Op-Ed: How Totalitarians Come to Power

QUEENS, NY – We as a people have ceded total control to authoritarian rule. People have become fearful and frightened, and that’s when it’s easy for the totalitarian forces of government to take control of our lives. Historically, authoritarian regimes use emergencies to come to power and crush the people’s freedom and liberties.

Authoritarian regimes that come to power in democracies, tend to look at voters in blocs. Instead of representing all the people, they divide the voters into separate racial and ethnic groups, vaccinated and unvaccinated blocs, gender blocs, or a “basket of deplorables.” Daily examples of discouraging words of fear and division from our leaders include President Biden saying that unvaccinated Americans are facing a winter of “severe illness and death.”

New York’s Department of Health is practicing medical discrimination by race, prioritizing non-white races and Hispanic/Latino ethnicity in the distribution of Covid treatments. Governor Hochul has been on a power grabbing crusade with emergency mandates since she began serving as governor. She created a huge hospital crisis in New York, by firing nearly 34,000 healthcare workers who were unvaccinated. Hearkening back to the divine right of kings, Hochul addressed her “apostles” demonizing the unvaccinated:  “…but you know there’s people out there who aren’t listening to God and what God wants.”

She says that Covid mandates are for your own good, but they’re in fact only for the benefit of Kathy Hochul. She will do anything to stay in power. Like Heroin to an addict, she tasted a little power, and now she’s addicted. She recently signed into law a bill that allows statewide mail-in voting, even though the voters of New York thoroughly rejected it in the general election. She effectively overturned the will of the voters to manipulate the election to keep herself in power.

There is a pattern here. There is a method to the madness, for authoritarian leaders to use emergencies to seize absolute control, which they have accomplished by dividing and terrifying the people into complete submission. It’s not about public health and prevention of Covid. NYC, with America’s most burdensome mandates has one of the nation’s highest rates of Covid cases per capita. It’s about absolute power. It’s about using crises and emergencies to strengthen the power of government to mandate totalitarian rules.

Power corrupts all. Even some of our nation’s greatest past leaders have fallen prey to the corruption of power, during the wars and emergencies throughout America’s history. During World War II, FDR ordered Japanese Americans unjustly into internment camps. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus, that protects people against unlawful arrests or detention. As America dealt with the threat of war with France, President John Adams signed the Sedition Act into law, to suppress political speech critical of his government for his own partisan advantage. The USA Patriot Act was passed after the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, 2001, in order to combat terrorism, but later on, provisions of the law were ruled unconstitutional in violation of the 4^th Amendment for allowing the federal government to spy on and search American citizens without showing probable cause.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Authoritarian leaders used wars and emergencies as pretexts to seize absolute power in the last century. Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler and other murderous dictators declared emergencies and took over. Lenin used the widespread disdain for Russia’s involvement in World War I to launch the October Revolution in 1917 to overthrow the democratically elected Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. Hitler notoriously used the despair caused by the Great Depression and the fear of Communism to rise to power. In 1933 the Reichstag fire and the purported threat of a Communist revolution, gave Hitler the pretext to seize complete and absolute power over Germany.

This is America, where our freedom of speech, religious liberty, our right to bear arms, and all our fundamental rights that come from God, not government, are guaranteed by our US Constitution. Using Covid as an emergency in the name of total control, authoritarians now in control of our city, state, and federal governments must be vanquished. We the people must vote in every election large or small, to preserve the core principles that made our country great and get rid of these authoritarian foes.

The way to get rid of them is to vote them out. Voting does count. If enough people come out to vote, we win.  Enough people came out for Glenn Youngkin to win the Virginia governor’s race. Over 55% of the state’s registered voters, the highest voter turnout in recent history,  came out in droves to successfully offset the Democrat’s vote-rigging stunts. On the other hand, only 21% of registered voters in NYC came out to vote in NYC’s general election, a record low turnout that allowed radical leftists like Alvin Bragg to be elected Manhattan District Attorney. It’s the people who didn’t vote that gave us this soft-on-crime DA. That’s how totalitarians come to power.

From top to bottom, they must be voted out because they’ve used the cover of the Covid emergency to change the voting rules in a desperate attempt to keep themselves permanently in power. If anyone thinks for a moment they would relinquish their emergency powers once the crisis is over, there’s a bridge we can sell you in Brooklyn! No one can sit out another election. We need to stop talking and starting voting, organize our communities, build the Republican Party, and get all our neighbors out to vote.