History Rhymes: Freedom from Fear

“Freedom from fear” was a prime justification for many of the most oppressive Covid pandemic policies. As Georgetown University Law professor Lawrence Gostin declared in late 2021, “COVID-19 vaccines are a remarkable scientific tool that enables society to live in greater freedom and with less fear. Using every tool—including mandates—to achieve high vaccination coverage enhances freedom.” 

While many Covid vaccine skeptics were astounded to see the intellectual contortions of mandate advocates, “freedom from fear” has been a favorite invocation of political charlatans for almost a century. Providing “freedom from fear” has become one of the most frequent political promises in this century. 

Politicians routinely portray freedom from fear as the apex of freedom, higher than the specific freedoms buttressed by the Bill of Rights. While presidents have defined “freedom from fear” differently, the common thread is that it requires unleashing government agents. Reviewing almost a century of bipartisan invocations on freedom from fear provides good cause to doubt the next bombast on the subject. 

“Freedom from fear” first entered the American political pantheon thanks to a January 1941 speech by President Franklin Roosevelt. In that State of the Union address, he promised citizens freedom of speech and freedom of worship—two cornerstones of the First Amendment—and then added socialist-style “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.” FDR’s revised freedoms did not include freedom to dissent, since he said the government would need to take care of the “few slackers or trouble makers in our midst.”

Nor did FDR’s improved freedoms include the freedom not to be rounded up for concentration camps, as FDR ordered for Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Three years later, FDR amended his definition of freedom by championing a Universal Conscription Act to entitle government to the forced labor of any citizen.

Richard Nixon, in his acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican National Convention, promised, “We shall re-establish freedom from fear in America so that America can take the lead in re-establishing freedom from fear in the world.” Nixon asserted: “The first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence, and that right must be guaranteed in this country.”

But with the Nixon scorecard, government violence didn’t count. He perpetuated the war in Vietnam, resulting in another 20,000 American soldiers pointlessly dying.  On the home front, he created the Drug Enforcement Administration and appointed the nation’s first drug czar. The FBI perpetuated its COINTELPRO program, carrying out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” as a 1976 Senate report noted.

President George H.W. Bush told the National Baptist Convention on September 8, 1989: “Today freedom from fear…means freedom from drugs.” To boost public fear, a DEA informant arranged for a knucklehead to sell crack cocaine to an undercover narc in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Bush invoked the sale a few days later to justify a national crackdown. Bush informed the American Legion: “Today I want to focus on one of those freedoms: freedom from fear—the fear of war abroad, the fear of drugs and crime at home. To win that freedom, to build a better and safer life, will require the bravery and sacrifice that Americans have shown before and must again.”

Foremost among the sacrifices that Bush demanded was that of traditional liberties. His administration vastly expanded federal power to arbitrarily confiscate Americans’ property and boosted the role of the US military in domestic law enforcement. In a 1992 speech dedicating a new DEA office building, Bush declared, “I am delighted to be here to salute the greatest freedom fighters any nation could have, people who provide freedom from violence and freedom from drugs and freedom from fear.” The DEA’s own crime sprees, corruption, and violence were not permitted to impede Bush’s victory lap. 

On May 12, 1994, President Bill Clinton declared: “Freedom from violence and freedom from fear are essential to maintaining not only personal freedom but a sense of community in this country.” Clinton banned so-called assault weapons and sought to ban 35 million semi-automatic firearms. Gun bans in response to high crime rates mean closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. Citizens would presumably have nothing to fear after they were forced to abjectly depend on government officials for their own survival. 

In February 1996, Clinton, seeking conservative support for his reelection campaign, endorsed forcing children to wear uniforms at public schools. Clinton justified the fashion dictate: “Every one of us has an obligation to work together, to give our children freedom from fear and the freedom to learn.” But, if mandatory uniforms were the key to ending violence, Postal Service employees would have a lower homicide rate. 

George W. Bush, like his father, alternated promising “freedom from fear” with shameless fear-mongering. Prior to Election Day 2004, the Bush administration continually issued terror attack warnings based on flimsy or no evidence. The New York Times derided the Bush administration in late October for having “turned the business of keeping Americans informed about the threat of terrorism into a politically scripted series of color-coded scare sessions.”

Yet each time a terror alert was issued, the president’s approval rating rose temporarily by roughly three percent, according to a Cornell University study. The Cornell study found a “halo effect:” the more terrorists wanted to attack America, the better job Bush was supposedly doing. People who saw terrorism as the biggest issue in the 2004 election voted for Bush by a 6-to-1 margin. 

The most memorable Bush campaign ad, released just before the election, opened in a thick forest, with shadows and hazy shots complementing the foreboding music. After vilifying Democratic candidate John Kerry, the ad showed a pack of wolves reclining in a clearing. The voiceover concluded, “And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm” as the wolves began jumping up and running toward the camera. At the end of the ad, the president appeared and announced: “I’m George W. Bush and I approve this message.”

One liberal cynic suggested that the ad’s message was that voters would be eaten by wolves if Kerry won. Pat Wendland, the manager of Wolves Offered Life and Friendship, a Colorado wolf refuge in Colorado, complained: “The comparison to terrorists was insulting. We have worked for years, teaching people that Little Red Riding Hood lied.”

Bush’s campaign to terrify voters into granting him four more years to rule America did not deter him from announcing in his 2005 State of the Union address: “We will pass along to our children all the freedoms we enjoy, and chief among them is freedom from fear.” 

