I keep hearing that COVID-19 is back — but of course, it never really left and likely never will. Case numbers and hospitalizations are ticking upward, something we’re likely to see as a seasonal phenomenon from here on out.

I finally experienced the virus firsthand last week. I rate it zero stars, not recommended.  As flu-type illnesses go, it was far from the worst I’ve lived through, but it wasn’t pleasant.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I’ve been getting off easy. It killed my mother in 2020, and last year, the other four people in my household all experienced it with varying degrees of severity, but I never tested positive or felt any symptoms (I credit the Novavax vaccine, for which I was a clinical trial volunteer). This time, we ALL got it. I can’t say it wasn’t my turn.

Another thing that  never fully left and seems to be raising its ugly head again: COVID-19 authoritarianism.

For two years, politicians and “public health” bureaucrats at all levels of government got their jollies pushing us around.

They threw centuries of actual, hard-earned epidemiological knowledge and experience — for example, the absence of evidence that masking prevents the spread of viral disease — in the trash can and replaced it with a state-established religion they called THE SCIENCE.

At points, they attempted to shut life as we knew it completely down across large parts of the country. They insisted on visible displays of faith in their new religion, in the form of those ineffectual masks. They limited our travel, threatened our jobs if we declined their heavily promoted, but also largely ineffective, mRNA vaccines, and admonished us to just get used to a “new normal,” the distinguishing feature of which was to be them remaining in charge of everything we did, indefinitely.

Yes, the madness subsided over time. But the sense of entitlement to rule obviously remains.

NewsNation’s Elizabeth Prann reports that, per a group called No College Mandates, more than 100 universities and colleges across the US still maintain vaccine mandates, and that a few (including Rutgers and Georgetown) still require religious face gear indoors.

Every spike in cases brings our technocrat masters around to muse about the possibility of returning to mask mask mandates, “encouraging” (because they’ve so far mostly failed to mandate) vaccine and booster “uptake,” etc.

Their “new normal” never really achieved “normal” status, but it lives on, largely due to the complete absence of real penalties for getting so power-hungry while getting nearly everything completely wrong.

How many of them went to jail, or  coughed up fines, for their various violations of your rights to live, travel, and work?

How many  lost their jobs for abandoning basic standards of science and getting nearly everything completely wrong?

How many have even admitted and apologized for their  totalitarian antics?

We do indeed need a “new normal” — and the distinguishing feature of that normality must be that in the future the technocrats show their work and ask, rather than order, us to trust them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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To me, Jason Aldean’s recent hit “Try That in a Small Town” provides the best  answer to an Internet joke question I’ve seen floating around for several years: “If you could completely eliminate one genre of music, what genre would you choose and why would it be modern country?”

The only thing remotely “country” about the song is the singer’s too thick by half insertion of a “hick” accent into what’s otherwise a weird mix of ’80s hair metal ballad instrumentation and ’90s girl pop singing cadence.

Then, of course, there’s the political angle. As an actual country/small-town boy by both upbringing and current residence (I grew up on a farm and then a town of less than 5,000), I kind of resent being portrayed as an angry, violent ignoramus by a guy who grew up in two mid-size cities (Macon, Georgia and Homestead, Florida) before moving to a large one (Nashville, Tennessee).

It’s the kind of “country” song that may draw people out to urban bars with mechanical bulls and cowboy-boot-shaped shot glasses, where they park their shiny big pickup trucks that have never hauled feed or driven fenceline, and put on their fancy hats that were picked to match an outfit, not to keep the sun off a face that’s never worked in a field. Or maybe even seen one. I have yet to hear anyone blasting it out of a rust-bucket old Chevy 3/4-ton in the town nearest me (the metropolis of Archer, Florida, population 1,118), though.

If you’re looking for REAL country music, you could do a lot worse than to give Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” — a so-called “viral hit” — a close listen.

According to The Oklahoman, Anthony “lives off the grid with his three dogs in Farmville, Virginia” (population 7,473).

He’s a high school dropout and former factory worker.

His backing band isn’t some recycled heavy metal combo. It’s himself, playing a resonator guitar.

His response to record deal offers: “I don’t want to play stadium shows, I don’t want to be in the spotlight. … No editing, no agent, no bullsh*t. Just some idiot and his guitar. The style of music that we should never have gotten away from in the first place.”

When I say he just might be a hillbilly, that’s intended as  a compliment, not an insult.

His “hit” song — whether one agrees with its every political implication or not — evokes the real problems of real people in real small towns and the real countryside, instead of using those people as some kind of yee-haw punch line.

I think he’s the genuine article. And I hope listeners engaging with “country music” for the first time find him before they find Jason Aldean.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is self-enforcing,” Steven Calabresi writes at The Volokh Conspiracy. “It is ‘the supreme Law of the Land’ binding on each of the 50 State Secretaries of State and their subordinates who draw up primary or general election ballots.”

Calabresi believes former president Donald Trump has disqualified himself as a candidate for president per that constitutional provision by engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, and that those Secretaries of State must, therefore, ban his name from upcoming ballots.

When Calabresi calls the provision “self-enforcing,”  he means that “no jury verdict is required.” A Secretary of State simply decides that Trump is an insurrectionist and that’s that. It’s over. He’s done. He may not appear on your ballot, and you may not vote for him.

Unlike Mr. Calabresi, I’m not a professor of law, but I have at least three problems with his claims.

First of all, Section 5 of the 14th Amendment makes clear that no, it isn’t “self-enforcing.” “The Congress,” it says, “shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

Secondly, the section he cites forbids insurrectionists to hold, not to run for, office.

And thirdly, when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, there was no such thing as “ballot access” under which Secretaries of State had any say at all over which candidates Americans could vote for.

Until the 1880s, all American election ballots were, effectively, “write-in” ballots. At the polling place, the voter wrote out his choices, or verbally dictated them to an election official if the voter himself couldn’t write, or simply cast a pre-printed ballot provided to him by his preferred political party (yes, “his;” women weren’t allowed to vote until 1920).

Unless we  credit the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment with prophetic abilities, AND assume that they didn’t really mean it when they assigned enforcement of the “insurrection” provision to Congress, AND assume that such “self-enforcement” also magically bypasses the court system set up to adjudicate claims under both the Constitution and subordinate legislation, Calabresi’s argument simply doesn’t hold water.

Personally, I’m in favor of returning to the “write-in ballot,” which would inherently require that election of an “insurrectionist” be challenged in the courts after the votes are counted. OK, actually I’m in favor of dissolving the government, but barring that, we should get the government out of the job of deciding who we may or may not vote for.

And even accepting the legitimacy of the existing system, the only legal way to bar Trump, or anyone else, from the ballot is to prove to a court’s satisfaction that he is indeed an “insurrectionist.”

Which, frankly, doesn’t seem like a very high bar.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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