The Mom Executive Order
Your mom was right. The government should not have closed schools; you should have been able to breathe and play freely with your friends; the Covid period fear and hysteria devastated and harmed and never should have happened. Young people didn’t need Covid shots that the CDC and pharmaceutical companies knew may hurt people. Many now call for their complete cessation. In spite of masks, arbitrary six-feet distancing, isolation, and shots, the virus spread anyway.
I want that executive order. The Mom Executive Order. Trump issued Executive Orders on sex change operations and drugs; on immigration and deportations; on barring transgender people from the military; on so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; on disallowing men to play in women’s sports. After devastation and losses young people endured in the Covid period, I want the Your Mom Was Right Executive Order.
My child and others thought me crazy for moving about freely during the Covid period. Believers and enforcers condemned rogue moms like me. One mom had to place her child’s bags on the curb rather than approach the door when she drove him to visit a family member because the family member feared she was contaminated for not staying home, not wearing a mask, or not having the right thoughts about the pandemic. Because I advocated for schools remaining open, I was accused of not caring if teachers died. I have been a teacher most of my adult life.
Trump was in power for more than nine months after March 2020, when lockdowns descended. He was in charge when governments inflicted harms that the next administration continued. I had to go to work, as many did, and leave my child in the house alone, on Zoom school. Families may have fared better when parents Zoom-worked and drew good salaries while their children Zoom-schooled, and dinners were delivered. They watched movies on Netflix and church on YouTube. Income streams remained while everyone stayed cozy and at home. Stay home. Stay safe.
But those families were rare. Factory workers, garbage collectors, utility workers, farmers, drivers, firefighters, health care workers, all those who worked to keep societies fed, heated, functioning with water and electricity all still had to go work. Where were their children when schools closed? What did those children do all day? I wanted to take my child to work with me, but my child was too scared to leave the house.
Your Mom Was Right, reads the executive order of my dreams. Stay home, Stay safe, read the government propaganda. But this didn’t work for many who had to go to work or for those who needed to be among friends, in communities, to feel safe. Community is immunity, said women’s health educator and advocate Dr. Christiane Northrup during the Covid period. She kept thinking independently, as she has for decades. Domestic violence, substance abuse, mental health crises, and child sexual abuse exploded during the Covid period. Crushing policies devastated children of the poor all over the world.
“Your mom was right,” reads the executive order I’m waiting for. “Closing schools is a grave injustice,” wrote Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and others in the Great Barrington Declaration, published in October 2020, and signed by doctors and scientists all over the world. Young people and most of society should continue normal life, the document read. The media, Democratic and Republican politicians, government bureaucrats, and most of society attacked and censored the authors, calling them “fringe epidemiologists” or worse.
Now, Bhattacharya leads the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the country that leads the industrialized world. Bhattacharya spoke early in the Covid period about lockdowns’ devastating harms, especially on teens and young people. With free speech attorney Jenin Younes representing him, Bhattacharya sued the Biden administration, alleging it pressured social media companies to censor him, and now calls for critical evaluation of the Covid shots in a recent “FreeNZ” podcast.
On March 25, Congress confirmed Bhattacharya to lead the NIH, which is the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world with a budget of almost $50 billion. It funds hundreds of thousands of researchers at academic institutions and hospitals. Senator Jim Banks (R-IN) noted Bhattacharya’s independent and critical thought in the Covid period while government and CDC officials knew of vaccine harms to young people just as they intensified vaccine propaganda campaigns.
In this strange time, individuals parroted propaganda and enforced government’s power. My mom friend’s ex-husband spied on her to see if she stayed home, did not see anyone, or had anyone over, and wore a face mask. Her lack of adequate compliance contaminated her, so he told their child she was unsafe to be near. These stories were not uncommon.
“So, you know more than the CDC and all the experts?” the moms were asked.
This year, Congress issued a 550-page report, stating that schools shouldn’t have closed, masks didn’t work, healthy people should have been permitted to live normally, and that most of the restrictions were a bad idea and didn’t work. Congresspeople could have asked me – and other moms I know – and it wouldn’t have cost billions of dollars for 550 pages.
