The Greatest Peacetime Assault on Freedom in Modern History
When the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, governments around the world moved within days to suspend civil liberties on a scale that would have been unthinkable even weeks before. Businesses were ordered closed. People were confined to their homes. Churches were shuttered while liquor stores remained open. Children were kept from school for months and in some cases for over a year. Travel between cities, between states, between nations was restricted or banned. The entire architecture of daily life was dismantled by executive decree, without legislative vote, without judicial scrutiny, and without any serious evidentiary basis for many of the specific measures imposed.
United States Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing in 2022, stated plainly that pandemic-era restrictions represented the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of the country. He was not exaggerating. In Nevada, churches were limited to 50 worshippers while casinos operated at full capacity. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo imposed attendance limits of 10 to 25 on religious services in what the Supreme Court would ultimately describe as targeted and discriminatory. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom banned outdoor church services while permitting outdoor dining, protests, and retail shopping. A federal court later ruled in California that infringing COVID regulations affecting churches were unconstitutional, 13 months after they had begun — 13 months during which the Lord’s people were told they had no right to gather in His name.
The Human Freedom Index recorded the average global freedom score falling from 7.03 in 2019 to 6.81 in 2020 — the sharpest single-year decline in the index’s history. Freedom House noted in 2021 that the pandemic had resulted in an unprecedented withdrawal of civil liberties among developed democracies and authoritarian regimes alike, encompassing excessive surveillance, discriminatory restrictions on movement and assembly, and arbitrary enforcement of restrictions by police. The Economist put it with characteristic bluntness in its Democracy Index 2021, observing that governments had repeatedly resorted to emergency powers during the year that would have been inconceivable in normal times. And in one of the most chilling observations of the period, the magazine noted:
Socialist and Communist governments were the most aggressive in exploiting the panic. China used the pandemic to intensify every dimension of its surveillance state. Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea tightened their already vice-like grip on movement and expression. But the virus of state overreach was by no means confined to overtly authoritarian regimes. Western democracies demonstrated with startling speed how willing their governing classes were to suspend constitutional liberties when given a convenient justification. And those who objected — who asked for evidence, who pointed to the logical absurdity of the measures, who noted that you isolate the sick and not the healthy — were silenced.
Isolate the Sick, Not the Healthy: The Logic They Would Not Hear
The foundational logic of epidemic control, practiced for centuries, is straightforward: identify those who are ill, isolate them from the healthy, and treat them. This principle guided the management of tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, and every other serious infectious disease in the history of modern medicine. It is the reason quarantine was invented. It had never been reversed in the history of public health — until 2020, when governments around the world decided for the first time in recorded history to lock down the healthy population rather than the sick.
The argument for this reversal was never made with any rigorous scientific foundation. The lockdowns were not the product of peer-reviewed evidence that mass confinement of the healthy would reduce transmission more effectively than targeted isolation of the infected. They were, as subsequent review would demonstrate, largely improvised. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded in 2023 and 2024 that arbitrary lockdowns and stay-at-home orders stripped Americans of their freedoms while the data surrounding COVID-19 was still poorly understood, and that as new evidence mounted questioning the usefulness of specific measures — including lockdowns, social distancing, school closures, and masking requirements — the government refused to change course.
Those who raised these questions at the time were not treated as contributors to a legitimate scientific debate. They were treated as dangerous. The machinery of censorship was mobilised to make sure their voices did not reach the public.
Big Tech and the Government: An Unholy Alliance
What emerged during the pandemic was a coordinated system of censorship unprecedented in American peacetime history. Documents later obtained through congressional investigation, Freedom of Information requests, and the Twitter Files revelations confirmed what many had suspected: the federal government was actively directing social media companies to suppress content that contradicted the official narrative.
The CDC maintained a direct line to Facebook, flagging posts for removal and coordinating content moderation on COVID-related topics. An April 2021 email from a CDC staffer to Facebook noted that algorithms were apparently screening out valid public health messaging alongside what they had labelled misinformation — a candid admission that the automated censorship had become indiscriminate. Facebook received $15 million in ad credits from the CDC in April 2021, simultaneously serving as the government’s partner in suppression and its paid platform for promoting the official message.
The White House was directly involved. Emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee revealed that White House official Rob Flaherty contacted Google’s team in April 2021 to connect about their work combating vaccine hesitancy and cracking down on vaccine misinformation, stressing urgency and warning that the situation could spiral out of control. YouTube subsequently announced it would ban any content claiming that approved vaccines were dangerous or caused side effects — including information that contradicted WHO or local health authorities. The White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed publicly that the administration was in regular contact with social media companies to raise concerns about narratives it considered dangerous.
