LIBERTARIAN PARTY OF MINNESOTA CONDEMNS VACCINE MANDATES
(issued 9/13/21 by state chair Chris Holbrook)
The Presidential vaccine mandate is tyrannical, unethical, exclusionary, and racist. We do not consent. We will not comply.
The first sentence of the LPMN Platform- Statement of Principles- states; “We the members of the Libertarian Party of Minnesota hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, we oppose the initiation of force or fraud as a means of achieving political or social goals.”
In that deeply rooted principle, we oppose any effort by the Biden and Walz administrations to force vaccinations into people’s bodies by threat of private employment penalty. Weaponizing a government agency to attack the (unvaccinated) American people is tyranny. Using OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) to force private businesses to force their employees to take covid shots (if they have over 100 workers) is an arbitrary implementation of dictatorial powers to suppress opposition.
If your company has 99 workers you are irrelevant, proving this declaration is not based on science but on politics. This merger of the large corporation as an enforcement mechanism of government dictate is fascism, as defined by Benito Mussolini. We will not have it.
Will you?
Is liberty important to you? – “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.” Is being free important to you? There was nothing more important to the founders of this country. They declared independence from a tyrant and committed their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor to achieve it. The result was a perfectly imperfect union of independent states, constructed to balance the autonomous power of those regional governments with each other and in parity with a federal government. America rejected then, and has ever since, the absolute power of a King to exercise arbitrary despotism over all people in a nation of states.
It is immoral and unethical to control another human being with force, yet Governor Walz implements controls over your livelihood at will, affirming the latest authoritarian federal over reach against state’s rights and our personal natural rights by saying that the Presidents new vaccine mandate “(This) is the right move.” Will he continue to alienate our rights when they mandate a bar code tatoo because the vaccine passport papers aren’t forgery proof?
Will you?
Do you have a red line? Is there anything that will convince you to put liberty before safety? We have been led to believe the inverse is our only option in a civilized society, while history demonstrates that sacrificing liberty for safety decreases both and only increases servitude, state police power, and suffering. As Joe Biden says, “what more proof do you need?”
We have been ordered to stay home for weeks, let our elders die alone, dine outside-only in winter, wear masks and get injections. We have further accepted our Governor telling us who among us is essential enough to work, who can operate their private business, who can collect rent on their own property, who occupies said property, and when and where we can travel. Commerce lockdowns have not and cannot stop virus spread, among vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. Has continual compliance made us more safe or more free?
Mandates and prohibitions are government creations of exclusion to separate those who obey at all costs from those who do not. This is a betrayal and an assault on a free and voluntary society. A NBC survey last week reported that of the 29% of Americans who remain unvaccinated, that 83% of those say they will not get the vaccine no matter what, even if it means getting fired. A whopping 5% said they would change their minds if their employer was going to fire them over it. 1/3 of respondents said their reasons were a distrust of federal government, 1/3 were worried about side effects, and 1/3 had other reasons.
President Biden’s mandate and Governor Walz’s implementation of it are meant to punish the unconvinced unvaccinated, not to persuade them. When the next iteration is forced confinement (as is being done in Australia), will the masses protest then?
Will you?
Those who stand in their distrust of government when it comes to dictated injections have understandable reason when you look into programs like Tuskegee, MK Ultra and even locally how the MPD would direct ketamine injections into those who were unruly in their custody without consent and before EMS determination. We oppose all violations of your bodily autonomy. Do you?
Vaccine acceptance and mandates have also demonstrated racial disparities. Per the CDC 52% of white people have gotten a shot versus 43% of black people. In Minnesota that number is 59% and 47%. The new mandate if implemented will burden nearly 5000 private businesses in Minnesota to police and segregate over 1.3M workers (at who’s cost?).
As Joe Biden, Tim Walz and Jacob Frey issue and support more mandates to exclude more unvaccinated folks from public facilities or employment, that comes with a factual racial ratio of implementation that favors whites. The Democrats are slyly creating apartheid under medical auspices right in front of your eyes. Again. Republicans aren’t much better, they just aren’t as deceitful in establishing class privileges. Stop voting for them.
Will you?
You must abandon your allegiance to duopoly power. When offered team red or team blue, choose neither. “One is a wolf, the other is a fox.” The proposal that you must choose the lesser of two evils is the biggest lie they tell. And they tell a lot of lies. Just months ago Joe Biden said he would not create a mandate and that vaccinated people could keep their masks off.
