Rand Paul in 2009 Interview with InfoWars: Vaccines the First Step Towards "Martial Law"

I think we can safely say that he is his father's son.

A lot of this is pretty defensible, I think -- including his observation that "mandates" for innocculations are a first step towards "martial law."

That kind of rhetoric used to bother me. It sounded paranoid to me.

But it doesn't sound that way anymore. I'm not saying this makes me right, but these worries of the paranoid fringe don't seem entirely paranoid to me any longer.

Under Obama's misrule, I have become far more suspicious of the competency and motives (personal motives and, even more crucially, unexamined and even unknown class/cadre motives and imperatives) and am far less likely to sneer at a claim that any power granted to those with the legal license to kill you could result in tyranny.

That said, he's speaking here to InfoWars. And it is necessary to know the background of why he's talking about the Swine Flu Vaccine. In short, it's because the Swine Flu Vaccine debacle ignited a public backlash that shades into conspiracy theories.

In fact, the 2009 swine flu outbreak has also prompted Conspiracy Theorist Without Portfolio Alex Jones to hop on the bandwagon and start churning out conspiracy theories.

(Note: the conspiracy theories are largely caused by paranoia owing to the government's warning about a far greater outbreak than actually happens; rather than concluding we dodged a bullet or the scientists overestimated the threat, the conspirators suggest that the threat was deliberately overstated to condition the populace to accept government control, and to accept Government Vaccinations.)

Some of this isn't exactly foreign to me. The head of the CDC lied about the transmission pathways of ebola to downplay the risks; I have no question that public officials routinely overstate or understate risks in order to manipulate public behavior towards a specific mode they've decided is "for the greater good."

But there's paranoia and then there's paranoia. The paranoia about the Clerisy's vested class interests is of a different character than paranoia that the government is conditioning people to accept vaccinations so that they can begin shaping our behavior through "vaccines" which are really designed to calm us and anesthetize us.

Your mileage may differ on this, but I find Rand Paul's actual words not all that bothersome; what bothers me is that he, like his father, is absolutely determined to flatter the paranoias of a a dark and weird fringe.

Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) said during a 2009 interview with Alex Jones' InfoWars that mandatory vaccines for illnesses such as the swine flu could be an early step toward "martial law," and said the procedures have a long history of lethal side effects.

"The first sort of thing you see with martial law is mandates, and they're talking about making it mandatory," said Paul. "I worry because the first flu vaccine we had in the 1970s, more people died from the vaccine than died from the swine flu."

That's mostly true (I just checked). 25 people died after having received the swine flu vaccination in 1976; I doubt it's true that each of those deaths can be traced directly to the vaccine, but Paul here is on fairly firm ground in at least repeating something that the Common Wisdom holds to be true.

Very few people died after the first registered case of swine flu itself.

"The whole problem is not necessarily good versus bad on vaccines, it's whether it should be mandatory or the individual makes the decision," he added. "And sometimes you want to not be the first one to get a new procedure, you want to see if it works well before you choose."

While Paul said he would personally choose to get the smallpox vaccine again and would have taken one for polio, he said the decision to vaccinate should be left to the individual. He also said the risks of the vaccines need to be weighed against the risks of the diseases.

"You have to weigh the risks of the disease versus the risks of the vaccine," Paul said. "But I'm not going to tell people who think it’s a bad idea that they have to take it because everybody should be allowed to make their own health care decisions."

I guess I'm just bothered at the Pauls' relentless courting of the paranoid right/left, the fringey cadre of people who drift easily from being LaRouchian Democrats to being John Birch Society Republicans. It's a group for which the dominant political position is a belief in dark conspiracies of all sorts.

posted by Ace at 01:19 PM

| Access Comments