For a country that’s one of the world’s leading democracies, the United States sure does have a government vested with some alarming potentially tyrannical powers: assassinating US citizens by fiat, indefinite detention without charge or trial, a sprawling surveillance state that collects data on practically everyone in the world, and a security apparatus that can be deployed domestically to infiltrate and put down dissent, just to name a few. All of this could, at the hands of a semi-competent authoritarian leader, be used to seize power and establish a nightmarish totalitarian state.

If you’re a right-wing media or political figure, however, none of this is an issue. The real threat to freedom and democracy, rather, is the life-saving vaccine developed to fight the pandemic that’s cost at least 677,000 American lives this past year and a half. Since Joe Biden ordered a nationwide vaccine mandate to boost the country’s flagging vaccination rate and prevent the thousands of deaths that are happening every day, the GOP and their allied media have suddenly transformed into the ACLU, warning of the mandate’s threat to civil liberties and the country’s imminent slide into fascism.

Just as with free speech, the US right has made a strategic choice to champion a principle (the protection of civil liberties) it’s long been hostile to, in this case as part of a bizarre mission to kill its own voters. And just as with free speech, the Right’s defense of civil liberties is extremely selective and unprincipled, with all the prominent conservatives now bleating about authoritarianism having cheered on or pursued a variety of assaults on basic freedoms, or stood by in silence as they happened.