The Very Model of a Modern COVID Authoritarian

Commentary

Few Americans better embody the COVID regime than Dr. Richard Pan. He rose to power by soliciting donations from the pharmaceutical industry and then used his position in government to demand censorship of his opponents. While Americans were subjected to lockdowns and mandates, he demonstrated a continuing contempt for constitutional liberties and a disregard for human suffering.

He told lies while accusing his opponents of spreading misinformation, and he used “public health” as a stick to beat down on the American way of life. All the while, he appeared oblivious to the profound harm his policies were causing children.

Mr. Pan, a former California State Senator, has announced his candidacy for Mayor of Sacramento, indicating that he believes he deserves more power. The March election provides an opportunity for a referendum on the COVID regime’s most fundamental tenets, including censorship, lockdowns, school closures, mask policies, vaccine mandates, and pharmaceutical industry influence.

The Regime’s Archetype

Mr. Pan authored Assembly Bill 2098 as a California State Senator, which authorized the California Medical Board to strip doctors of their medical licenses if they shared COVID “misinformation,” which he defined as any statement that “is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus.” After a federal district court ruled that the law was unconstitutional, Governor Gavin Newsom repealed it.
Mr. Pan made no attempt to hide his contempt for free speech. He asked the California Medical Board to revoke Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s medical license for his opposition to Assembly Bill 2098. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, he called anti-vaccine advocacy “akin to domestic terrorism” and demanded that social media companies ban users and groups who challenged government-approved COVID narratives.
In the article, he accused those who disagreed with him on vaccines of being corrupted by “a financial interest.” Pan’s career path, on the other hand, suggests that he has his own conflicts of interest.

Mr. Pan was elected to the California State Senate in 2014 after winning a close primary. According to the Sacramento Bee, Mr. Pan “raised more money than his opponents” and “also benefit[ed] from big spending by outside interest groups,” including health care lobbyists.
Mr. Pan received more contributions from the pharmaceutical industry than any of his colleagues the following year, when he introduced legislation to increase vaccine requirements. Big Pharma and its trade associations “gave more than $2 million to current members of the Legislature,” according to The Sacramento Bee that year. “The top recipient of industry campaign cash is Sen. Richard Pan, a Sacramento Democrat and doctor who is carrying the vaccine bill.”
In 2018, Mr. Pan proposed the “Online False Information Act,” which would require anyone who posts news on the internet to have their information verified by registered “fact-checkers.” It was an explicit call for restraint, a rejection of the First Amendment’s press freedom.
He relaunched his war on dissent two years later under the guise of “public health.” AB 2098 specifically targeted three types of COVID-related speech. First, it threatened doctors who disagreed with the virus’s nature, including the danger it posed to healthy young adults. Second, it established guidelines for how doctors could treat COVID patients. Third, it concentrated on influencing medical narratives surrounding COVID vaccines.

According to the legislative record, he and his colleagues hoped to address the “problem” of doctors “calling into question public health efforts such as masking and vaccination.” Their proposed solution was to put an end to the professional debate.
The law’s broad definition of “misinformation,” which could be changed at any time based on the capricious whims of bureaucrats, was a deliberate assault on free speech. It defied two centuries of First Amendment law and American tradition. In 1943, the United States Supreme Court wrote, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Under the guise of “public health,” Mr. Pan sought to establish a malleable orthodoxy in order to silence his detractors. Governor Newsom repealed AB 2098 before an appeals court could rule on its constitutionality after a district court issued an injunction against its implementation.

Mr. Pan, meanwhile, spread politically convenient lies about COVID.

He claimed that “unvaccinated 10- to 14-year-olds [were] driving the pandemic in the United Kingdom,” urging teenagers to get more shots and continue to wear masks. He stated that athletes competing in the 2022 Olympics should wear facial masks, arguing that “exceptional performance is not a problem wearing a mask.” According to his evidence, “neurosurgeons perform hours-long intricate brain surgery while wearing masks.”
In February 2022, he called for the continuation of mask mandates for California schoolchildren and introduced legislation that would “require a Covid-19 vaccine for school enrollment,” while eliminating all personal belief exemptions in the state. He was adamant that “natural immunity is clearly rubbish” and that “puberty blockers” are “reversible.”
Mr. Pan’s Reclaiming the Republic may be the most direct referendum on the COVID response that voters receive. Mr. Pan proudly supported the regime on every issue that reshaped our world beginning in March 2020—lockdowns, school closures, masking, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, the politicization of science, vaccine mandates, and censorship.
The recent New Zealand election suggests that voters want a referendum on the COVID response. The New York Times admitted on the eve of the election that “the dog years of the pandemic have dragged on, and there is a strong sense that the country has never been further off track.” As a result, polls show that most people will vote to punish the governing center-left Labour Party, which won a historic majority under Jacinda Ardern just three years ago.”
As Prime Minister, Ardern was a staunch supporter of lockdowns, censorship, and vaccine mandates. New Zealanders strongly opposed her party’s rule, and she will now visit the United States as a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. She will serve as a model for the incompetence and arrogance at the heart of the authoritarianism that swept the world in 2020.

So far, Americans have been denied the opportunity to hold meaningful referendums on the broad usurpations of our Bill of Rights. Our intelligence community, which is responsible for lockdowns and the suppression of free speech, is immune to democratic accountability.

White House officials like Rob Flaherty have profited from the revolving door between private and public corruption by threatening social media companies with government retaliation in order to coerce them into complying with the Biden Administration’s censorship demands.
Biden and Trump, both unapologetic about their roles in the COVID response, remain their parties’ leading candidates for the 2024 nominations, so we may have to look to the local level to provide democratic accountability for the despotism from 2020 onward. It is still present.

The desperate clamor to avoid accountability for those who opened the Pandora’s box of hate, division, state power, propaganda, and violence lies beneath many headlines and events in our time, and this is true of the reshuffled alliances with hot war in the Middle East. Even as the instigators cower in the shadows, this appears to be evolving into a civilization-wrecking dynamic of all against all.

According to the Brownstone Institute

The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of The Epoch Times.