Oh yes, it’s just like literal slavery

Now let’s tie together Barr and the Trump admin attacks on reasonable pandemic precautions and scientific advice in general into one smelly package:

Attorney General William Barr argued Wednesday that coronavirus-related lockdown orders were surpassed only by slavery as the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties” in the nation’s history.

Oh yes. Certainly. The internment of Americans of Japanese descent in 1942 was as nothing compared to health measures during a lethal pandemic. The Trail of Tears? Pff, a walk in the park. Mass incarceration? Three strikes laws? HUAC? The Espionage Act of 1917? The Sedition Act of 1918? All mere vapor compared to inconvenient emergency health measures.

The remarks from the attorney general came during an event hosted by Hillsdale College, where Barr delivered a speech defending his intervention in high-profile Justice Department cases and comparing career prosecutors to preschoolers.

“You know, putting a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest. It’s — you know, other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” Barr said during a question-and-answer session following his remarks.

Very cogent, except for the fact that it’s not like house arrest, because we are allowed to shop for necessities and go out for exercise and the like. We’re urged to stay home as much as possible and we’re told (in some jurisdictions) to social distance, but we’re not under house arrest. People in actual quarantine are, but the rest of us aren’t. I daresay Barr knows that perfectly well.

At one point, Barr seemingly suggested that the federal response to the pandemic should be guided by politicians and elected officials rather than medical experts and the broader scientific community.

“The person in the white coat is not the ‘grand seer’ who can come up with a right decision for society. A free people makes its decision through its elected representative,” he said.

That’s just great – feeding the idiotic fanatical hostility to medical expertise we’re already dealing with. Barr is such scum.

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