They need us confused and divided to solidify their power and corporate cronyism by absolute authoritarian control. Whereas a people united cannot be defeated. We must unite against the two-party system, not takes sides within it. That is how we alter or abolish their destructive ends.
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,”
Joe Biden and Tim Walz are trying to seed a civil war, hate thy neighbor, to prevent a revolutionary war against their despotism and to distract from their failures. There continually change the narrative on masks, double masks, what vaccines and booster shots do, how long they last, what is herd immunity, surface transmissibility, and what solutions can we find to ease an overwhelmed hospital capacity that they have created. Did you know Minnesota statute forbids adding hospital beds without legislative approval? Yet there is no statute preventing an executive action purchase of a $7M morgue that has served no purpose except to instill fear and to validate more executive actions. They are making you pay for their mistakes.
Will you?
The President’s oath to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic means that he must have enemies foreign and domestic to justify forceful actions. As Presidents have created foreign enemies for decades to legitimize their offenses, they must now create a domestic enemy. It’s you.
Do you care? What will you do? What can you do? Do you want your freedom? Do you want protection of your personal life and personal choices? Or do you want your life, behavior, and political views imposed upon you by others, forced under penalty by state and corporation.
You must take a stand. You must rise. You must get involved to have an impact. Run for local office to defend our rights and our states rights against federal encroachments. Donate or campaign for someone who does. Stop supporting and voting for the parties in power (Democrats and Republicans both) that have led us to this point of destruction and division. Their absolute power has corrupted them absolutely. They cannot be expected to do the right thing. They have put party over principle. They only can and must be removed at the ballot box.
The LPMN and its candidates consistently defend individual sovereignty. Your body is your property and no one else’s. YOU are the ultimate authority regarding decisions for your body. And yes you must accept the consequences of those decisions, but they are YOUR decisions to make. We do not judge your choices, yet we stand firm behind your inalienable right to make them. Always.
Will you?
“Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.” – Thomas Paine
Addendum:
There has yet to be text from OSHA about implementing this executive order, how it legally lands within OSHA’s mandate, if testing will be an allowable substitute, and who will bear the costs of compliance. There will be many legal challenges to the constitutional authority of such a move. As a reminder, President Biden recently lost the challenge of using the CDC to impose and extend a national eviction moratorium. It is our hope this new idea suffers a similar ruling.
The authoritarian side argues precedent allows the mandate, citing the 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts ruling, when the US Supreme Court backed the authority of the police powers of a State to enforce compulsory vaccination laws (regarding smallpox). However, that case backed the rights of an individual State to do this. This new case will test if the Federal government has clearance to impose its police power on all States. Unfortunately in 2012 SCOTUS upheld the Obamacare individual mandate, however that was for individuals to participate in a new national scheme. This case is now about forcing companies to force individuals. While some companies have done this on their own, being forced to is different. Let it be noted that NO STATES have declared a full mandate for Covid vaccines. The Federal government would be the first one to do, and in doing so usurping power from the States.
If you intentionally harm another with your choice, the role of government is to administer justice. We have always maintained that the only legitimate function of government is to protect the rights of the smallest minority, the individual. Pre-emptive punishments, mandates, restrictions or bans to avoid theoretical infringements are in themselves the infringements.
You are not born with a natural right to be free from exposure to dangers. There are multiple respiratory diseases in the top ten causes of death. Accidents are in the top ten causes. You have been educated on the best way to avoid a car crash or the best way to avoid death from influenza, but there is not a mandate to get a flu shot, nor an effort to eliminate all cars. More children under 18 years-old have died from gunfire in the Twin Cities this summer than have died from covid. Should we be mandating Kevlar vests for all students?
Our stance is not to downplay Covid. Our position has always been that tolerance, education and persuasion are appropriate courses to attack problems. Coercion with physical or economic threat or penalty are direct assaults. The LPMN has said repeatedly that we are not anti-mask, pro-mask, anti-vaccine, nor pro-vaccine. We are anti-mandate and we denounce Biden’s initiation of force. The President doesn’t trust you. The Governor doesn’t trust you. When you have a partner that doesn’t trust you, do you just comply with whatever they tell you to do?
Will you?