By Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD, Columnist
Dcrossing our country by car allows you to appreciate this glorious and (dare I say) exceptional country. The diversity of landscapes is a feast for the eyes. Food for the soul is the affirmation that most Americans love their family, cherish America, and appreciate their fellow Americans, whether white, black, or somewhere in between.
Daily, the media dutifully informs us coastal and urban residents about gender fluidity, diversity training, and decarbonizing energy systems to avoid the coming environmental Armageddon.
When the media couldn’t flog us with a juicy Covid-19 tragedy, they resurrect a tired but effective and agonizing headline about the impending great earthquake.
Why would the media-government complex want to demoralize its citizens and make them live in fear and anxiety even when a “crisis” is resolved? To make them rely on the government rather than themselves for their daily needs. To prevent them from respecting the democratic republic formed by our Constitution and from accepting government control of their lives. Fear lays the foundation for unconditional compliance.
Federal and state governments have used Covid as justification to cross the line from public safety measures to tyranny.
Despite the decrease in Covid cases, the national Covid emergency declaration has been extended beyond March 1, 2022.
The national emergency designation gives the president more than 100 special powers that can circumvent legal procedures ranging from banking to public health and anything else the government wants to control.
Despite a long tradition of differing opinions regarding medical processes and treatments for disease, the government has discouraged such discussions regarding Covid.
First, the Surgeon General simply asked us to help stop “misinformation” because it “pollutes our information environment.” A few months later, the federal government requires social networks, search engines, crowdsourcing platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems to send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid misinformation. -19 on their sites. Translation: dissenting opinions will be censored once the government finds out how to do it. What happened to our respect for the marketplace of ideas?
If tracking our computer usage doesn’t work, we have the National Patient ID, a unique number issued by the federal government that contains all the details of a person’s medical records from cradle to grave.
The concept has been around for over 25 years as part of HIPAA. However, Congress has prohibited itself from funding such an undertaking.
In 2019, Congress lifted the funding ban despite the very real possibility that national patient identification could enable large-scale tracking of Americans through their health records.
What happened to the confidential patient-physician relationship based on trust and confidentiality?
Such government excesses and intrusions are becoming commonplace. We are dangerously close to losing the government of, by and for the people.
Our government is increasingly populated by long-serving, closed-minded bureaucrats like Dr. Anthony Fauci and influential career politicians who are hardly worker heroes like Nancy “let them eat ice cream” Pelosi .
Universities – grooming our future leaders – have become politically unbalanced and intolerant of open discourse.
We learn how evil Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs who have profited from political unrest are pulling the strings of their government. We tend towards our own classic oligarchy, rule by the few.
We have our own wealthy ideologues who have gone from just annoying elitists to toxic power brokers promoting their own agendas. Notables include Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Washington Post), Bill Gates (Microsoft), George Soros (Open Society Foundation).
Meanwhile, soaring inflation is making it harder for Americans to afford basic necessities. Refueling is now an exercise in emotional and financial misery.
The reaction of Transportation Secretary Buttigieg and Vice President Harris is indicative of their disdain for the average American. Can’t afford gasoline? Buy a $45,000 electric car. This dismissive rhetoric does not correspond to reality. In 2020, there were 286.9 million cars in the United States with 1 million electric vehicles.
Moreover, the power grid could not possibly support a sudden influx of electric vehicles, given the brownouts across the country in winter and summer.
This political and powerful class of people wants to change the way we live and think, whether we like it or not. We will never have as much money to buy political influence as the American oligarchs. But we have our voices.
Parents talk about their schools’ curricula and overtly racist toxic policies that perversely segregate students based on skin color and laws that circumvent parental input into their children’s medical decisions.
Medical practices evolve to meet the needs of patients, not insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Physicians who have fought for open medical discussion about vaccine safety and effectiveness are leaving their mark.
CDC Director Walensky has finally publicly admitted that Covid vaccines do not stop transmission of the virus. Many doctors have gone from looking at their unvaccinated patients in horror to “I respect your choice.”
The oligarchs do not represent the real America. It’s up to us to carry on the legacy of American heroes who thought for themselves and resisted the system.
Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist and board member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD from UCSF Medical School. Dr. Singleton completed a two-year surgical residency at UCSF and then his anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended law school at UC Berkeley, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law. She articled at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. She teaches courses on recognizing elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers.