In a bizarre twist, the report also states that Operation Warp Speed, President Trump’s Covid shot program, was an overwhelming success (p. 301). The report reads like it went to the desks of Trump’s “yes” bureaucrats who said, yes, you can release this report but only if you accentuate the “blame Biden” rhetoric and amplify the message that the Warp Speed shot program was one of mankind’s greatest successes and saved millions of lives. Then we’ll sign off on it.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who treated thousands of Covid patients with early treatment drugs, would disagree with Trump’s trumpeting the success of the Covid shot program. She spoke to journalist Tucker Carlson recently, insisting Covid shots should be pulled from the market. Dr. Suzanne Humphries would also disagree with Operation Warp Speed. A practicing physician and author, Humphries has researched and written about medical history and ethics her whole career. She continued thinking independently during the Covid period. “Truth is so much more complicated than the sound bite lie,” she recently said on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Trump’s citing Operation Warp Speed as the greatest vaccine program in the history of mankind sounds like what Senator George Aiken (R-VT) said in 1966, when he described the “Declare victory and get out” strategy of getting out of the disastrous Vietnam War. Similarly, Obama planned to have all US troops in Afghanistan out by the end of 2014 because the 2009 escalation worked, though thousands of US service members and countless Afghans are dead, with the Taliban now controlling the country. The goal was to remove the Taliban.
“But because Americans don’t like to admit defeat and no administration likes to acknowledge mistakes, they have to pretend their Afghanistan policy has been a great success,” wrote Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy magazine, December 19, 2012. The Afghanistan policy failed, and so did Covid policy and vaccines. Militant polarizing of the population, groupthink, and the government’s wartime propaganda against its own people made these deadly disasters possible.
“But if we want to avoid learning the wrong lessons, it will be up to scholars, journalists, and other independent thinkers to give us a more objective appraisal of America’s longest war,” Walt writes. The same is true for the Covid “wars.” Like Trump’s Warp Speed shot program victory, Bush also declared war victory with the laughable “Mission Accomplished” banner in 2003 in the midst of the disastrous Iraq War while US service members fought and died for more than eight years following, with most of the deaths occurring after Bush’s victory speech. The country is still in shambles today.
Trump’s federal government overreach, blaming the other guy, and restricting free speech continue the Democratic Party’s same policies. Government power abuses before and during the Covid period made current power abuses more possible. They are part of the same through line, growing more virulent and more distinct.
Author James Bovard notes power abuses during the Covid period and current censorship, persecution, and arrests of government critics. “Any precedent for blanket censorship will propagate like a covid virus,” Bovard writes in his April 17 article, “Foreign Students’ Persecution Imperils any American who Advocates for Freedom” on Libertarian Ron Paul’s site. Sadly, Trump now ramps up wars and censorship while many voters regret believing his statements that he would end wars and stand for free speech. Former CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson recently issued grave warnings on Trump’s latest bombing of Yemen.
Many praise Bhattacharya’s NIH confirmation. Yet, before he even had the chance to set up his new desk, the Trump administration issued vast censorship of American scientists over Israel, as Lee Fang notes in an April 22 article, republished on www.antiwar.com. I am neither a Biden nor Trump supporter and tend to back away slowly from groups, whipped into frenzies.
Recent protestors carry perplexing signs, such as “Hands Off Democracy” after the Covid period included the largest transfer of wealth in history; a government-caused 25-percent unemployment rate in the middle of lockdowns that decimated livelihoods and closed businesses; mass censorship; government crackdowns of gatherings in our own homes; school closures; forced vaccinations and firings – all without Congressional votes, required to make laws in our democracy. I looked for protestors in the midst of Covid-period mania and destruction. Where were they?
The federal government’s power abuses have grown for decades. The so-called War on Terror, backed by the Authorization to Use Military Force legislation, has been waged for almost 25 years. It was approved by both Democrats and Republicans and granted the government free rein to perpetuate acts of war anywhere in the world at any time, without Congressional approval or oversight. Those powers still exist. The government’s declaration of the Covid period emergency similarly granted it unrestrained power. The Trump administration continues in this spirit with many good Executive Orders that restrain and cut agency power, but some that are destructive – and with capturing and imprisoning protestors. Should we be surprised?
The government’s Covid-era power abuses stunned me as those abuses invaded my home like never before, scaring my child with masking and isolating propaganda and hurting my child with school, club, and activity closures. As I opposed lockdowns, closings, and shot mandates, I had to watch my child’s losses and pain that I could not prevent. My students and many friends’ children endured major mental health crises, including suicidal ideation and weeks-long psychiatric hospitalizations. Now, officials in the highest levels of government make some of the same statements this mom, and others, made. Trump said to Congress recently that the executive orders are to restore “common sense, safety, wealth, and optimism.”
Maybe it’s time for the Your Mom Was Right executive order.