wear a face mask, mask required sign, Multnomah County mask guidline
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Here we go again.

The Biden administration on Thursday suggested they're considering demanding new lockdowns, business shutdowns, and school closures. Using the COVID-19 Delta variant as justification, the Biden administration's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reversed itself on Tuesday and told Americans that vaccination won't save them from having to wear a mask again.


Wednesday morning, vaccinated White House staff were once again masking up. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi directed U.S. Capitol Police to arrest staff and visitors who don't comply with her masks-for-all mandate.

With other cities surely to follow, Washington, D.C. will require everyone, vaccinated or not, to wear masks indoors starting Saturday. Los Angeles County was ahead of schedule, breaking with then-CDC guidance two weeks ago to require residents wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status.

California is requiring state employees and even private health-care workers to either get the vaccine or endure weekly COVID-19 testing. New York is doing the same for state workers, and Biden announced a similar mandate for federal workers.

Mask mandates are back at the Department of Defense, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has called vaccine passports "the way forward," and CNN's Don Lemon says you shouldn't be able to go to work or even to the "supermarket" without getting the shot.

You didn't think your ruling betters were finally beginning to recognize their hypocritical mandates and ineffective lockdowns weren't helping, did you? Or that the COVID-19 vaccine, touted as a magical elixir to save us from our selfish, autonomy-loving selves, was going to make the power-grab go away?

"Fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me," the saying goes. Nearly a year and a half ago, when panicked politicians shut down the country in reaction to the spread of COVID-19, most of us gave them the benefit of the doubt. "Two weeks to stop the spread" wasn't that long, right?

When two weeks turned into months (and in some states, more than a year!) some of us started pushing back and asking questions. If the point was to slow the spread until we better understood the virus and overwhelmed hospitals could equip themselves, why did we need to keep everyone locked down when nearly all hospitals were empty and we learned the virus was comparable to a bad flu for most age demographics?

Besides, lockdowns were wrecking the economy, and closed schools were putting millions of children behind for life. They weren't keeping the virus contained, either, so why was anyone pretending they still helped? Meanwhile, Anthony Fauci and company promised little blue pieces of paper on our faces would protect us all, after telling us at the pandemic's outset that they wouldn't help and we shouldn't wear them.

When vaccines became available, the rationale for going back to normal became even more obvious. People who wanted the vaccine could get it, and those who preferred to take their chances with COVID-19 should have been able to do so.

As soon as President Biden took office, oh, did the tone change. The new administration gleefully took credit for the vaccine developed under the Trump administration (which Biden and running mate Kamala Harris made a point to skeptically question during the campaign). The septuagenarian president was the harbinger of a return to normal, darn it, and talking heads popped champagne corks.

But a real return to normal would mean giving up the power trip that came with telling an entire country how to live, or not live, their lives, down to what they must wear and how they must breathe. So Biden, Pelosi, Democrat governors, and the unelected goons at the CDC want to send you into round two of senseless COVID-19 mandates.

You could be forgiven for naively going along with the first round of arbitrary lockdowns, even though they stretched far beyond the power any of their proponents should ever have possessed. "I don't see the logic, but I'd rather make temporary sacrifices to keep people safe than risk hurting anyone," said most compassionate, neighborly Americans.

But as lockdown tyrants like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (all Democrats) kept getting caught breaking their own rules, sensible people rightly started getting suspicious.

As lockdowns dragged on, and not even the availability of vaccines and effective therapeutic treatments was enough to allay the media panic-fest, those sensible people became more than suspicious. We became indignant at the endless denial of our freedom — and our competence — to make our own decisions.

If you weren't in that crowd the first time around, you should be now. Get ready, because corporate media fearmongers and power-addicted politicians aren't going to give up their newfound power to tell you whether you can go to work, what you should put in your body, or what to wear on your face.

They deserve no end of shame for pushing the first year of lockdowns. But if you let them get away with it again, you ought to be ashamed too.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.