A rare bit of good news in our demon-driven, dazzlingly insane America: Even Democrat governors can go too far. At least in 2023.
Yes, during the COVID panic they got away with murder. Literal negligent homicide (at best), in the case of blue state rulers like Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer and others who dumped COVID patients in nursing homes to infect and kill the most vulnerable citizens of their states. This nicely inflated the death statistics, to justify mail-in voting and vote harvesting for the 2020 races.
But robust kids and teens were caged up at home, while their grandparents in nursing homes gasped out their last breaths on ventilators, denied any farewell visitors, blessings by clergy, or even Christian burial at the end. They were bagged up and burned as medical waste, like aborted babies from clinics.
Churches were padlocked and gathered dust, while casinos, liquor stores, and abortion clinics were deemed “essential,” and throbbed with financial life.
So much for “Public Health,” a phrase that deserves only bitter laughter. Anyone who still speaks it with a straight face is either a grifter or a dupe. (Please read this essay explaining why those two words are the name for a false god we’re obliged to mock and despise.)
FBI Show Trials for Citizens it Entrapped
Those governors also got away with blatant tyranny. Whitmer violated her state’s constitution with her state of emergency locking citizens in their homes, as Michigan’s highest court ruled. Not that some stinking constitution stopped the FBI from faking a kidnapping plot against her, and recruiting hapless citizens to entrap into its plan. Thank the good lord that three of these FBI victims have just been acquitted, unlike those January 6 protestors goaded to break the law by FBI-controlled agitators.
Nobody actually tried to conduct a citizens arrest of Michigan’s tyrannical governor, except those whom the FBI aggressively lobbied and funded, in a desperate effort to create right wing “domestic terrorists” for the purpose of show trials. I wonder what our founding fathers would have done with a Royal governor who tried what Whitmer did.
Pay No Attention to the Tyrant Behind the Curtain
But at the moment, we aren’t all cowering at home in pitiful fear of a Chinese bioweapon, wearing useless face diapers when we creep out to purchase our kibble, or sticking out our arms to take an abortion-tainted experimental mRNA gene therapy.
Maybe we’re less prone to just flinching and cowering when our rulers pronounce the magic shibboleth that’s supposed to make all our constitutional and human rights disappear. When the Wizard of Oz booms: “Public … health!” some of us insist on looking behind the curtain.
A New Mexican Standoff
So when New Mexico governor declared that “gun violence” (more agitprop nonsense language) was such a threat to “public health” that by executive order she was suspending citizens’ gun rights in one of her cities, she didn’t get the reaction she expected: Servile, cringing obedience from the citizens, adoring tributes from the media, and a cascade of gift certificates for pedicures and pumpkin lattes. Instead she got what she richly deserved: defiance and scorn.
Hundreds of citizens appeared in public, peaceably displaying their weapons as permitted under actual New Mexico law. The relevant sheriff announced that he wouldn’t enforce an unconstitutional order. Even gun-grabbing undergrad David Hogg took to Twitter to denounce her ham-handedness.
America’s best news source, Revolver gloriously gloats:
New Mexico’s Attorney General, Raul Torrez, has just hung his governor out to dry. He’s made it crystal clear that he refuses to stand in defense of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham in the face of growing legal battles stemming from her draconian ban on firearm carrying. “While I acknowledge my legal responsibility as the foremost legal representative of New Mexico to provide defense when state officials are litigated against in their official roles, my primary allegiance lies in safeguarding and upholding the constitutional rights of every individual,” Torrez asserted.
Ouch. She’s on her own.
One Man Steps Forth to Embrace the Stupid
I hate to correct Revolver, but that’s not entirely accurate. There’s one institution standing stalwartly alongside Grisham in her one-woman war on the Bill of Rights: Her local Catholic church, and its Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe. Catholic News Agency reports, deadpan:
“I believe Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is correct to point out the crisis we are experiencing in Albuquerque and the County of Bernalillo,” Wester said, adding that “the number of gun deaths we witness here is deplorable and tragic. I hope we can come together in New Mexico to address this issue.”
“In my view, the governor has been consistent in addressing gun safety through legislation and is not now attacking the Second Amendment,” Wester went on. “She knows the law. Rather, I believe she is trying to get us to solve what has become a crisis in our state.”
“I do not see the governor’s call to action and discernment as a threat to the Constitution,” Wester said. “The focus should be on the sanctity of human life. That is the point.”
Remember that I reported here some months ago on a coordinated plan by leftist bishops to attack our citizens’ gun rights, led by the scandal-plagued Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark. Whenever any politician tries to cancel the Second Amendment, one of those bishops will be ready to step forward and lie about it, to suggest that owning a gun is somehow akin to aborting children, because … reasons.
Gaslighting the Sheep on Behalf of the Wolves
Nobody will be fooled by Wester’s argument. Because he doesn’t offer one. He simply, blandly states that a diktat by a governor canceling gun rights doesn’t violate the Second Amendment. This isn’t Christian teaching. It’s gaslighting, and ought to earn Wester the scorn and ridicule that (pro-choice “Catholic”) Governor Grisham is already reaping.
Where does this kind of mindless post-Christian virtue-signaling come from? That’s a long story, which I tell in my upcoming book, No Second Amendment, No First (now available for pre-order, though I’m making final updates). Here’s a sample:
Following biblical truths, we recognize that every life is unique and precious. Does that mean, at the policy level, the highest good is avoiding death at any cost?
Actually, no. If that were true, then we’d never fight any wars. We’d always decide that the price in human lives was just too high. So, we’d let bullies and tyrants (who think life is cheap) run the world. If Churchill had been a pacifist, there would have been death camps in Britain.
God didn’t tell the Jews to embrace nonviolence in the Old Testament, and Jesus never endorsed it in the New. He never told soldiers to quit the Roman army as the price of following him. He did tell us to accept personal slights (like a slap on the cheek) rather than escalate to dueling, but that’s as close to pacifism as Jesus ever got. He didn’t come to earth to contradict his Father, who’d told the Jews to fight in self-defense against — and sometimes even to conquer — truly evil regimes built on child sacrifice.
If extending every single life as long as possible were the goal, our speed limits would have to be set at 10 miles per hour, and we’d all drive rubber cars while wearing helmets. Mountain climbing, NASCAR, football, and other dangerous sports would be illegal. We’d have no death penalty, not even for murder. But we’d also have a hard time enforcing the law in the first place. No cops would carry guns.
Christian leaders (Catholic and Protestant) who make such a fetish of “safety” and “public health” that they are willing to shred our liberties … no longer believe in the Christian view of the person. They see us as hapless, occasionally naughty pets, not dignified images of God. We need to be kept in “safe environments” and compelled to make “responsible” and “sustainable” choices that protect “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
If that means the masters who rule us might decide to vaccinate, sterilize, or even euthanize us when it suits the “common good,” who are we to complain? And how?
Once we’ve let our masters pull out all of our teeth, we can’t even bite the hand that beats us.
UPDATE: Gov. Grisham has been forced to revise her order.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”