Discovery documents from the lawsuit brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration revealed that monthly meetings of the Unified Strategies Group — a body including more than 50 federal employees across 15 federal agencies — were coordinating with Big Tech to determine which topics would be suppressed. The censored topics included stories about COVID jab refusal, personal accounts of vaccine side effects, criticism of COVID restrictions, and posts noting that people who had been vaccinated were nonetheless testing positive for COVID. These were not false claims. They were true. They were suppressed because they were politically inconvenient.
Perhaps the most revealing single episode was Facebook’s ban, in place from the beginning of 2021, on any post suggesting that COVID-19 might have originated in a laboratory in China. That ban was not lifted until May 2021 — more than a year after the question first arose, and only after it became impossible to maintain. The lab leak theory, which had been denounced as a conspiracy theory and used as justification for deplatforming anyone who raised it, would subsequently be assessed as the most likely origin of the pandemic by the FBI, the Department of Energy, and — under a new administration — by the CIA itself.
Senator Ron Johnson described the arrangement accurately: “Big Government is now Big Brother. The censorship that results from this unholy alliance between big government and big tech has, and will continue to, cost lives.”
The Origin They Covered Up: Made in Wuhan, Funded from Washington
From the earliest days of the pandemic, the official position of most Western governments, international health bodies, and mainstream media was that COVID-19 had emerged naturally from animals at a Wuhan wet market. Anyone who suggested otherwise was labelled a conspiracy theorist. Facebook banned the discussion. Scientists who raised the question were professionally penalised. The prestigious journal The Lancet published a letter in February 2020, organised by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, condemning the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory and calling for scientific solidarity in opposition to it — without disclosing that Daszak had a direct financial and professional relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The evidence that has since accumulated tells a different story. The FBI concluded with moderate-to-high confidence that the pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Department of Energy reached the same conclusion. A 2025 White House website summarised five key pieces of evidence pointing to a Wuhan lab origin. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul concluded in a 2021 investigation — later corroborated by the Department of Energy — that a preponderance of the evidence proved the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology due to dangerously unsafe conditions, and that the Chinese Communist Party focused on covering up the mistake instead of warning the world.
The coverup was not only Chinese. American officials were directly implicated. Congressional investigators established that the National Institutes of Health, through a grant to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, had funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research designed to enhance the transmissibility or pathogenicity of bat coronaviruses. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, repeatedly denied under oath to the United States Senate that his agency had ever funded such research. In October 2021, NIH Deputy Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak admitted in a letter to Congress that the NIH had in fact funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth Alliance — directly contradicting Fauci’s sworn testimony. Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University summarised the situation: the NIH, and specifically Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins, had lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public — knowingly, wilfully, and brazenly.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky had pressed Fauci on this in a Senate hearing in May 2021 and been publicly berated for it. Paul was correct. His subsequent investigation as Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has produced subpoenas to fourteen government agencies, a CIA whistleblower testifying that intelligence analysts concluded multiple times between 2021 and 2023 that a lab leak was the most likely origin of COVID-19 but that their conclusions were altered and suppressed, and evidence that key researchers implicated in the gain-of-function research — Dr. Ralph Baric, Peter Daszak — were simultaneously serving as consultants to the intelligence community that was tasked with investigating the very research they had conducted. In September 2025, Senator Paul called for Dr. Fauci to testify again, having uncovered emails showing that Fauci had deleted official government records and sought to obstruct the release of public documents — actions Fauci had denied under oath in 2024.
The origin of COVID-19 matters not only as a matter of historical truth. It matters because the American taxpayer funded the research that may have produced it, because public officials lied under oath to conceal that fact, and because the same information-suppression apparatus that buried the lab leak question was the one that silenced every other dissenting voice during the pandemic.
The Church Under Pressure: When the Lord’s People Bowed to Caesar
It was sad to watch what happened to the Lord’s people during the pandemic — and sadder still to watch what happened to many pastors. The same men who should have led their congregations in a clear-eyed assessment of what was taking place instead repeated government talking points from their pulpits or, worse, simply closed their doors at Caesar’s command without any apparent theological reflection on what they were doing.
