They Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

The Truth About Disaster Liberalism

Jason Chaffetz

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780063066137
• eBook ISBN: 9780063066144
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Fox News contributor and New York Times –bestselling author delves into progressive efforts to leverage crises to force their priorities into law.

In They Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste, Jason Chaffetz explores how disaster liberalism subjugates individual freedoms to political expediency in times of crisis, and how Republicans need to be ready for next time. Because when we allow government power to become unlimited in a crisis, the crises will become unlimited.

Across the board, Democrat leaders exploited the pandemic to achieve their agenda, invoking disaster liberalism to justify unpopular and unconstitutional power grabs. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed a gun control bill on April ten—three weeks into the pandemic—because he wouldn't have to put up with tens of thousands of protestors. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers announced he was making it a criminal offense to attend church or go to work, only to see his overreach struck down by the state supreme court. Nancy Pelosi rammed through a $3 trillion liberal wish list filled with proposals unrelated to COVID-nineteen, that immediately died in the Senate.

If not for the courts and local media, many of the Democrats' schemes would have successfully been implemented. As it was, many were—and many of the most egregious violations of Americans' rights were celebrated across the left.

In They Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste, Chaffetz uncovers Democrats' game plan and calls upon all Americans to protect ourselves against future incursions. Only the American people have the power to stop the left's next power grab, as Chaffetz shows in this powerful, thoroughly-researched call to action.

Chapter 1

When the Masks Came Off

A Watershed Event

In a year of extraordinary events, June 2020 marked an inflection point in American politics. Everything that came after it would be different from what had come before it. Of all the events Americans endured during a year no one wants to replicate, this was the one that changed everything. It was the moment that the COVID pandemic was overturned by more pressing concerns—the political passions of the leftist elite. And we just let it happen. June was when the masks came off and we saw the left for who they really were.

It all started with the murder of George Floyd, which set off nationwide protests that quickly ballooned out of control. The Black Lives Matter protests that month rode a wave of legitimate frustration, harnessing the intensity of a collective rage to power demands for justice. But the anarchists, Antifa, and others who hate America hijacked the outrage and used the protests as an opportunity to destroy communities. If they continue to get their way, the ultimate result will be a new wave of progressive policies. The same kind of policies that have flooded black communities with poverty and crime for decades.

For better or worse, the political aftermath of those protests will likely be seen as a watershed event in American politics—a decade-defining moment that turned the tide of history. But which way will the tide turn? Toward racial harmony, or toward an America stripped of fundamental rights and devoid of the rule of law? Will life return to the normal we once knew, or will a new normal replace it, one that Democrats, liberals, and outright socialists sought to thrust upon us?

These strong tides have a hidden undertow. The peaceful protesters who legitimately demanded racial equality cloaked the more radical and politically motivated efforts to leverage a crisis in the pursuit of power.

I hope there will be a significant upside for those who experience disparate treatment from the criminal justice system in this country. But we can be certain the downside of the protests will be seismic. The hypocrisy these protests exposed has torn the masks off America’s elite institutions, exposing their agenda-driven underpinnings that subjugate science to dogma.

COVID-19 was a useful pretext to push progressive policies—until it wasn’t. How the Black Lives Matter protests made leftist politicians switch their furor from one crisis to another in an instant shows just how politically motivated so many of their actions were. Because of this, the impact of the Black Lives Matter protests will forever be tied to the crisis they upended: a global health pandemic that we were told urgently demanded no one gather—even to protest.

Protests began as a legitimate response to incidents of police brutality and the loss of certain kinds of black lives. The outrage was conveniently selective, only directed at black lives disrupted by police violence, but never at black lives disrupted by criminal or political violence. They became much bigger than simply a civil rights protest, of which there have been many. These protests were distinguished from other civil disobedience in ways both constructive and destructive. The scope of the protests quickly expanded across the country and around the world, drawing attention to certain inexcusable abuses, suppressing others, and shining a spotlight on demands for progressive policies—many with a tenuous link to racism.

Unfortunately, the timing and implementation of the protests sent unintended messages to the American public that led many to question the whole premise of the lockdown. Was it ever really about public health? Or was it political all along? Before the watershed event, the question was a heresy. Afterward, for many, it was a given.

Taking place in the midst of a global pandemic and economic lockdown, the protests’ political utility for Democrats was dependent on reversing messaging they had aggressively promoted for weeks. Democrats would attempt to walk it back as time went on, but as May turned to June, the reversal was 180 degrees virtually overnight. The extensive violence, looting, and rioting that characterized the earliest protests—much of it targeting vulnerable black neighborhoods in deep blue cities—contradicted the message that black lives matter. And the selective coverage of the protests sought to emphasize the stories that fit a political narrative while ignoring obvious and egregious counternarrative examples.

