This week, President Trump posthumously pardoned Susan B. Anthony for her illegal voting conviction. In spite of the absurdity of his tribal partisan opponents (who would drink rat poison if Mr. Trump suggested he was anti-rodenticide) complaining about it, I thought it was a neat way to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment. There is a time and place for a little political and historical theatre in any government, and the pardon drew attention to Anthony’s ultimately successful civil disobedience tactics. The noblest parts of American history are these fights against stupid and unjust laws, great and small.

Of course, the history of our country is also rife with hypocrisy and people failing to live up to their own philosophical ideals, and Susan B. Anthony, being only human after all, certainly fit into that category. Like many suffragettes, she was a proponent of Prohibition, and indeed, those two political causes were purposefully linked in her time. 

As we all now know, Prohibition was the epitome of a stupid regulation, making outlaws of ordinary Americans for whom alcohol (and the establishments which served drinks) were an integral part of their culture and history. Instead of creating a more righteous, healthy, and sober society, crime (both real and regulatory) increased along with the size and power of the government’s police power. And while alcoholism without a doubt carries a social cost, banning liquor certainly did nothing to curb the allure of alcohol or clubs to socialize in, or to otherwise solve the social problems blamed on booze.

The terrible and deadly temptation of progressivism, then and now, is the idea that with enough laws and central planning by experts (who often have more credentials than wisdom) a perfect society can be forced into existence. Such plans never survive contact with actual human beings.

***

We are now engaged in the biggest experiments in prohibition in a century. Like the failed test of one hundred years ago, it is all in the name of public health, and the “progressives” couch their language in terms of collective duties to our neighbors. Once again – those in power seek to use the moment to expand their reach, while pitting us against each other by extolling snitches and making criminals out of people just trying to live their lives.

And it is once again backfiring badly.

It was frankly hilarious to read the news that the new scourge of society in the age of COVID is (gasp) house parties. I mean, who could have possibly predicted that human beings, as the inherently social animal that we are, would get together with other human beings just as we always have in the only venue remaining open to us?  

What is less hilarious are the ominous warnings that “other measures” may be needed to curb this behavior. Or that bars remain inexplicably closed (if you can sit an eat without a mask, there ought to be no problem sitting and drinking) which hurts the economy while doing exactly zero to stop the spread of COVID. At this point, these penny-ante tyrant measures have no basis in common sense, but are merely action for the sake of action, like rubbing rabbit’s feet or continuing to rely on the TSA at airports. It’s public health theatre, and every day, more and more people see it for what it is and righteously flout it.

Even the mask mandates no longer hold up to that common sense. The CDC recently came out warning that masks with exhale vents do nothing to curb the spread of COVID, because they allow particles to be breathed out into the air. Well, duh. But every single mask has these vents – unless you’re wearing a form-fitting N95 (or a full on gas mask), those “vents” are also known as “sides,” “bottoms,” and “tops.”  The more we learn and observe about this particular virus, the sillier and sillier smug exhortations to wear masks in the name of “freedom” or “social responsibility” really are.

Science is about predictions — we develop theories based on limited data, and see if the models are predictive when compared to the real world. In the case of masks, many of the theories are based on lab tests where people are studying air flow and water droplet transmission through X material. If you’re talking about a potentially deadly disease, it’s scary to try those experiments out in the field.

Except that people, being people, are already field testing the “expert” theories, and have been doing it for months now. The first one was before COVID was on most people’s radar at all — it was already likely prevalent in many communities in February or even earlier. The result?  No mass casualty event, no overwhelmed hospitals, no widespread panic, and no economic calamity before the economy was deliberately shut down.

The next big ones were the “mostly peaceful” protests which are still going on in major cities around the country. The result?  Once again, no mass casualty events, no need for hospital ships, etc., although there continues to be, of course, the negative side effect of millions of dollars in damage to buildings and public infrastructure.

Not to rat anyone out, but I happen to know that the house parties large and small that our local public health officials are so panicked about have been happening with tremendous frequency, and for quite a while now. If people getting together to enjoy some beverages or a meal with their families was going to cause mass death, it would have already happened.

But the ultimate test has been in my home state of South Dakota. Last week, nearly half a million bikers gathered from all over the world in a small town for the 80^th Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. South Dakota has never had a mask mandate, and never ordered businesses to close. They ended their fiscal year with a budget surplus, and are going back to school. 

The rally officially began on August 7^th, although many thousands of the vendors and even participants always start showing up the week prior. Through the week, bars were full, people were social without the distancing, spectators gathered en masse to watch races, and hardly a mask was to be seen. Participants came from all over the country, and I doubt there was much in the way of contact tracing. And having grown up with the rally in my back yard every summer, I can say with confidence that a lot of the bikers, shall we say, possess one or more common risk factors associated with higher risk of death from COVID.

And yet, once again, no mass casualties, no overrun prairie hospitals, no piles of dead bikers were evident on the streets. It’s been long enough that we would have started to see it by now if it was going to happen. And yet, when 460,000 people got together and did all the things that the experts claim will surely doom us all, doom once more failed to cooperate. 

One can quibble with the wisdom of such unplanned social experiments before people undertake them of their own free will. But at this point, it’s irresponsible to ignore that the apocalyptic predictions have failed to come true every single time. There seems to be no correlation between draconian lockdowns or mask mandates and COVID’s mortality rate. (In countries where terribly stringent shutdowns were the order of the day and “victory” was claimed, up pops the virus as soon as those North Korea-esque restrictions let up.)  

And while the risk of COVID is certainly real, it is nevertheless vastly overestimated by the general public while too many prohibitionist public officials participate in the fear mongering, and downplay or ignore the greater risks to the fabric of our culture and our society that disease mitigation efforts continue to cause.

It truly is time to pull ourselves together, and stop simply accepting these absurd and counter-productive regulations that destroy our liberty while doing little or nothing useful to improve public health.

***

Susan B. Anthony refused to pay her fine or recognize her conviction because she refused to acknowledge that the government had the power to prohibit her from voting in the first place. She was right, and her courage and peaceful and principled civil disobedience with respect to universal suffrage led to a more just and inclusive society. It would have been even better had the expansion of the vote come without the Karens of her day trying to shut down the speakeasies and empowering the Mob.

It’s time for us to learn these lessons of history, and stop meekly acquiescing to power that government doesn’t and shouldn’t have. Endless emergency orders which keep our economy strangled and our necessary government institutions from courts to the Legislature to the DMV at arms length from the public they’re supposed to serve harm us far more than any virus. It’s time to reassert our rights as citizens of a free state and country, and end this newest and more pervasive “progressive” prohibition.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a criminal defense attorney in Reno. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].