Since the start of the Covid pandemic, many Americans have been appalled at the tidal wave of dictatorial decrees that futilely sought to vanquish a virus. Even more shocking was the craven response by many citizens who believed that groveling to officialdom was the only way to survive. But there were warning signs of the collapse of American support for freedom long before the Wuhan Institute pocketed US tax dollars to concoct its first coronavirus.

“Is the best of the free life behind us now?” Merle Haggard asked in a haunting 1982 country music hit song. Nine years earlier, Haggard had scoffed at potheads and draft dodgers in a White House performance of his song “Okie from Muskogee” for President Richard Nixon. But reflecting the widespread loss of faith in the American dream in the 1970s, his “free life” song lamented Nixon’s lies, the Vietnam debacle, and the ravages of inflation.

The issue of lost freedoms helped spur me 30 years ago to write a book titled Lost Rights chronicling how “Americans’ liberty is perishing beneath the constant growth of government power.” When I recently updated the political damage report in a book titled Last Rights, the late 20th century seemed practically a golden era of freedom in hindsight. In recent decades, federal, state, and local governments have unleashed themselves from the Constitution and commandeered vast swaths of Americans’ lives.

The worst regulatory abuses of the 1990s still exist and plenty of new bureaucratic depredations have been added to the lineup.

In the 1990s, federal regulators censored beer bottles, prohibiting breweries from revealing the alcohol content on the label. That prohibition ended but federal censorship multiplied a hundredfold. On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history,” including “suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens,” as a federal appeals court ruled last September. Americans’ criticism of Covid policy was secretly suppressed millions of times thanks to federal threats and string-pulling. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court took a dive on this issue on Wednesday, seizing upon bullshit procedural grounds to avoid condemning federal censorship.

In the 1990s, local bureaucrats sporadically cracked down on homeschooling, preventing a smattering of parents from teaching their own kids. During the Covid epidemic, teachers unions spurred unjustified school lockdowns that victimized tens of millions of children. Teachers unions vilified any opponents of school shutdowns as racists and enemies of humanity. Vast learning losses resulted that continue to........

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