Most people remember the outrage when word broke from New Orleans in 2005 that NOLA PD, National Guard units, and Louisiana State police were going house to house confiscating weapons on the orders of the NOLA police chief. I think that was probably the first time in recent memory the entire country got a collective wake-up call about what could happen under the duress of an extraordinary situation.
But nothing like it was repeated, even in the horrific aftermath of the 911 rubble.
Not until COVID did we see those baser, kick-the-Constitution-to-the-curb impulses raise their ugly heads, and then, man – did we ever with a vengeance.
In the navel-gazing afterward – especially as the Trump administration finds and releases ever more documentation detailing the lies sold to a frightened public to justify the methods – I thought we had all agreed lockdowns were bad. Not just bad, but devastating for all but a minuscule few concerned.
And the bit where the government – or the governor – had unlimited authority to order you to your room for days and weeks at a time, mandating masks, who could meet where, casinos that could stay open while churches must close, beaches that remained empty, and waves in the surf were so deadly that they must remain unridden while marching for deceased felons was a healthy release across multiple urban landscapes?
I thought we had all agreed it was an arbitrary, pernicious, and capricious exercise in usurpation by people in positions of authority flexing their inner fascist.
From petty (Whitmer not allowing people to buy seed packets) to picking favorites (Sisolak choosing casinos over church congregations), all with an insulting sprinkling of that ‘let them eat cake’ royal privilege…
EXCLUSIVE: We’ve obtained photos of Governor Gavin Newsom at the Napa dinner party he’s in hot water over. The photos call into question just how outdoors the dinner was. A witness who took photos tells us his group was so loud, the sliding doors had to be closed. 10pm on @FOXLA pic.twitter.com/gtOVEwa864
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) November 18, 2020
…Americans are up to their eyeballs with politicians who declare themselves to be an imperial power in times of challenge.
At least…I thought they were.
In Pennsylvania, the pushback was so severe that voters approved a 2021 constitutional amendment that curbed the governor’s power to declare public emergencies and limited those declarations to 21 days. It gave the legislature the option to end or extend such emergencies.
- The Department of State oversaw the voter referendum that amended the state constitution to limit emergency disaster declarations to 21 days unless extended by the legislature, stripping the executive branch of unilateral long-term lockdown authority.
Josh Shapiro is running for a second term as PA’s governor. During COVID, he was the state attorney general and responsible for enforcing the draconian regulations, so one cannot believe he hadn’t heard that angry voter reaction to his predecessor overstepping the bounds of what people felt was necessary to curb the pandemic. Shapiro was the hatchet man for all of it.
Just as surely he is aware of what has been exposed of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s breathtaking mendacity and calculated perfidy in foisting unimaginable cruelties upon the American people while using the entire country as a petri dish for his version of Trusting the Science™.
In light of all of that, these recent moves by the governor seem, to be as charitable as possible, unwise.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is pushing to radically rewrite his state’s health code to give his administration authoritarian police powers as he seeks re-election.
Read my latest for @realDailyWire here: https://t.co/QadH32JgrI
— Meg Brock (@MegEBrock) August 24, 2026
Utterly menacing. Perhaps he enjoyed playing the big, bad Sheriff of Not In My Hamlet too much and badly wants back that unfettered thrill of power which voters stripped from him. And is willing to go around the long way to get it.
Josh Shapiro Eyes New Powers That Make COVID Restrictions Look Like A Warning Shot
“We’ve already seen how this kind of authority can be abused, and we cannot allow the mistakes of the past to be repeated.”
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is pushing to radically rewrite his state’s health code to give his administration authoritarian police powers as he seeks re-election.
The Democrat’s proposed change would give Pennsylvania’s Department of Health centralized police powers under the guise of “disease control measures,” including the ability to enter homes and schools without a warrant, access confidential medical records, and impose statewide school mask mandates for disease prevention. The Department of Health reports to the governor’s office, meaning this change would give Shapiro — and his successors — the ability to single-handedly implement draconian policies across the state.
