California's Mania for COVID-19 Mandates Reminds Me of Infamous Executive Order 9066

An administration that cannot maintain basic standards of sanitation in its major cities subjects its schoolchildren to a constant barrage of COVID-19 vaccine legislation.

By John Leake

In a recent essay titled “America’s First Third-World State,” Victor Davis Hanson wrote of California:

If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been considered unhinged. After all, the city that gave us the modern freeway system is not supposed to resemble Justinian’s sixth-century Constantinople. Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse. Hygienists warn that permissive municipal governments are setting the stage — through spiking populations of history’s banes of fleas, lice, and rats — for possible dark-age outbreaks of plague or worse.

Paradoxically, this same administration that cannot maintain basic standards of sanitation and civilization on the streets of its once great cities has recently demonstrated Swiss-German levels of diligence, competence, and thoroughness at passing COVID-19 legislation, with special focus on the state’s schoolchildren. Indeed, the state legislature is downright manic in promulgating new COVID-19 laws that mandate vaccines and link them to school participation. The same lawmakers have demonstrated a similar mania for censoring and censuring any doctor who even questions the state’s dictates and orthodoxy.

The PERK (Protection of the Educational Rights of Kids) Association is doing yeoman’s work in challenging this totalitarian mania. PERK’s website provides a simple overview of the state’s barrage of recent bills.

Yesterday one of the ladies at PERK asked me if I was aware of any precedent in California history for the sort of discrimination now being proposed by state lawmakers. I immediately thought of Executive Order 9066, (February 19, 1942) authorizing the U.S. Military to remove 110,000 Japanese Americans (including 80,000 "Nisei" who were U.S. citizens) from their homes and place them in "relocation camps."

Japanese Americans in an Internment Camp

As President Ford stated when he repealed the Order in 1976:

February 19th is the anniversary of a sad day in American history. It was on that date in 1942…that Executive Order 9066 was issued…resulting in the uprooting of loyal Americans….We now know what we should have know then—not only was that evacuation wrong, but Japanese Americans were and are loyal Americans….I call upon the American people to affirm with me this American Promise—that we have learned from the tragedy of that long-ago experience forever to treasure liberty and justice for each individual American, and resolve that this kind of action shall never again be repeated.

The California state's proposal for vaccine mandates—and its discrimination against those who do not wish to be injected with products for which the manufacturers bear no liability in the event of injury or death—is precisely "the kind of action" about which President Ford warned us. As was the case of Executive Order 9066, legislative proposals for vaccine mandates are not motivated by facts or reason, but by unwarranted fear of a hypothetical danger. The proposal to violate citizens' bodily autonomy and freedom of choice in the purported interest of protecting the public from hypothetical dangers bears an eery resemblance to Executive Order 9066.