COVID Changed My Understanding of What the US actually Is.

COVID Changed My Understanding of What the U.S. Constitution actually Is.

Not what it was founded to be. I know what it was founded to be. It is written down. It has been written down for two hundred and forty years in language so precise and so hard-won that every generation since has had to actively choose to honour it or actively choose to betray it.

What COVID changed is my understanding of which choice this generation made.

Let me lay it out plainly.

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The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States prohibits Congress from making any law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. It does not say that these rights are suspended during emergencies. It does not say that a public health agency may determine which speech is permitted and which constitutes a hazard to be suppressed. It does not say that the government may instruct private platforms to silence physicians, scientists, and citizens who are asking questions about medical products the government is actively promoting.

It says Congress shall make no law.

Between 2020 and 2023, the United States government coordinated with social media platforms to suppress speech about COVID policy, about vaccine safety, about treatment alternatives, and about the origins of the virus itself. This is not allegation. The Missouri v. Biden case, subsequently Murthy v. Missouri, produced discovery that documented the communications between federal agencies and platform companies in which government officials flagged content for removal, expressed frustration when removal was insufficiently rapid, and maintained ongoing relationships designed to ensure that the information environment reflected the official position rather than the full range of available evidence.

The First Amendment was not suspended. It was worked around.

Carefully. With the plausible deniability that the government was merely flagging rather than compelling.

The distinction did not survive scrutiny. And the Supreme Court’s handling of the case produced one of the most consequential failures of institutional nerve in recent memory, declining on standing grounds to reach the constitutional question that the evidence demanded be answered.

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The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right of the people to be secure in their persons against unreasonable searches and seizures. The foundational principle beneath it is that the body of a citizen is not the property of the state. That what enters it, what is done to it, what is required of it as a condition of participation in civic and economic life, is not a matter for government to determine unilaterally.

Vaccine mandates that conditioned employment, military service, educational access, and the ability to travel on the receipt of a medical product not yet fully approved, whose long-term safety profile was explicitly uncharacterised at the point of mandate, are not compatible with that principle honestly applied.

The legal arguments made to sustain them reached back to Jacobson v. Massachusetts, decided in 1905, a case involving a fully approved smallpox vaccine with a century of safety data, in a legal era that predated every modern bioethical framework, every informed consent standard, and every international human rights instrument developed in response to what happened when governments decided that the emergency was sufficient justification for overriding the individual’s claim on their own body.

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The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. It guarantees just compensation when the government takes from the citizen.

The people injured by these products have received no due process. The compensation frameworks established have been restrictive by design, slow by operation, and inadequate by every honest measure of what just compensation for serious permanent injury would require.

The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, the body established to provide remedy, has approved a fraction of the claims submitted and paid a fraction of those approved, at a pace that has ensured that many of the injured will not live to receive what the law nominally entitles them to.

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The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law and prohibits any state from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process.

People lost jobs. Lost livelihoods.

Lost professional licences they had spent decades building. Lost the ability to serve in the military in which they had built careers and identities. Lost access to universities. Lost access to their own children’s school events. Without due process. Without individual assessment of their circumstances. Without any of the procedural protections that the Constitution insists upon before the state may take from a citizen what the citizen has built.

And then, above all of this, the Declaration of Independence. Which is not the law but is the moral foundation from which the law derives its authority.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Not from the emergency. Not from the public health agency. Not from the pharmaceutical supply contract or the platform’s content moderation policy or the administrative apparatus that has grown, over a century of progressive expansion, to the point where it now governs more of American life with less democratic accountability than anything the founders could have imagined and more than anything they would have tolerated.

From the consent of the governed.

Consent requires information.

Consent requires the freedom to say no without losing everything. Consent requires that the power being consented to is exercised within the limits the governed have defined, and that when it exceeds those limits, there is a mechanism of accountability capable of reaching the people who exceeded them.

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Every one of those requirements was violated during the COVID response. Not at the margins.

Centrally. Systematically. In ways that are now documented, that have been argued in federal courts, and that have produced, so far, no serious institutional reckoning proportionate to what the documentation shows.

The Constitution did not fail. It was not suspended. It was not formally repealed.

It was treated, by the institutions sworn to uphold it, as an obstacle to be managed rather than a foundation to be honoured.

And every official who stood at a podium during those years and spoke about American values, about freedom, about the principles that distinguish this republic from the governments that do not feel bound by the rights of their citizens, did so while their agencies were coordinating the suppression of speech, the coercion of medical compliance, and the abandonment of the injured, in ways that the document they were invoking was written specifically to prevent.

That is the contradiction that no administration has been required to resolve.

Not because the resolution is complicated.

Because the resolution would require them to stand before the people whose consent is the only legitimate source of their power and account honestly for what they did with it.

The silence of every administration, across party lines, across election cycles, across the changing of every face at every podium, is not the silence of governments that examined that question and found nothing to answer for.

It is the silence of governments that know exactly what an honest answer would cost.

We the People are still waiting.

And the waiting itself is the most important political fact of our time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Next one will be German because this can be applied axiomatically to every country in this planet.