Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare quotes the soothsayer’s warning Julius Caesar about what turned out to be an impending assassination on March 15.

The death of American liberty happened around the same time four years ago, when the orders went out from all levels of government to close all indoor and outdoor venues where people gather.

It was not quite a law and it was never voted on by anyone. Seemingly out of nowhere, people who the public had largely ignored, the public health bureaucrats, all united to tell the executives in charge — mayors, governors and the president — that the only way to deal with a respiratory virus was to scrap freedom and the Bill of Rights.

What Happened to This Document?

In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a classified document, only to be released to the public months later. The document initiated the lockdowns. It still does not exist on any government website.

The White House Coronavirus Response Task Force, led by the vice president, will coordinate a whole-of-government approach, including governors, state and local officials, and members of Congress, to develop the best options for the safety, well-being and health of the American people. HHS is the LFA [lead federal agency] for coordinating the federal response to COVID-19.

Closures were guaranteed:

Recommend significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Issue widespread “stay at home” directives for public and private organizations, with nearly 100% telework for some, although critical public services and infrastructure may need to retain skeleton crews. Law enforcement could shift to focus more on crime prevention, as routine monitoring of storefronts could be important.

A Blueprint for Totalitarian Control of Society

In this vision of turnkey totalitarian control of society, the vaccine was pre-approved: “Partner with pharmaceutical industry to produce anti-virals and vaccine.”

The National Security Council was put in charge of policymaking. The CDC was just the marketing operation. That’s why it felt like martial law. Without using those words, that’s what was being declared. It even urged information management, with censorship strongly implied.

As part of the lockdowns, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, as set up in 2018, broke the entire American labor force into essential and nonessential.

They also set up and enforced censorship protocols, which is why it seemed like so few objected. In addition, CISA was tasked with overseeing mail-in ballots for the November election.

Congress passed and the president signed the 880-page CARES Act, which authorized the distribution of $2 trillion to states, businesses and individuals, thus guaranteeing that lockdowns would continue for the duration.

They wanted zero cases of COVID in the country. That was never going to happen. It’s very likely that the virus had already been circulating in the U.S. and Canada from October 2019. A famous study by Jay Bhattacharya came out in May 2020 discerning that infections and immunity were already widespread in the California county they examined.

What that implied was two crucial points: There was zero hope for the zero COVID mission and this pandemic would end as they all did, through herd immunity, not from a vaccine as such. That was certainly not the message that was being broadcast from Washington.

The growing sense at the time was that we all had to sit tight and just wait for the inoculation on which pharmaceutical companies were working.

Different Sets of Rules

By summer 2020, you recall what happened. A restless generation of kids fed up with this stay-at-home nonsense seized on the opportunity to protest racial injustice in the killing of George Floyd.

Public health officials approved of these gatherings — unlike protests against lockdowns — on grounds that racism was a virus even more serious than COVID. Some of these protests got out of hand and became violent and destructive.

Meanwhile, substance abuse raged — the liquor and weed stores never closed — and immune systems were being degraded by lack of normal exposure, exactly as some doctors had predicted.

Millions of small businesses had closed. The learning losses from school closures were mounting, as it turned out that Zoom school was near worthless.

It was about this time that Trump seemed to figure out that he had been played and started urging states to reopen. But it was strange: He seemed to be less in the position of being a president in charge and more of a public pundit, tweeting out his wishes until his account was banned. He was unable to put the worms back in the can that he had approved opening.

By that time, and by all accounts, Trump was convinced that the whole effort was a mistake, that he had been trolled into wrecking the country he promised to make great. It was too late.

Mail-in ballots had been widely approved, the country was in shambles, the media and public health bureaucrats were ruling the airwaves and his final months of the campaign failed even to come to grips with the reality on the ground.

(In this interview, I discuss how the censorship industrial complex is working to end free speech in America. I also discuss what I see coming in the November election. Go here to watch it).

Didn’t They Say Vaccines Would Prevent Infection?

At the time, many people had predicted that once Biden took office and the vaccine was released, COVID would be declared to have been beaten. But that didn’t happen and mainly for one reason: Resistance to the vaccine was more intense than anyone had predicted.

The Biden administration attempted to impose mandates on the entire U.S. workforce. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, that effort was thwarted but not before HR departments around the country had already implemented them.

As the months rolled on — and four major cities closed all public accommodations to the unvaccinated, who were being demonized for prolonging the pandemic — it became clear that the vaccine could not and would not stop infection or transmission, which means that this shot could not be classified as a public health benefit.

Even as a private benefit, the evidence was mixed. Any protection it provided was short-lived and reports of vaccine injury began to mount. Even now, we cannot gain full clarity on the scale of the problem because essential data and documentation remain classified.

What Exactly Happened?

After four years, we find ourselves in a strange position. We still do not know precisely what unfolded in mid-March 2020: who made what decisions, when, and why. There has been no serious attempt at any high level to provide a clear accounting much less assign blame.

Not even Tucker Carlson, who reportedly played a crucial role in getting Trump to panic over the virus, will tell us the source of his own information or what his source told him. There have been a series of valuable hearings in the House and Senate but they have received little to no press attention, and none has focused on the lockdown orders themselves.

The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured. Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome.

The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore.

In the early days of lockdown, Henry Kissinger warned that if the mitigation plan does not go well, the world will find itself set “on fire.” He died in 2023. Meanwhile, the world is indeed on fire.

The essential struggle in every country on Earth today concerns the battle between the authority and power of the permanent administration apparatus of the state - the very one that took total control in lockdowns - and the enlightenment ideal of a government that is responsible to the will of the people and the moral demand for freedom and rights.

How this struggle turns out is the essential story of our times.