April 21, 2020
Dear Members and Coworkers,
The reaction to the kung-flu is one of the hardest things we’ve ever had to watch. Not so much the sickness itself, but the assumption of great anti-Constitutional powers that have been exerted by some governors, mayors and county commissioners. We wish they’d stop, but the outrages keep piling up. Whether closing beaches, state parks, skate parks, national parks or mom and pop businesses, apparently, we have no free moral agency left. We’ve been “ordered” to cower in our homes and presumably listen to doctors we didn’t elect tell us what we can and can’t do, where we can or cannot go. If you look into what certain governors have done in their states, whether Michigan, New Jersey or Colorado, you’d never believed any of this could happen in the United States.
We’d already seen the oil industry take a tremendous hit, with Russia and Saudi Arabia releasing a glut of production into a saturated market. Since all the industrial nations (save Sweden) ordered everyone to sit at home, no gas was being purchased. Now the price of oil has completely collapsed. Nobody ever heard of someone being paid to accept oil, until this week. That happened.
As you’ve seen, a lot of people have had about enough of state and local “authorities.” Reports say that the social media companies are banning and deleting information regarding the origins or the prospects of how many would die. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg will decide what’s true and what’s not, and not allow “dis-information” to be disseminated. “We’ll take that down,” he said. It looks like the news media, social networks and all, believe the communist Chinese are the fount of all truth. If you’ve got information to the contrary, don’t put it on facebook, they’ll delete it and probably have you on some watch list. Much like the global warming scare, “scientific models” have been created and reactions plotted. But the “scientific models” for the pandemic are just as flawed as were the ones that reality debunked over the past thirty years on climate-change, maybe worse. The newly famous doctors ruining the view on your HDTV told President Trump that 2.2 million Americans would die, and many more than that if the economy wasn’t locked down immediately.
It’s hard to imagine that he, and all but a few bought the dire warnings. But reality has shown them to be false. They cut their mortality estimates in half, and then cut them in half again, and they’re still way off. If you look into it, a Southern California study that tested the general population found that the virus had already infected hundreds of thousands of people and most of them had no idea. But they did have anti-bodies in their blood showing that they’d already developed an immunity due to recent exposure. Maybe Fox News is carrying that information, but the other mainstream networks and flagship newspapers are still fanning panic. You’d have thought the successful treatment (hydroxy-chloriquine) was all but a death sentence if you listened to them. That’s because Trump mentioned it as having promise. But the news producers already decided how this was going to go.
Since when was staying inside the healthy option? It turns out that sunshine, or even synthetic ultra-violet light kills the virus within a few minutes. You’d think that spending time outside in the warmth of Spring weather would be one of the safest things you could possibly do. But some governors don’t appreciate their orders being ignored and that’s why you’ve seen police escorting a lone beach-goer back indoors, arresting a man with his wife and daughter at a deserted park, and we don’t know the half of it.
This is a particularly odd situation. Ordinarily an unconstitutional order would be immediately challenged in court and either upheld or struck down. But they closed the courts! In several of the situations you can read about, police have done the bidding of their superiors without considering whether the “orders” run afoul of the Constitution. The New Jersey Governor, Phil Murphy, famously replied, “That’s above my pay grade. I wasn’t thinking about the Bill of Rights when we did this…We went to scientists who said people have to stay away from each other.” He, and every other public official swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. So did the police officers who enforced his “orders.” How can it be above his pay grade when loyalty to the Constitution was a provision of his accepting the job?
No doubt the national shutdown will spawn thousands of lawsuits. We’ll be hearing the results of these disputes for the rest of our days, but the courts will have to open first. Meanwhile, businesses to which people dedicated their whole lives are going under. A rash of bankruptcies will ripple throughout the U. S. economy for years to come. The rent or the mortgage can’t be paid, and landlords are told they can’t evict. You don’t suppose landlords have financial obligations too?
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the panic is the immediate, knee jerk reaction that government money must be immediately distributed to nearly everyone. Two trillion dollars overnight wasn’t enough. Since all the members of the House and Senate are on extended “quarantine,” they’re not passing additional emergency measures to bail out the population. They’ve flipped and flopped. At first some were urging everyone to visit Chinatown, you know, to fight back against the perception that it was instigated by a certain race of people. (In Italy, the population was asked to hug Chinese people to show they weren’t racist. You know the result.)
We’re under threat of arrest and prosecution if we should undertake to exercise any number of Constitutionally protected activities. They closed beaches, got the surfers out of the water and warned beach-goers that they’d better get back indoors or else. (Some inkling of sanity has been restored. We hear Florida is reopening beaches, but don’t get within six feet of strangers, or, or,…)
The “authorities” can presumably pull out all the stops in other western nations. They don’t have our Constitution. But there are some prohibitions that the “authorities” have no authority to enact here in the United States. But they don’t seem to notice. Some of the governors are issuing orders for which there is no defense. In their eyes the public has no common sense. Safety can only be guaranteed by government mandate, enforced by police, according to these power-drunk “officials.”
Are we supposed to trust the news-people after what they’ve put us through in recent years? Rarely can you believe a word of what passes for news. It’s all skewed every which way to bamboozle the vast majority of their audiences, and now they’re out to scare everybody into submission. They obviously love this situation. They’d been rooting for the economy to tank ever since the advent of President Trump. Now they’ve got their wish, and can barely contain their gayful glee. The facts? The numbers? It does little to inspire confidence when we see that the CDC (another government bureaucracy) sends out guidelines advising hospitals to call the virus the cause of death if doctors assume (their word) it was a complication. How scientific is that? What’s that do to “the numbers?”
If this doesn’t get rid of President Trump, nothing will. But they’re betting on the pandemic to finish off his presidency, after everything else they tried failed. Did he ever light them up last night! The smell of burnt hair probably fouled every mainstream studio when they heard that President Trump has by executive order banned all immigration indefinitely! They’ll start calling him and his supporters racist, as if we’ll buy it this time. They’re so unpredictable. But it’s the only whiff of good news we’ve seen in two months. If capitalism in the United States dies a painful death, so much the better as far as those coveting socialism are concerned. Hopefully the economy will be up and running again by the time you read this letter, but not if the news media has anything to say about it. If our rights are, as our founding documents state, Divinely given, then nobody can revoke them but God. Let’s all hope and pray He hasn’t.
Sincerely,
Mark Armstrong
- The monthly CD offer is for a sermon by Garner Ted Armstrong titiled, “Could Christ Have Sinned?”
