Sir Roger Daltrey famously said, “I’ll get on my knees and pray we don’t get fooled again.”
Apparently many conservatives have been neglecting their prayers, and their early ’70s British rock and roll. Supporting the use of Flock cameras is as bizarre as it is shortsighted, especially coming on the heels of the most dramatic explosion of tyrannical state power in generations.
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American conservatives experienced an alarming wake-up call about the fragility of liberty in the spring of 2020. Across the country, governors and bureaucrats unilaterally shut down small businesses, outlawed church services, fined families for visiting parks, and threatened innocent citizens with quarantine measures and masking/vaccine mandates, all while encouraging destructive and deadly race riots that killed 25 Americans and sending the elderly to their deaths in nursing homes.
Democrats such as Govs. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) were often the worst offenders. But COVID tyranny was a bipartisan phenomenon. It was President Donald Trump who empowered Dr. (in name only) Anthony Fauci and shut down the global economy, ushering in the current era of high inflation. Lest we forget, it was (likely) Republican cops who arrested a (likely) Republican pastor in (extremely) Republican Kentucky for the crime of holding a socially-distanced, outdoor church service.
The conservative reflex to support “tough on crime” measures is not without warrant (pun intended). The Left is all in on “defund the police” and mass immigration from the Third World. Empowering law enforcement, however, can come without ignoring the main lesson of the COVID era: If you give the administrative state an inch of “emergency” authority, they will take a mile of your constitutionally protected rights.
Supporting a massive automatic license plate reader dragnet requires conservatives to suffer total amnesia regarding how quickly government power can be weaponized.
What if local health departments and blue-state mayors and governors had possessed a nationwide, AI-powered Flock camera network in the spring of 2020? We know exactly how that would have gone. In Kentucky, officers recorded the license plates of churchgoers attending drive-in Easter services to issue quarantine notices. In California, paddleboarders were chased down by health authorities.
Had a searchable, real-time vehicle tracking grid existed at scale, state officials wouldn’t have simply asked you to state home, they could have set up automatic “geofence” alerts to track any vehicle leaving its neighborhood. It would have been far easier to track down church attendees, anti-lockdown protesters, and families driving across state lines to escape local mandates.
When Whitmer outlawed the use of boats, everyone still went fishing because this is America and Whitmer can kick rocks. But a Flock camera at every boat launch would have made the prospect far more precarious.
The statist tendencies of unprincipled Republicans is not surprising. But some otherwise principled and thoughtful conservatives are drinking the Flock Kool-Aid. Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro is a First Amendment and Second Amendment absolutist, making his support of Flock all the more puzzling.
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Conservative Flock supporters are making a classic trade: law enforcement convenience at the expense of the Fourth Amendment. The same infrastructure that helps catch a carjacker or illegal immigrant in Texas can be repurposed to track down gun owners or pro-life activists in New York. You may trust Ron DeSantis, but how about Zohran Mamdani or the unsavory cast of characters currently running Dearborn, Michigan? Is it unreasonable that, say, Jews, for instance, could eventually be targeted by this technology considering the last 5,000 years of human history?
A moment in which Democratic Socialists of America candidates are winning elections and large swaths of the Right are becoming increasingly hostile toward constitutional rights and the American founding, is no time to break bad on the Fourth Amendment. Conservatives must wise up on Flock before the technology can be further weaponized against the innocent. COVID taught us that this transition can happen far faster than anyone (this side of Rand and Orwell) could possibly imagine.