White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said he wouldn’t have used the same analogy as Attorney General William Barr, who compared coronavirus lockdowns to slavery.
“Well, when we look at lockdowns, when you look at individual liberties and who we are as a nation, a nation of freedom, many times when we give up those civil liberties, and I’m one that believe in those civil liberties are inherent, they’re enshrined by our Constitution, and … we need to protect those because when bad things happen, we sometimes, not always but sometimes, start to take away the liberties that are enshrined in and are part of our constitutional rights and make us different as Americans than many other countries,” Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, said on Thursday outside the White House.
“I’m not familiar with the quote. Obviously, we’ve got a number of times where civil liberties have been trampled on, and certainly, when we start to look down at forced confinement, those are tough,” Meadows added when a reporter asked whether the lockdowns were worse than internment camps that forcibly housed Japanese Americans during World War II. “To compare them with the Japanese internment camp, I don’t know that he made that analogy, I certainly wouldn’t.”
Meadows then reiterated that he hadn’t seen Barr’s comments, which he made while speaking at the conservative Hillsdale College’s Constitution Day dinner.
“You know, putting a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest,” Barr stated. “Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”