Social Distancing? Never Mind

The speed with which America’s political, cultural, and media elite reversed their previous messaging on public health in 2020 would give anyone whiplash. The tide turned so quickly from denying free speech and assembly rights in May to demanding them by June that the juxtaposition was jarring. We saw two sets of protests and two sets of standards.

To understand this, we have to go back to the first protests—the ones that took place before June. At first, during the early days of the pandemic, Americans surrendered their rights with surprisingly little pushback. But as the weeks passed and the reality of the lockdown set in, more and more people fought back. During the month of May, in state after state, Americans began to demonstrate against restrictive lockdowns that threatened their livelihoods, their communities, and their way of life. In some cases, the responses were more forceful, with police arresting mothers who let kids play on playgrounds, ticketing churchgoers listening to sermons from their cars, and denying occupational licenses to barbers who opened for business. In states governed by progressive politicians, these protests were met with warnings and reprimands from public health officials and politicians alike. There were heavy doses of public shaming and dire predictions of massive death tolls. In short, the protesters were condemned for putting their civil rights ahead of public safety.

But just weeks and even days later, the much larger and much more violent protests on the left received very different treatment. They weren’t condemned by leftist elites, but rather promoted.

This shift was not subtle. It wasn’t just the woke scolds on social media whose positions abruptly reversed. It wasn’t just the celebrities, or the left-wing newsrooms. It was people with real political power—the blue state politicians who had made shaming protesters part of their agenda and the public health experts who had been peddling fear for weeks.

All of a sudden, social distancing was optional—a mere suggestion to be measured against weightier issues. Overnight, we went from shaming anyone who even questioned public health guidelines to forgetting we even had public health guidelines.

Let’s start with the health experts and academics on whose expertise America relied to shut down the economy and destroy many small businesses in the first place. These were the same people warning us in April and May that we should not act too quickly to reopen businesses and leave our homes.

As the riots got under way, I remember thinking to myself—what are the epidemiologists going to say about this? Given how strongly people had reacted to much smaller protests in Michigan, California, and Wisconsin, what would public health experts, the blue state governors, and the hand-wringing leftist media say now? Would the Party of Science™ tell us the truth when the truth runs against their narrative?

We didn’t have to wait long for an answer to those questions. The academics at the University of Washington, whose forecasting model was referenced by federal and state governments to make decisions about the need for lockdowns, were among the first to reverse course.

In a public letter signed by nearly 1,300 health experts from around the country, they highlighted one particular “heavily armed predominantly white” group who was protesting “stay-at-home orders and calls for widespread public masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19.” They then went on to broadly sum up the anti-lockdown protests as “white protesters resisting stay-at-home orders.” No doubt the many people of color who joined in the lockdown protests across the country were surprised to learn people of their race had been erased from the narrative by these epidemiologists. Furthermore, the reductive description of protests as a tantrum about wearing masks obscured the very real and painful price exacted by the stay-at-home orders. The letter further ignored the many white liberals pushing for less restrictive lockdowns.

Divisions over the economic trade-offs of locking down the economy were hardly racially drawn. Lockdowns also weren’t hurting the rich. They took a harder toll on those who were not white-collar workers, on people with smaller houses, bad internet, and no money to stock up on two months of food.

After that inaccurate and wholly incomplete assessment of objections to the lockdown, the public health experts characterized the leftist protests as a “response to ongoing, pervasive, and lethal institutional racism.” With that rose-colored description of a weekend that resulted in burned businesses, looted stores, injured protesters, and police, they followed up with, “A public health response to these demonstrations is also warranted, but this message must be wholly different from the response to white protesters resisting stay-at-home orders.”

The condescending tone continued with efforts to tie these claims to science. The letter claimed that white supremacy is “a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19” and insisted that “COVID-19 among black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy.” This is the twisted logic by which a long-standing problem, one apparently not dealt with during the eight years this country was governed by a black president, became so urgent that it could only be dealt with through violent demonstrations in the middle of a global pandemic.

The letter’s bottom line was this: “As public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. . . . This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.”

In other words, your protests are not important enough to warrant risking disease transmission. Ours are.

Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo followed suit, writing on Twitter, “We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus. In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

You know what else rivals the harms of the virus? The risk of cancer patients not seeking treatment, unemployed Americans falling into depression and suicide, or battered women being exposed to increasing levels of domestic violence by their partners who stay home. But none of that mattered before the Black Lives Matter protests. Only after the protests began were we told we were allowed to “evaluate the risks and benefits” of virus-spreading activities. We didn’t get to decide whether we believed church services, funerals, or livelihoods were essential—governors decided that for us.

