Rebutting Beau of the Fifth Column — who said that California sheriffs are overstepping their societal bounds — by refusing to enforce Governor Newsom's stay-at-home order

© 2020 Peter Free

 

10 December 2020

 

 

Today, I try to rebut a strong legal argument from a very smart YouTube "liberal"

 

What follows has to do with prominent California prominent sheriffs' refusal to enforce Governor Newsom's stay-at-home COVID-19 order.

 

Below, I take the "conservative" side in supporting the sheriffs.

 

YouTube's Beau of the Fifth Column goes the other way.

 

Our disagreement matters in choosing the United States' future.

 

 

Rebuttal — maybe Beau overlooked the more immediate danger?

 

YouTube's "Beau of the Fifth Column" generally provides intelligent, thoughtful analyses of current events. He is, I infer, essentially a social democrat by inclination.

 

Ordinarily, what Beau says is thorough and rationally defensible. But yesterday, his COVID pandemic concerns partially short-circuited his analysis of California sheriffs' opposition to Governor Newsom's stay-at-home order.

 

See:

 

 

Beau of the Fifth Column, Let's talk about cops refusing to enforce laws...., YouTube (09 December 2020)

 

 

Beau called the sheriffs' announcements of non-enforcement, a "political stunt"

 

His main point was that sheriffs cannot arbitrarily choose what to (or not to) enforce, without very obviously undermining our system of laws and authoritative, elected (command) officials.

 

Although task prioritization certainly goes with sheriffs' territory, that alone — Beau thinks — cannot justify a blanket departure from doing what is legally expected of them:

 

 

What happens, he asks, if sheriffs are allowed to get away with their California foot-dragging?

 

Will that set a precedent for arbitrarily enforcing laws that they like — even as against selected groups of people, but not others?

 

How will sheriffs afterward justify their departments' use of force, if force is arbitrarily dispensed upon sheriffs' whims?

 

 

The sheriffs' fall from lawful legitimacy . . .

 

. . . could be a deep one, suggests Beau.

 

One that potentially topples the American 'society of laws, not men' structure.

 

 

Let's address Beau's thinking with a rebuttal by threat prioritization

 

I build my case on ranking imminent dangers:

 

 

Does the likelihood of the loss of Liberty forever, outweigh Government's capriciously imposed wishes to control a proportionally non-catastrophic — meaning non-existential — pandemic?

 

If we do have to teeter-board in deciding this matter, which direction should receive the greater weight as a matter of fundamental values preservation?

 

 

Pertinent to this choice, in my view, Beau glossed over two aspects to being a sheriff in America:

 

 

One of these is the fact that sheriffs are generally elected — and explicitly so with regard to their suitability for (and judgment in exercising) their law enforcement powers.

 

Second, sheriffs take an oath to protect the US Constitution.

 

 

In my own (directly related, urban police) experience . . .

 

The Constitutional oath must sit more firmly upon law enforcement heads, than it does (in practice) upon the rest of Government's usually power-seeking miscreants.

 

Ask:

 

 

What would happen, if sheriffs unquestioningly carried out very arguably unconstitutional orders?

 

Would we have to wait for our typically laggard and jurisdictionally fragmented judicial system to redress these wrongs?

 

Waiting, for instance, until long after people were forcibly incarcerated, or even killed as an inevitable part of this very likely combative process — both of those outcomes being directly due to overweening Government's excesses?

 

 

At some point, in my ranking of competing evils . . .

 

. . . the sheriffs' constitution-protecting oath has to kick in.

 

My tentative conclusion is that the sheriffs' Constitution-protecting oaths should be asserting themselves precisely now — while COVID Maoists (like Newsom) — all over the United States — are trampling American freedoms, economy and personal livelihoods into dust.

 

Beau's appellation of the California sheriffs' stance as a "political stunt" is — in my estimation — too casually dismissive. That remaining so, even if we admit that the sheriffs may have been acting, without thoroughly thinking through the precedent that their actions (or inactions) may set.

 

I find it ironic that it is "liberal" Democrats (all over the place), who seem to be supporting turning American law enforcement into a Nazi-like Schutzstaffel (SS) — using this threat-exaggerated COVID pandemic as an excuse.

 

If we, as a society, permit the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to justify Government's vapidly thought out, draconian whims — during this and all future emergencies — American Liberty will have been completely incinerated atop a virus's tiny back. So to speak.

 

 

Contrary to Beau's view . . . . . .

 

. . . mine is that the most imminent danger to American society is the eradication of Liberty — and not this only narrowly deadly virus.

 

As I said yesterday, sheriffs seem to be the United States' last executive branch bastion against the imposition of blatant totalitarianism by — evidence-lacking, proof-disregarding, arbitrarily and capriciously acting — elected despot-wannabes.

 

Arguing that sheriffs have neither the authority nor the right to act against this autocratic trend — on the basis of (debatably) overly intellectualized, assertedly uncorrectable worst-case scenarios — is absurd — but nevertheless typical of 2020's Establishment-minded Democrats and their hangers-on.

 

 

The moral? — Get a grip

 

Fearful "liberal" despotism-supporters can passively sit home — while the rest of us struggle to protect the most significant Liberty-preserving priorities that were once considered to be aspirationally emblematic of the United States.