On Friday May 19, The Chicago Thinker, a conservative student-organized political news and opinion site, hosted a symposium at the University of Chicago campus, including former Trump administration adviser and Hoover Institute member Dr. Scott Atlas, along with Stanford medical professional Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, George Mason University Law professor Todd Zywicki, Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn, George Washington University Law's Jonathan Turley, and Ilya Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute.  They all made compelling and important presentations concerning the systematic breakdown in rational medical policy and law at nearly every U.S. university and college.

The general framework of the symposium was organized as an assessment of managerial and judgmental failures by university administration.  But COVID was far from a failure: it was a resounding success.  It resulted in the rapid, nearly instantaneous and parallel development of specific political objectives by the DNC, in combination with its syndicate of sponsors.  These successes include the use of emergency pandemic pretext to change state voting procedures without legislative consent or deliberation.  These changes have now created normalized expectations for the next election cycle involving voter qualifications (few if any), mail-in or absentee ballots (nearly unlimited), voting duration (extended at will), and ballot processing (unclear).  The COVID program has also been viewed as a successful use of millions of university students as experimental "guinea pigs."

As admirable as it is to see a group of conservative students take a leadership role in exposing and discussing these and many other serious problems stemming from COVID, the real nature of the pandemic program is still not being squarely faced.  It involves not only medical profiteering (billions); an unprecedented raid on the U.S. Treasury (trillions); the unauthorized tracking and monitoring of American citizens (millions); and the interference and disruption of business, family life, religious observation, and schooling, but also a further, fundamental implosion of federalism, and with it, a dismantling of the very nature of American constitutional design.  This rests most of all on a perversion of law and policy, including how our court system has failed to comprehend and enforce the specific rights of privacy, personal sovereignty, and the avoidance of harm.

The already delicate separation of powers, and its checks and balances among the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches, is now further eroded, for example by uncontrolled and unexamined executive orders that rest on "emergency" pretext.  But the progressive left is also determined to weaken or effectively eradicate the vital functional independence of the states.  Relatedly, it is also fixated on removing the electoral college system and relying on so-called popular voting, which obviously creates American political representation by exclusive high-population Democrat-controlled states like New York, Illinois, and California (and also partly explains uncontrolled illegal mass border-crossing and strategic resettlement).

The University of Chicago's politically conservative students want to believe that higher education, and their country itself, can somehow be put back in order, and that they can continue to pursue their academic ambitions in an institutional system that has for the last three years otherwise been an overtly hostile medical and ideological enforcement agency that has sought to marginalize not only conservatism, but fundamental probative thought.  As the symposium speakers rightly noted, the attempted intellectual harm inflicted on our youth by such political authoritarianism cannot be described as anything other than a complete collapse in professional duty and standards.

What the students unfortunately have to face is that the "COVID" program is not over; it is just beginning.  COVID's purpose, through its numerous law and policy manifestations, is a takeover by one unified political party and the consolidation and permeation of that party's ideology.  That ideology rests on one core belief, if not clinical delusion: the absolute control of environment through the absolute control of population.  

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of COVID's social and political engineering (or "biosecurity") is that such control can be carried out by the population itself, through a subversion of objective law and order.  As Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum) stated in The Nature of Government, "non-objective law is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its victims become its enforcers and enslave themselves."

Matthew G. Andersson is a former CEO and a graduate of the University of Chicago.  He is the author of the upcoming book Legally Blind, concerning how ideology affects law and policy.

Image: PIRO4D via Pixabay, Pixabay License.