The church has always understood that it gathers not by permission of the civil magistrate but by the command of Christ. Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is (Heb 10:25) is not a preference to be suspended when inconvenient. It is an apostolic command. The New Testament church was not established in a setting of favourable government policy. It was established under Rome, a government that would eventually execute most of its founding leadership. The question of whether to gather was settled not by risk assessment but by obedience.
Yet churches across America and around the world closed voluntarily — in many cases before any government order required them to do so. When government orders did come, few challenged them. The few who did — Grace Community Church in California under Pastor John MacArthur, for example — were treated as reckless outliers rather than as men acting on principle. MacArthur argued, correctly, that Christ is the head of the church and that no civil government has authority to prohibit the gathering of believers for worship. He was sued by Los Angeles County. He stood firm.
The majority did not stand firm. And it is worth asking why. Part of the answer is that many Christians and pastors had been conditioned, over a generation of increasing deference to credentialed expertise, to treat whatever government health officials declared as settled truth. The possibility that officials were wrong, or that they had interests other than public health in mind, was simply not considered. The logical questions were not asked. Why were liquor stores essential and churches non-essential? Why could people shop at Walmart but not gather in a building of far smaller capacity? Why were outdoor religious services banned while outdoor protests of tens of thousands were permitted, and even encouraged, by the same officials imposing the restrictions? Why were the healthy locked down rather than the sick isolated?
These questions had answers, but the answers were not medical. They were political. And it was a political agenda, not a health emergency, that drove many of the most destructive pandemic policies.
Six Feet and Masks: Theatre, Not Medicine
Among the most revealing admissions of the post-pandemic period was the disclosure by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former top advisor, Dr. David Morens — later indicted for using his personal email to hide communications related to a coronavirus research grant — that the six-foot social distancing rule had no scientific basis. The former CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, acknowledged in congressional testimony that the CDC had made COVID-19 policy recommendations without adequate evidentiary basis. The House Select Subcommittee found that as new evidence mounted against the usefulness of specific measures, the government pushed the Constitution to its limits regardless.
Six feet of distance was not a medical threshold derived from empirical study of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. It was a number. It was arbitrary. But it restructured every aspect of public life for two years — schools, workplaces, churches, hospitals, restaurants, public transport — as if it were scientific law. Anyone who questioned it was dismissed as anti-science.
Masks present a similar story. The initial guidance from both the WHO and Dr. Fauci himself in early 2020 was that masks did not significantly protect healthy people from COVID-19. That guidance was reversed, and cloth masks became compulsory. Studies subsequently published, including a major Cochrane review — the gold standard of systematic evidence review — found that masking of the general public had little to no measurable effect on respiratory virus transmission. The conclusion of many sober analysts was that social distancing and mask mandates were primarily tools of behavioral conditioning and visible compliance — instruments not of health policy but of social control, demonstrating to the public that the crisis was real and that the state was in charge of managing it.
The Two Parties and the Socialist Agenda
It became clear during the pandemic, to anyone willing to look honestly, that the Republican Party in the United States is not the conservative bulwark its supporters imagine it to be. With some exceptions — Rand Paul, Ron DeSantis in Florida, a handful of others — the GOP broadly accepted the lockdown framework. Republican governors in states like Maryland, Massachusetts, and others imposed restrictions indistinguishable from those of their Democratic counterparts. The federal COVID relief legislation was passed with broad bipartisan support, expanding government spending and intervention at a scale that dwarfed anything the Franklin Roosevelt administration had done during the New Deal.
The Trump administration, for all its rhetorical resistance to the Fauci agenda on hydroxychloroquine and timeline, nonetheless established the lockdown framework, authorised the emergency vaccine authorisations, and presided over trillions in government intervention. Operation Warp Speed was a joint government-private sector initiative that gave pharmaceutical companies billions in public money and shielded them from legal liability for their products’ side effects. The conservative economic critique of this arrangement was effectively suppressed. The socialist model — government dictates who opens and who closes, who travels and who stays home, which businesses survive and which perish, which information circulates and which is suppressed — was implemented with bipartisan support. The difference between the two parties was primarily rhetorical.
This is not surprising to those who understand that both major American political parties have, for many decades, been moving in the same direction — toward a more centralised, more interventionist, more surveillance-capable state. The pandemic did not create that direction. It accelerated it. And the acceleration was so rapid and so visible that even those who had previously dismissed such concerns as paranoid found themselves confronting a government that told them they could not attend a funeral, visit a dying parent in hospital, or sit in church — and that any complaint about these arrangements was misinformation.