The great H.L. Mencken reportedly said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” While it’s hard to believe he didn’t have the Biden family finances in mind, it still serves as an apt warning for another round of handwringing over the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Just last week, Americans were hit with a one-two punch from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as both agencies urged another round of booster shots “for all Americans ages six months and older.”

The same FDA (which has no business dispensing medical advice, only safety data) that took fifty years to figure out the decongestant phenylephrine doesn’t really work. But it can cause high blood pressure. Regardless, for Pfizer and Moderna, the new jabs for a never-ending stream of annual COVID-19 variants are called profit centers.

Yet, this time not everyone is going along. The public seems willing to buck the compliance conformity and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has thankfully decided to buck the CDC, citing a lack of “sufficient clinical evidence” for the latest shots in people under the age of 65. (RELATED: FORMER REP. JASON LEWIS: If The Special Counsel Can Indict Trump For His ‘Lies,’ Then Why Not The Partisan Press?)

And for good reason. The CDC itself has been forced to recommend that all doctors consider myocarditis in otherwise healthy patients who report chest pains and had prior mRNA COVID vaccinations. Meantime, Dr. Anthony Fauci is busy walking back history after smearing a host of epidemiological colleagues who were right all along about ‘herd immunity.’

“If you get vaccinated,” whispered Joe Biden, “you won’t get COVID.” An obvious lie that should have been put to rest when the octogenarian kept testing positive for the virus. Even Dr. Deborah Birx noted that “fifty percent of the people who died from the Omicron surge were all older, vaccinated.”

A stark reversal from coronavirus task force member, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who had declared that, “with the Omicron variant, kids are either going to get the vaccine or they’re likely to get a serious condition.”

You can see why the Biden administration is panicking. After all, it fully understands the hysteria over COVID, fueled by media malfeasance, got ‘ol Joe in the White House in the first place. I saw it in real time and tried to warn folks in 2020 while running for the U.S. Senate.

Now comes a three-judge panel at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling Big Tech censors can’t follow the dictates of government ones without abridging First Amendment protections. Especially since the defendants not only “continued to take down content the officials flagged, and provided requested data to the White House, but they also changed their moderation policies expressly in accordance with the officials’ wishes” in order to show that “stronger demotions in particular should deliver real impact.“

The stinging rebuke highlighting what everyone knew to be true hasn’t dissuaded the Biden administration from using government coercion, however. It immediately demanded the high court block the appellate court decision.¹³ Then the White House Pretorian Guard sent out a media memo “urging news outlets to ramp up scrutiny of the House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Biden.”

Well, why not?

Literally, just about every news outlet imaginable carried water for the ‘new normal.’ They still are, ask Woody Harrelson. When the lefty actor brought up his sarcastic criticism of Big Pharma on Saturday Night Live, ‘progressive’ mouthpieces from Rolling Stone to the Daily Beast to Huffpost labeled their former comrade an ‘anti-vaxx conspiracist.’

Yes, the same ‘journalists’ who denied SARS-CoV-2 could have originated with a Wuhan gain-of-function “laboratory-associated incident.”¹⁶ Hell, you weren’t even supposed to call it a ‘Chinavirus,’ though geography was how we used to name them. The media mocked conventional off-label treatments, over-counted COVID-related deaths and promoted vaccines whose manufacturers were advertising on their programs.

The whole damn thing was one big Psy Op.

Nowhere was the incestuous relationship between government and the press more pronounced than in Minnesota. When a power-drunk Governor Tim Walz announced statewide mask mandates, the observable data was already accumulating on how ineffective, actually useless, the practice would turn out to be.¹⁸ Nevertheless, Walz’s economic development commissioner, Steve Grove, sent off sample letters to business leaders suggesting they submit the pro-mandate agitprop to newspapers, such as the Star Tribune.

“Your support for wearing masks,” wrote the former Google executive, “is critical toward ensuring adoption.” Steve Grove, in case you’re wondering, is now the CEO and publisher of the pro-Walz Star Tribune.

Hey, if we can’t sue the vaccine makers or Big Tech, maybe we should all bring a Section 1983 lawsuit charging the media for abridging our civil liberties by ‘defrauding the United States’ in their role as ‘state actors’ under the color of law.

Lockdowns and masking were more than drastic public health measures. As Justice Neil Gorsuch put it, “Since March of 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” And the costs have been catastrophic.

A study at Johns Hopkins was one of over 400 that found “no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

They did have an effect, however, on overdose deaths, suicide rates and the “prevalence of persistent sadness among teenage girls in the U.S.,” which, according to the CDC, ironically enough, “hit an all-time high.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services now suggests routine screenings for ‘anxiety.’ (RELATED: MATTHYS: The CDC’s ‘Reset’ Shows Just How Dangerous Government Narratives Can Be)

Academically, the post-pandemic NAEP Report Cards confirm that the quarantining of elementary and secondary students was a calamitous disaster. Colleges and universities pulled a bait and switch that would have made Charles Ponzi envious. Administrators lured students back with full tuition rates and then, once they got to campus, shut down classrooms.

Now they’re flirting with it again?

But the damage far exceeded a student’s GPA. It was an inexcusable exercise in dystopia, and I shared my own frustration in “Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press“:

Imagine taking someone mired in loneliness and telling them to isolate in their rooms, left to the poison of social media algorithms so often used to traumatize young adults.

The lockdown lobby deliberately abandoned an entire generation for political gain. Who does this? How many formative years in high school and college were now forever gone? How many futures destroyed, how many dreams dashed? What these public health bureaucrats, politicians and media did to kids wasn’t a public policy mistake—it was a scandal.

God may forgive the ‘grown-ups’ who did this, but the rest of us won’t.

The latest push reveals the defining characteristic of the new fascist left. That is, they are not going to stop until someone makes them. It’s gaslighting on a level heretofore not seen in America. How else would you explain the farce of ESPN awarding tennis great and U.S. Open champ Novak Djokovic—who refused the jab and was subsequently banned from competing by shameless authoritarians around the globe—‘The Moderna Shot of the Day.’

But nothing’s absurd unless brave people say it’s so.

Former Congressman Jason Lewis is the author of “Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics and the Partisan Press.” He also writes at jasonlewis.substack.com.

This article was originally published on the author’s Substack page, which can be viewed here.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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