On January 20, 2025, hours before handing over power, President Biden issued preemptive pardons for Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and every member of the House January 6th Committee. You pardon people who might be guilty. Innocent men don't need preemptive cover. That act confirmed what millions already believed: the COVID-19 regime protected its own while leaving ordinary Americans to absorb the wreckage. No accountability. No reckoning. Just pardons for all and a quiet exit.
I spent the spring of 2020 watching my sons miss prom, their track season, and the backyard football games they'd looked forward to all winter. As a father, coach, and financial professional with 30 years of assessing real risk for real people, I recognized the pattern immediately. This wasn't careful governance. It was fear sold as science, compliance demanded as patriotism, and constitutional rights treated like optional suggestions on a homeowners' association notice. The Biden administration didn't invent the COVID panic; it industrialized it into something the Founders would have recognized at once and fought hard against.
The Bill of Rights Did Not Have a Pandemic Clause
This wasn't speculation. The Twitter Files proved it. Internal documents released in late 2022 showed the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security directing social media platforms to remove content, including medically accurate statements that contradicted government narratives. The Stanford-led Virality Project flagged millions of posts per day for removal — posts that were accurate but inconvenient. A Rhode Island physician was suspended for citing a peer-reviewed study. Alex Berenson was banned at the White House's direct request. The same Justice Department that labeled school board parents "domestic terrorists" ran a government-private censorship apparatus targeting accurate science. The question every editorial board should have asked was not who spread misinformation. The question was: who was the actual threat to democracy? That answer is now documented in their own emails.
Vaccine passports became the new internal passport system. One must show one's papers to board a plane, eat at a restaurant, or visit elderly parents. The shots did not stop transmission. Natural immunity existed; the bureaucracy ignored it and declared compliance the price of admission to civilized society. Fifth Amendment property rights were gutted when small businesses were ordered shuttered while big-box retailers and politically connected enterprises stayed open. Seventh Amendment jury trials? Courts went dark. Due process was mothballed for the greater good, which always meant more power for the administrative state and less accountability for the people in charge.
The Data Was Available. The Narrative Didn't Care.
Sweden, which largely avoided the worst lockdowns, recorded a cumulative excess mortality rate of 158 deaths per 100,000 population from 2020 to 2022, among the lowest in Europe, where the median was 351 per 100,000. Countries that locked down harder did not produce better health outcomes meaningfully. They produced more economic wreckage and more debt. Florida, under Governor DeSantis, reopened its schools in August 2020. A Harvard University study analyzing test data from 2.1 million students across 49 states confirmed that school districts that stayed open lost far less academic ground than those that went remote. Eight of the ten states with the worst learning loss voted Democrat. That correlation is a policy outcome, not a coincidence.
The CDC's own numbers confirmed the human damage. In 2021, 44 percent of high school students reported persistently feeling sad or hopeless, up from 37 percent before the pandemic. Nearly 20 percent considered suicide. Among girls, one in four reported suicidal ideation. I coached youth athletics for years. When kids don't train, they don't improve. When they don't compete, they lose something harder to measure than a test score — confidence, identity, the sense that effort has real consequences. A generation lost that, by decree, from adults who paid no personal cost for the decision. Small businesses that had survived recessions and decades of California's regulatory pressure died in months. I watched friends in the service industry lose everything while politicians lectured about "equity" from Zoom backgrounds. The grief was real. The accountability was not.
We Must Never Let This Happen Again
Fauci told Congress the federal government had not funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH later acknowledged otherwise. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) argued the testimony constituted a violation of 18 USC 1001. Biden's pardon, issued before any charges were even filed, guaranteed the question would never be tested in court. As Paul put it: "If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden's pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal." Hard to argue with that logic.
The remedy is institutional, not rhetorical. Congress should require any future public health measure restricting constitutional rights to face expedited judicial review under strict scrutiny, not deference to agency expertise, but actual review by Article III courts. States should enshrine parental rights in education so no future Randi Weingarten can hold children's schooling hostage to a union contract. Voters must identify and reject the soft authoritarianism that dresses control as kindness, every single time it appears on a ballot.
I've spent thirty years advising clients that the most dangerous assumption in any market is that last cycle's crisis won't recur. Howard Marks calls it the failure of institutional memory. The COVID response was the political equivalent of that failure — except the losses weren't measured in basis points. They were measured in learning gaps, adolescent suicides, shuttered businesses, and constitutional precedents that erode a little more each time they go undefended. The Constitution is the operating system for a republic. The moment we allow temporary administrators to issue root-level overrides because the models said so — and then pardon themselves before anyone can ask why — we've decided that self-government is optional. It is not. We must refuse to let it become so.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.