Constantly Underfoot

RFK Jr. sat on CNN and said something that should not have been controversial. He said the government’s first duty in any future pandemic is to protect constitutional rights. Not balance them against expert opinion. Not temporarily suspend them. Protect them. Dana Bash reacted as if he had just committed a category error. She told him she did not want to “allow” him to say things that were not entirely true. Allow. That is the word she chose. Not “challenge.” Not “disagree.” Allow. Watch that moment carefully and the entire posture becomes clear. This is not a journalist testing a claim. This is a gatekeeper deciding which premises are permitted on air. The substance of Kennedy’s argument ... that the last response got almost everything wrong ... barely registered. What registered was the unacceptable suggestion that rights might rank above the public-health machinery. That is the scandal that never ended. A large part of the media and the expert class still treats constitutional rights as optional equipment that can be powered down whenever the right people declare an emergency. They do not say it in those words. They simply act as if the Bill of Rights is a set of guidelines that apply only when the experts find them convenient. Bash’s performance was not an outlier. It was a clean demonstration of the surviving mindset. The lockdowns are over. The mandates are gone. The emergency declarations have expired. But the assumption that experts outrank rights never left the building. It just learned to speak more politely until someone like Kennedy forced the issue back into the open. The Constitution was not written as a suggestion for calm weather. It was written to restrain power precisely when fear is highest and the people in charge are most certain they know better. (article below)