Anti-Business Anti-Freedom Left Strikes Again

Their latest assault comes from left-of-the-west-coast Los Angeles.

The city of Los Angeles will begin requiring most people to provide proof of full COVID-19 vaccination before entering a wide variety of indoor businesses including salons, restaurants, gyms, museums, and theaters.

Alternatively, those with medical conditions that do not allow them to be vaccinated, or those with sincerely held religious beliefs that prevent them from being vaccinated, will be allowed to enter on presentment of a negative Wuhan Virus test done within the prior 72 hours (whose definition of “sincerely held?”). Never mind that the cost of such a test starts at $20 and that the median cost is $127. And you thought the costs at the theater concession counter were high. How’s that blowout or updo at the salon sound now? The testing requirement looks like it’s going to swamp that dinner out you thought you were going to enjoy with the family.

Notice, too, that many—most?—of the businesses in these categories are small businesses, mom-and-pop businesses, low margin businesses.

This isn’t only an assault on American businesses and American business owners, though: it’s also an assault on Americans qua Americans.

It’s a demand that we citizens give up our medical privacy and proclaim to the world what our medical status is, using only the Wuhan Virus situation—which is on the wane—as an initial step to expose all of our medical privacy.

It’s more than that, even. This vaccine mandate, and others like it, are a demand that we citizens give up an essential liberty—a liberty over which we’ve already fought one civil war—our control over our own bodies. It’s an essential liberty that the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party are trying to take away from all of us this time, not just a minority which they held and hold in contempt.

“Threats of Violence”

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, under [last week’s Senate hearing’s] questioning from [Senator Josh, (R, MO)] Hawley, said the memo is only about violence and threats of violence, and it’s the role of the FBI address those threats.

And

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a separate hearing that the Justice Department does not see parents as a threat and that the attorney general’s memo is only focused on threats and intimidation.

The FBI’s claimed responsibility in this context is to

help protect you, your children, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation—from international and domestic terrorists….

To help. Help whom? State and local police forces, acting within a State’s police powers, their authority to enforce law, are fully capable of handling “threats and intimidation;” they might need help only against domestic terrorism.

To help. Emphasis on “help.” The FBI’s claimed responsibility also is to help State and local law enforcement agencies deal with violence, not to do for the State and locals, or dictate to them, or to usurp their responsibilities.

But, if we can take Clarke’s and Monaco’s claims at face value, the only ones talking about domestic terrorism or domestic terrorists are the worthies of the National School Boards Association. Specifically, neither DoJ nor the FBI are talking about domestic terrorism, either in the Garland Memo or in those Senate hearing testimonies. Thus, there is no reason, by Garland’s own memo or those testimonies, for the FBI’s presence in these matters: with no domestic terrorism involved, there’s nothing for which the FBI need assist State and local law enforcement.

AG Merrick Garland’s memo is reprehensible, and dangerous to liberty, not because it focuses on threats of violence (which is bad enough FBI interference)—stipulate, arguendo, that that insistence is accurate—but because it exists.

Garland’s memo is reprehensible and dangerous to liberty because it is a naked attempt to usurp those States’ police powers and law enforcement capacities and arrogate them to the Federal government’s national police.