How many Americans died alone in a hospital bed with no visitors to keep the virus from spreading? How many lonely patients in nursing facilities went months without any physical contact with loved ones? How many families were asked to sacrifice the one opportunity to hold or attend a funeral for a parent, grandparent, or child during this time? “Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported,” the letter read.

Here were public health professionals trying to justify why some people could gather by the thousands, shouting, chanting, and in some cases looting and burning, but Americans wanting to end the lockdowns must still stay home.

As inconsistent as some public health officials were from May to June, the politicians were worse. America’s most restrictive governors and mayors, who had gleefully used the force of law to prevent women from cutting hair in their homes and kids from playing on playgrounds, were suddenly protesting against law enforcement—marching shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people in violation of their own edicts. The very people upon whom they rely to enforce their broad restrictions—police—were now the enemy.

Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker marched with protesters against police in June. But in May, he was threatening to use those same police to crack down on disobedient businesses. Wallet Hub ranked Pritzker’s mandate as the third most strict lockdown in the country. At the time, he emphasized that his plans were “science-based.” Where was this science in June?

New Jersey governor Phil Murphy rushed to exempt outdoor gatherings from his restrictive lockdown orders, acknowledging protests needed to be consistent with “the law,” aka his edicts (and thus correctly implying they had not been consistent with the law). He did this after he had appeared with protesters, violating his own edicts.

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had been harshly critical of lockdown protesters who hadn’t socially distanced in her state, was photographed marching side by side with a dense crowd of demonstrators. Whitmer justified the photo op because she was wearing a mask—an option she didn’t give to churchgoers or small businesses wanting to reopen in her state.

In Seattle, where protesters set up their own Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) by taking over a police precinct, Mayor Jenny Durkan brushed off the anarchists. She excused the widespread vandalism, violence, and crime as a “block party atmosphere.” It was a big shift from her position in 2016, when right-wing Oregon ranchers seized a government wildlife refuge in Oregon. She accused that group, which is believed to have consisted of only a few dozen men, of trashing the place. But when thousands of leftists vandalized public buildings and trashed private businesses, it was a summer of love.

The contradictions were almost too numerous to track. While millions were gathering around the country to protest that black lives matter, it became clear that only certain black lives mattered—those that fit a narrative. Black lives like former police captain David Dorn, who was murdered by looters near St. Louis the night of the riots while protecting a business, got far less attention. Unless you frequent right-leaning media sites, you may have missed it. The lives and livelihoods of poor black families whose neighborhood pharmacies, grocery stores, and fast-food restaurants had been cleared out or set ablaze didn’t seem to matter much. Nor those of the black business owners whose life work went up in flames. And certainly not the lives of black people who might be exposed to a deadly disease from which black people were two to three times more likely to die than whites. Unless a black life was taken by a white cop, these lives didn’t seem to matter any more than the spread of a deadly pandemic among those most at risk to contract it.

MSNBC’s Ali Velshi unwittingly became an internet meme after he stood before a burning building in Minneapolis and reported, “I want to be clear in how I characterize this. This is mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly but fires have been started and the crowd is relishing that.” Many posted a famous clip of actor Leslie Nielsen in the movie The Naked Gun telling bystanders, “Please disperse. Nothing to see here!” as a fireworks warehouse explodes in flames behind him.

In the days that followed, media outlets went out of their way to use the term “peaceful protesters” to describe those attending events in which violent activities had taken place. We were continually reminded that many were wearing masks. We had to learn from Trump administration official Dr. Deborah Birx about the seventy coronavirus testing sites that were destroyed the first weekend of the “peaceful” protests. The media rarely told such stories.

The contrast in the coverage was so obvious, media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News, “The riots have ripped the mask off the mainstream media-politicized coronav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: When the Masks Came Off
• Chapter 2: The “Public Health Crisis” Playbook
• Chapter 3: The Party of Science?
• Chapter 4: A Politicized Tragedy
• Chapter 5: The Inevitable Slippery Slope of Liberalism
• Chapter 6: Clenched Fists
• Chapter 7: The Coronavirus Relief Heist
• Chapter 8: Rigging Elections for a Generation
• Chapter 9: The Real Gun Crisis
• Chapter 10: A Lockdown on Faith
• Chapter 11: Chilling Free Speech
• Chapter 12: An America We Don’t Recognize
• Chapter 13: The Memory Hole
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Jason Chaffetz
• Copyright
• About the Publisher