“The administration’s proposed new regulations on mask mandates and communicable diseases are deeply concerning,” Pennsylvania lawmaker Michele Brooks told The Daily Wire. “These include catch-all authority to impose masking, distancing, and virtually any other disease-control measure it wants, a statewide vaccine database with mandatory reporting, authority to restrict attendance at funerals, and extraordinarily broad powers to monitor private health information and enter private property.”
And ‘ENTER PRIVATE PROPERTY’?!
Hang on here. Wasn’t there some sort of state constitutional amendment? Or didn’t it go far enough?
It doesn’t matter when the state health code is being rewritten to go around it. And when the word ‘condition’ is added to the list of qualifying events for the health department to go all brownshirt on citizens.
…The Pennsylvania Department of Health can currently only impose disease control measures when attempting to provide “surveillance” of infectious disease outbreaks. Added clauses in the massive 502-page regulation proposal unveiled on August 8 would allow the department to implement disease control measures not only for surveillance, but also for the “prevention, containment, or mitigation” of a disease, infection, or “condition.” Disease “prevention” could include measures such as coerced vaccination and mask mandates, without the active spread of infectious disease. The term “condition,” another new addition to the health code, is nebulously defined as a “noninfectious medical ailment or other health-related event.”
A ‘condition,’ as the Daily Wire rightly notes, can be anything. They ask if a mental issue qualifies as a ‘condition’ that would trigger these authoritarian powers and have received no answer thus far.
Why wouldn’t ‘mad about a stolen election’ count as a ‘condition’? It could, right?
And make no mistake: they are kicking the door in, authoritarian changes.
…The regulatory changes hand Shapiro’s team unfettered power to enter apartments, schools, or any “other location” determined by the Department of Health when conducting a disease investigation, without a warrant.
“The department or local health authority may enter an apartment, building, health care facility, school, college or university, or other location as necessary to conduct its investigation under this chapter if the representative presents documentation to establish that they are an authorized representative of the department or the local health authority,” states the regulation proposal.
The new regulation explicitly states that no person can “interfere” with a DOH investigation and further specifies that health bureaucrats have the power “to meet and speak with a student or other person in private” at schools. It explicitly states that school employees “may not obstruct” an investigation of a student.
That ‘no person’ stipulation includes parents, in case you were wondering.
The health department would be a law and country unto itself, and Shapiro seemingly would have his vengeance on ungrateful voters who spurned his last efforts to control them.
…The Shapiro administration openly admits pushback against COVID-19 restrictions motivated the proposed regulation changes. It cites Corman v. Acting Secretary of Pennsylvania Department of Health, a case in which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the Pennsylvania Department of Health did not have the power to enforce a statewide school mandate, as the impetus for the drastic restructuring of Pennsylvania’s health code.
Former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf used his unchecked emergency powers to impose some of the harshest COVID restrictions in the nation from March 2020 to June 2021. These policies were doggedly enforced by Shapiro, who at that time was Pennsylvania’s attorney general and became known as the muscle of Wolf’s COVID regime.
Shapiro defended Wolf’s order that closed Pennsylvania businesses for months, calling it “a lawful exercise of the Commonwealth’s police power” in a May 2020 legal brief submitted to the United States Supreme Court. When a federal judge struck down Wolf’s ordinance that prohibited citizens from gathering in groups in September 2020, Shapiro filed a successful motion to have the ruling stayed, and the gathering restrictions were reinstated by October 2020.
Be afraid, Pennsylvania – be very afraid.
Your sitting governor already holds you in little regard. Do not anger him further.
…Wolf was stripped of his power but used the Department of Health to create a statewide school mask mandate that acting Health Secretary Alison Beam announced on August 31, 2021. A group of parents challenged the legality of the order and faced off with Shapiro at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where he ruthlessly defended the order and called the parents “self-centered.”
I have always thought that Shapiro was one of the few semi-rational, nearly-lucid kind of Democrat left on the national stage, and I will admit being completely clueless as far as his COVID record. That alone should immediately disqualify him from consideration for any higher office, and I’d be damned if I’d vote for him for governor in order to have a chance to enact this dystopian hell-on-earth plan.
This is terrifying stuff and inexcusable after everything the country’s been through.
How sad to see yet another one of the Democrats’ few remaining ‘moderates’ prove that ‘scratch a progressive, find a fascist’ is still a truism.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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