. Sadly, they have succeeded.

Thus, after convincing us that our lives are paramount to all else, it was easy for them to perpetrate fear campaign after fear campaign to manipulate us into giving up our freedom. I do not know exactly when these fear campaigns and the erosion of our freedoms began. The earliest that I can recall would be just at the beginning of my adult life when the Clinton administration set its sights on the Second Amendment. Americans rebelled against the assault weapon ban, and soon afterwards Columbine happened. This launched what seems to me to be the first fear campaign, and on the back of this fear, lawmakers cried for “reasonable” gun control laws for the good of the collective and denounced staunch 2A defenders as right-wing extremists and domestic terrorists.

Shortly after Columbine, the September 11th attacks occurred, and the nation sat stunned as thousands of our civilians were murdered. We mourned with the families that lost loved ones and we cheered the heroics of first responders at ground zero. We swelled with pride as we wept at the story of Flight 93 and the brave men and women that refused to sit idly by as terrorists crashed them into a government building. Even as we swore to never forget, we eagerly accepted the Patriot Act for the good of the collective and for our own personal safety.

In the two decades that followed September 11, 2001, we were inundated with fear campaigns. Mass shootings, terror attacks, threats of terror attacks, the swine flu, and the SARS pandemic to name a few. All these campaigns chipped away at our sense of security and at our feelings of safety. We were so used to security and affluence that we had little of the grit, determination and self-reliance that earmarked the World War II generation. We gladly ceded the weight of these problems to those chosen to represent us with a blind naivete that is embarrassing in hindsight, and we resumed our lives of self-indulgence and excess. We ranted and bickered over the way those men and women represented us, but we took no real responsibility for our own safety and our own freedom. The void that was left allowed those chosen to represent us to maneuver themselves into a position where they began to rule us more and more.

This just set the stage for 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic. I’ll not get into any conspiracy theories regarding the pandemic in this post. What I will point out is that this was the single largest fear campaign that any of us born after 1960 in the United States can recall. Even taking the CDC’s numbers at face value during 2020, the survival rate was greater than 97%. When removing the senior citizen deaths from the equation, the survival rate was nearly 100%. As of October 1, 2021, the CDC website reports that the number of Covid-19 cases in the US is 43,289,203 and the number of deaths is 694,701. That is a death rate of 1.604%. Globally, the numbers are 233,136,147 cases with 4,771,408 deaths for a total death rate of 2.046%.

We should all ask ourselves if a global death rate of 2.046% is worth forcing everyone to wear masks against their will in public places. We should ask if it is worth forcing people to take an experimental chemical concoction into their bodies against threat of loss of livelihood, threat of loss of access to healthcare, and threat of loss of basic freedoms like traveling and attending public events. We should ask ourselves if we think the encroachment on freedom will end with this pandemic or if there will be some new emergency that requires more freedom to be taken away. We should ask ourselves how much is too much for them to take. At what point do we draw the line and say no more? We should also study history for evidence of any government that has, of its own volition and without revolt or revolution, restored freedoms to its populace once it has taken those freedoms away.

We’ve become so accustomed to our freedom that we take it for granted and we think that no one will ever want to or be able to take it away. That complacency will lead to our enslavement to the oligarchy of the so-called elites that think they can and should rule the rest of us. Maybe it is too late now and maybe the course is set. Maybe we have no chance of winning our freedom back. That doesn’t mean that we must live as slaves. We can choose to fight back no matter the odds. We can choose to never bend the knee no matter the consequences. We can choose to die free rather than live a slave. The simple truth that all tyrants fear is that no one can truly take our freedom without our consent and participation. The powers of the state may loom large and seem insurmountable. The state may hold the power of life and death, but the state can never take the only true freedom any of us really has: the freedom to choose. When we understand that all other freedoms are predicated on our freedom to choose between life as a slave or death as a free person, we will unlock a power that all tyrants fear. A ruling class is nothing without a subjugated group to rule. Never forget the words of Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death.”