Pulitzer-Winning Historian Dismantles William Barr's COVID-19 Lockdown Claims
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham dismantled Attorney General William Barr’s claim that coronavirus lockdowns are “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” in U.S. history other than slavery.
“You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest,” Barr said at a Constitution Day celebration hosted by the conservative Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, on Wednesday. “Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” he added.
On Wednesday’s broadcast of “CNN Tonight,” Meacham described Barr’s comments as “incendiary hyperbole.”
They were “designed to feed a sense of paranoia and fear on behalf of an administration that is relying not on a message or an agenda of hope, grounded in traditional American understandings of liberty, and is instead is betting on finding just the right number of Americans in the right number of states who will say ‘yeah, we’re scared, we’re mad, we want a tough guy,’” he added.
“If you think that this is akin to slavery, you obviously never suffered under the burden of slavery in real time or in its longtime system of segregation and the denial of the suffrage and voting rights that grew out of it,” Meacham explained.
The historian reeled off a long list of other intrusions on civil liberties in U.S. history — far worse than the lockdowns aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19 ― from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
“We’re talking about scientifically uncontroversial public health measures,” Meacham reminded host Don Lemon. It is “not some ideologically driven plot” to change American lives, he noted, but instead a plan to save them.
Check out Meacham’s comments here:
AG William Barr suggests that the calls for a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid-19 were the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties” in history “other than slavery.”
Presidential historian Jon Meacham fact checks what he called “incendiary hyperbole.” pic.twitter.com/YPmgFm3i7F— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) September 17, 2020
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
