California Governor Gavin Newsom, facing tightening polls in a coming recall election due to his authoritarian abuse of power in response to the COVID pandemic, decided to double down on what got him sideways with Californians in the first place. He issued a mandate requiring all the state’s teachers and school staff to be vaccinated or undergo weekly coronavirus tests. Newsom’s action makes California the first state to enact such extreme measures in the face of the Delta variant. As usual, California is pioneering authoritarianism.

“We think this is the right thing to do,” Newsom argued, “and we think this is a sustainable way to keeping our schools open and to address the number one anxiety that parents like myself have for young children.”

The problem is that while the Delta variant appears to be more contagious, it’s also proving to be less deadly. Furthermore, it’s not seriously sickening children at any higher a rate than the initial COVID strain. In fact, writes Jeffrey Anderson at City Journal, “[CDC] numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018-19 flu season — a season of ‘moderate severity’ that lasted eight months — than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months.”

Once again, children are not the most at risk from this virus.

However, since fearmongering over COVID was seen to be successful in ousting Donald Trump from office, as well as serving to justify elected officials’ demand for more power, Democrats like Newsom are seeking to play that game again. The governor’s doing it as he fights off a recall vote.

Republican governors acted primarily to protect their residents’ constitutional freedoms from the authoritarian impulses of unelected bureaucrats, which has actually proven to be just as effective, if not more so, against the pandemic. That success isn’t convenient for the Left, hence the misinformation from the Leftmedia.

A perfect example of this comes from a Washington Post op-ed penned by the former head of Planned Parenthood, Leana Wen, who ironically dares to give advice for “how to help keep [children] safe.” Her cognitive dissonance is simply astounding. A woman who headed the organization responsible for murdering hundreds of thousands of preborn children every year now deigns to suggest she’s concerned for children’s health!

On top of this, she attacks GOP Governors Ron DeSantis (FL) and Greg Abbott (TX) for the “crime” of standing for the rights of their residents to make their own medical choices. So much for all that “my body, my choice” rhetoric.

Hopefully, Newsom’s Liberty-stomping vaccine mandate will backfire and ensure that Californians vote him out. Unfortunately, this is lefty California we’re talking about, so the prospects don’t appear great. That said, should voters kick him out, it will send a big message to other authoritarian governors.