In the 2020 presidential race, Democratic candidate Joe Biden personally blamed President Donald Trump for every one of the 220,000 Covid deaths in the nation. Biden had a simple promise based on a simple message: “People want to be safe.”  And the only way to survive was to put Uncle Joe in the White House and unleash him. 

Biden ran one of the most fear-based presidential campaigns in modern history. Biden talked as if every American family had lost a member or two from this pestilence. He routinely exaggerated Covid death tolls a hundredfold or a thousandfold, publicly asserting that millions of Americans had already been killed by Covid-19. Biden was helped mightily by fear-mongering media coverage. CNN ramped up the fear with a Covid Death Counter always on the screen. But the death count was statistical garbage. Individuals who died of gunshot wounds were counted as Covid deaths if a postmortem showed any Covid trace.

A Brookings Institution analysis noted: “Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to overestimate [Covid] harm. Forty-one percent of Democrats…answered that half or more of those infected by COVID-19 need to be hospitalized.” At that time, the rate of hospitalization was between 1% and 5%, but Democratic voters overestimated the risk up to twentyfold. A CNN exit poll found that the “recent rise in coronavirus cases” was the most important factor for 61% of Biden voters. Biden won the presidency as a result of only 43,000 votes in three swing states.

In June 2021, Biden proclaimed that everyone must get a Covid vaccine so that America could have “freedom from fear.” He said that people should “exercise your freedom” to get vaccinated with a drug approved on an emergency basis six months earlier. He declared: “We need everyone across the country to pull together [i.e., submit] to get us over the finish line.” The following month, Biden promised that anyone who got the injection would not get or transmit Covid. After the government coverup of failing vaccine efficacy collapsed, far more people balked at getting the shot. Biden responded by dictating a “get the jab or lose your job” mandate for 100 million American adults. (The Supreme Court later struck down most of that mandate.) 

“Freedom from fear” apparently requires maximizing hatred of anyone who fails to submit. In an October 2021 CNN town hall, Biden derided vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you” with Covid. Biden continued to proclaim that Covid was an “epidemic of the unvaccinated” long after government data revealed that most individuals who caught Covid were vaccinated. NIH posted a 2022 article that blamed “fearmongering and scare tactics” by anti-vaccine activists for the reported adverse side effects of Covid vaccines.

A 2022 Rasmussen poll found that 59% of Democratic voters favored house arrest for the unvaccinated, and 45% favored locking the unvaxxed into government detention facilities. Almost half of Democrats favored empowering government to “fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing Covid-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.”  A massive covert federal censorship regime was also deployed to suppress criticism of Covid policies or even jokes about Covid vaccines.

For his reelection campaign, Biden milked “freedom from fear” in a Pennsylvania speech on what he labeled “the third anniversary of the Insurrection at the United States Capitol.” Biden planned to turn the November 2024 election into a referendum on Adolf Hitler, accusing Donald Trump of “echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” CNN reported that Biden campaign aides planned to go “full Hitler” on Trump. Biden spent half an hour fear-mongering and then closed by promising “freedom from fear.” This was the famous Biden two-step—demagoguing to his heart’s content and then closing with schmaltzy uplift lines, entitling the media to rechristen him as an idealist.

Biden did not survive the Democrats’ version of the “Night of the Long Knives” and Vice President Kamala Harris was designated the party’s presidential flag-bearer. Harris painted with an even broader brush than Biden. At a Juneteenth Concert this summer, she condemned Republicans for a “a full-on attack” on “the freedom from fear of bigotry and hate.” Harris implied that politicians could wave a psychological magic wand to banish any bias in perpetuity.  How can anyone have “freedom from fear of bigotry” unless politicians perpetually control everyone’s thoughts?

In August, the Democratic National Convention whooped up freedom in ways that would qualify as “authentic frontier gibberish,” as the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles would say. A campaign video promised “freedom from control, freedom from extremism and fear.” So Americans won’t have true freedom until politicians forcibly suppress any idea they label as immoderate? The Democratic Party platform warned: “Reproductive freedom, freedom from hate, freedom from fear, the freedom to control our own destinies and more are all on the line in this election.”

But the whole point of politics nowadays is to preempt individuals from controlling their own destinies. Hillary Clinton told the convention crowd that, thanks to the cracks in the glass ceiling, she could see “freedom from fear and intimidation.” Hillary also boasted of seeing “freedom to make our own decisions about our health”—after everybody shuts up and gets Covid Booster #37, presumably. 

“Freedom from fear” is the ultimate political blank check. The more people government frightens, the more legitimate dictatorial policies become.  Pledging “freedom from fear” entitles politicians to seize power over anything that frightens anyone. Giving politicians more power based on people’s fears is like giving firemen pay raises based on how many false alarms they report.

Politicians’ promises of “freedom from fear” imply that freedom properly understood is a risk-free, worry-free condition. It is the type of promise that a mother would make to a young child. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham epitomized that mindset when she proclaimed at the Democratic National Convention: “We need a president who can be Consoler-in-Chief. We need a president capable of holding us in a great big hug.” And continuing to hold us until we officially become psychological wards of the State?

“Freedom from fear” offers freedom from everything except the government. Anyone who sounds the alarm about excessive government power will automatically be guilty of subverting freedom from fear. Presumably, the fewer inviolable rights the citizen has, the better government will treat him. But as John Locke warned more than 300 years ago, “I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.”

Why not simply offer voters “freedom from the Constitution?” “Freedom from fear” means security via mass delusions about the nature of political power. Painting the motto “freedom from fear” on shackles won’t make them easier to bear. Perhaps our ruling class should be honest and replace the Bill of Rights with a new motto: “Political buncombe will make you free.”

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.