When people say they want “freedom,” this next story represents the reason. Freedom is more than a cliché; it’s a desire not to be limited to the restrictions of an administrative state that, through history, has shown time and time again to be corrosive to innovation, joy, and advancing society. The less of any administrative state you have, the better a society and its people. An administrative state only benefits the people running it, who are always in the extreme minority. It forces people to live within the limits of the weakest links in such a society. So when people say they want freedom, they mean they don’t want an administrative state of losers running their life. And that was never more obvious than in a story about Antonio Brown, a wide receiver for my favorite football team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Over the last week or so, one of his private cooks and a girlfriend of some kind leaked information that the fully vaccinated NFL football player was using a fake card to prove it and that he had bought it for $500. Since that accusation, Brown and the Buccaneer staff had stood by his vaccination status; when Brown got the shot, a team member was with him to witness it. The Buccaneers had complied by reviewing the vaccine cards to the NFL, which was doing the bidding of the Biden administration like nice little servents. So there weren’t many teeth to the story to go anywhere, but it does bring up a whole host of problems that I had been thinking about myself. Even if Antonio Brown did provide a fake card proving his vaccine status, so what? What law did he break? And why was it such a big deal causing the media to attempt to shame him into compliance with quite a lot of news generated?
I have personally witnessed hundreds of people getting the shot and the card at this point, so I’ve had some of these questions from the beginning of the process. First, I have watched many people get the shot who immediately had terrible side effects from it. They tell you when you get the shot to stay near the administrator for 10 minutes in case you pass out. So getting this shot, even under forced government coercion, is the grounds for many, many lawsuits. Watching the process over these many months, I would say it’s one of the cruelest things I’ve ever seen a government attempt to do to its people. It’s terrible stuff because the government knows the vaccine is dangerous. When they gave Joe Biden the shot on television, I do not believe that they really gave him the shot because it would have knocked him out for days, perhaps even killed him at his age. I would not blame a professional athlete one bit for not wanting to get a vaccine shot and looking to get a fake vaccine card to prove it, to avoid the painful aftereffects of the vaccines that might ruin the season for them. Professional athletes cannot afford to have their bodies shut down the way this vaccine does to people. So my first thought about Antonia Brown’s actions for me was, “so what.” While the media made it sound like he had just murdered people with his “dishonesty.”
Then again, watching all those people get the shots, then have some administrator pick up a card off a tall stack of little cardboard vaccine cards and scribble some dates, and the site of the administration as the proof of the event was shaky from day one. That tiny, unextraordinary card was what the big deal was? The first thought I had was that massive amounts of counterfeit cards would be shown as proof that they received the vaccine. There was no traceability to the cards, and given the stakes, where it meant that some people wouldn’t be able to have their jobs if they didn’t have a card showing they had a vaccine, well, of course, they were going to cheat with a fake card filled out with some chicken scratch. The Buccaneers as an organization said precisely what I had been thinking for months when they were pressed on the matter. They reviewed Antonio Brown’s card and didn’t see any errors in it. What were they supposed to check, a proper signature, the correct dates? It wasn’t the Buccaneers responsibility to check the validity of the cards themselves, just that people had them. So the government, in all its administrative wisdom, issued this massive mandate with considerable costs to people in their health and livelihoods. Yet, they had no way to know if people had received vaccines or not, based on a stupid, standard piece of cardboard that a child could copy and fill out as proof. Yet, that was precisely the case.
I remember how hard it was to get a fake ID when I was younger, showing that people were over 21 when they were only 18 or 19. Back then, it was perfectly justified to make a fake ID because all the hot girls were looking for older guys who could take them to places 21 and over. So as a guy, you had to have a fake ID to play the game; the government didn’t know what it was doing when it changed the drinking age from 18 to 21 as I was coming to those ages, so people had to survive like every culture where there is an overly administrative state, a black-market forms. China has a big one, as do all totalitarian governments, because people want the freedom to do what they need to do in life and when governments come up with too many rules based on their own personal limitations, law-breaking will become a dominant recreational activity. I knew some sharp cookies who made fake IDs, and they made good livings providing them. These vaccine cards were not even close to being as challenging to make. Anybody could make a proof of vaccine card, so given the political climate, there was no question to my mind that there was going to be massive fraud in providing the cards.
Yet even worse, the government obviously hadn’t thought about any of that as they clamped down on people with Executive Orders and tried to scare everyone into compliance. Nothing about the vaccine mandates was constitutional, the government got caught breaking the law themselves by implementing such a thing, and the Buccaneers knew it as an organization. They played along with the made-up rules, but it wasn’t their job to investigate whether Antonio Brown got the shot as the card showed he did on the dates they showed he received them. It was their job to collect the cards and demonstrate compliance to an out-of-control government and the woke NFL that wanted to bend the knee to an administrative state so they could stay in business. There were so many things wrong with the whole process that the path of least resistance always has the answer, come up with a fake card and shut everyone up. There was no legal authority. The government could not enforce any breaking of the rules because they made up the rules like some playground kid making them up as the game was being played, and that’s what the government gets for its gross overreach. When they force people to comply with their dumb rules, people will find a way to break those rules so they can live life. And that is the kind of freedom that we all talk about in these kinds of circumstances. People want to be free of being bothered by this kind of administrative state overreach. The more rules people have to live under, the more rules they will have to break to live life, and that is the reality that the administrative state of any kind has never admitted to itself.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 