This is the old-fashioned kind of resistance, the kind that fights rather than sides with government oppression. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:
By long American tradition, protest movements manifest themselves most fully in gatherings in Washington, D.C, starting at the Washington Monument and culminating in speeches at the Lincoln Memorial. At long last, after two years of astonishing attacks on fundamental rights that most everyone once believed were protected by the U.S. Constitution, this happened today, January 23, 2022.
It didn’t just happen actually. It wasn’t spontaneous. It was paid for, planned, organized, put together, and broadcast on online media. There was nothing but sincere love of what we used to call liberty behind these efforts. The speakers, organizers, and people who showed up took huge risks in order to salvage what is left of the Founders’ vision. They deserve every credit for this. Bless them.
The enduring question is: why did it take so long? Why did people not pour out into the streets on March 13, 2020, when the government first issued its lockdown directives that were put into place the next week and lasted for months after? How is it possible that governments around the country could have locked up the churches on Easter 2020, smashed 100K-plus small businesses, and kept many schools closed for the better part of two years and yet protests against lockdowns were few, far between, and mostly unattended?
Let us not forget that “social distancing” rules were structured to “keep people separate,” in the words of the crank doctor Deborah Birx who concocted all these protocols and talked Trump into accepting them. Combined with capacity restrictions, they amounted to a ban on public meetings. In many states, you could not gather with more than 10 people. This was enforced by the police and cheered by mainstream media.
So let us not be too hard on people for not living a life of utter defiance. In addition, in those days, people were utterly shell-shocked. They feared not only the virus (which data had already shown was not a threat to most people of working age) but aIso arrest, doxxing, and shaming. The George Floyd protests got the green light from the same institutions, so people used the occasion to let off steam, but that light quickly turned red thereafter.
