Lockdown Letter to Utah Governor Gary Herbert, 2020
Remembering the Betrayal of Three Years Ago
Three years ago, I sent this to then-Utah-governor Gary Herbert, (R):
Dear Governor Herbert,
I have PhD in political science, and until very recently was Assistant Director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University.
I am writing to let you know I am strongly opposed to your recent “Stay Home Stay Safe” directive, and as I am in discussions with my fellow Republicans, I can assure you we are not going to forget it anytime soon. …
I sincerely believe this was a betrayal of liberty, and a failure of prudence and compromise. Utah was in a position to do much better than other states had. By March 26th when you made the decision, our state had only around 400 confirmed cases concentrated around SLC, and plenty of evidence was emerging about a) the questionable-ness of earlier projections of spread and death-rate (e.g., the March 25th refutation of the COVID Act Now website on at The Federalist by Madeline Osburn), and b) the severe economic damage being inflicted on nearly everyone.
And your office had had time to formulate more fine-grained exceptions and guidelines than other state governments had, and to have issued them with clearer legal language. But your order is quite crude. Its ugliest and most tyranny-evocative phrases by far are: “not visiting friends or family without urgent need,” and “not attending any gathering of any number of people, except for members of the same household or residence.”
Having made it illegal (Or have you? What exquisite flexibility for officials/police and confusion for citizens lies between the words “directive” and “order!”) for even the smallest and most COVID-19-cautious of groups to gather, out of friendship, out of a desire for SOME Easter week meeting if only in a home with 10 others, or even out of a desire for political activity, you had better know that your fellow citizens expect your office to be working 19 hours a day 7 days a week to bring EXCEPTIONS and COMPROMISES on board as quickly as possible. (Eg., Why not frisbee, tennis, no-touch soccer, lottery tickets for limited-capacity entry to certain rec centers, museums, libraries, and widely distanced patio dining, etc., etc., etc., permission to travel to a state park two counties away, permission to shop non-essential retail. Tip of the iceberg of things that should be being considered.) And we expect your office to rescind and adjust significant parts of this order as soon as you possibly may, and with CREATIVE and HOMEGROWN DELIBERATION about how to do this. ASK Utah citizens what things they think could be done to staunch the economic and mental health bleeding that is already happening due to voluntary compliance with state government suggestions, but which you have just radically opened up by making them mandatory.
Don’t go down in the books as an enemy to elementary economic prudence, and as a fair-weathered friend to liberty. Rethink this “directive” fast.
Sincerely,
Carl Eric Scott
Governor Herbert did not reply. Nor did his administration make signficant changes regarding any of the items mentioned. No creative exceptions. No meaningful provisions for greater citizen input.
Nearly all relief came from officials at the more local level, like the Orem mayor Richard Brunst, who made returning to hair salons possible by late April of 2020, or like the handful of localities which repoened gyms in May. Contariwise, Salt Lake City’s mayor, Erin Mendenhall, gave several of Herbert’s directives the explicit force of law and added others, and set up a snitch line to report on your neighbors! A leader who mainstreamed despotism, although to her slight credit, she at least did not demand arrests of myself and about a thousand others when we held an illegal protest gathering, organized by Eric Moutsos and Utah Business Revival, April 18, 2020, at the Salt Lake City/County Building.
All-in-all, I’m sorry to report that “conservative” Utah was an exception to the general U.S. patterns of Covid-19 policy only here and there, and only now and then.
And I do count Gary Herbert as a traitor, in a non-legal, metaphoric, but still quite heavy sense. He betrayed basic principles of democratic liberty.
He miseducated his fellow citizens about American government, and about his role within it. He treated us like children, giving us slogan after slogan on the topic, and serious discussion, never. (Serious discussion by definition is more-than-one-side discussion.) As the letter above indicates, he issued statements deliberately phrased to sound like legally-binding government orders, but which on closer inspection, were something like “strong recommendations,” or in some instances, “orders the police would not be ordered to enforce.” And he never, as far as I recall, took the time to discuss where the constitutional/statutary authority for his statements and actions was coming from.
Due the disorganization of real Utah conservatives, the 2020 election replaced him with his picked successor Spencer Cox, possibly the most dangerous of the RINO governors out there.1 So Mr. Herbert is now my neighbor, living in Orem, the town adjacent to mine, serving as executive of the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce.
I could be wrong, and will retract if I am, but I am aware of no susbsequent apology of any kind for any of his administration’s speeches or deeds regarding Covid.
And I haven’t the heart to research to what degree Herbert voiced support for the most apostate-from-American-democracy move of the Covid/Vax Disaster, the vaccine mandates. When the summer/fall of 2021 arrived, a season which will be remembered with curses for as long as America lives, Herbert was no longer in office. But you just know he would have gone along with the mandates. Governor Cox intially was going to, but bowed to pressure from the legislature, and from protestors like myself, who packed public hearings at the Utah Capitol.2 But as for Herbert, he should get down on his knees and thank God he was never put to the test on that issue.
And, he should apologize. He should watch the film Anecdotals five times in a row, and realize that he played a part in creating the climate that led to those peoples’ mistreatment and suffering. He should apologize to them, myself, and all the Utahns he was charged to serve in the name of democracy, sacred rights, and justice for all.
He now knows all his heavy-lifting for the lockdowns was for a policy that failed and harmed, and which was passed down for his “consideration” from national elites guided by Chinese models. Ditto for what he knows now about his November ‘20 mask mandates, which overrode many local governments’ decisions to phase mask-requirements out. We now all know that the masks did next to nothing, became a “badge of ideological obedience,” and harmed the development of many children.
I’m angry here, and since there isn’t any new intellectual ground to which this anger might take me, it’s best to wrap-up. But as for my letter from the time, I would stress that it did illustrate the spirit of real moderation, of willingness to meet half-way, and to do the tough work of democracy. A better way was visible. Herbert’s leadership, by contrast, was shot-through with a spirit of elite decision-making, of manipulation, and yes, of despotism.
Forgiveness is possible, but no implicit or explicit expectations that I honor any so-called code of “civil discussion,” especially coming from community leaders who did nothing at the time to stand against the democracy-diminishing measures, will lead me to retract these tough words about Gary Herbert’s conduct as governor.
I sense that Cox is the most dangerous because he’s the most slick, and because he represents and is strongly backed by, the Romney-esque ‘Mormon-moderate’ strain of Utah Republican identity, a newer partisan flavoring which I worry could catch-on in other states, and which in any case, could eventually portend a centrist third party here.
However, Cox backed them in spirit and to my knowledge criticized none of them outside his jurisdiction. He was able amid the flux of Utah politics to present himself as a “peacemaker” taking the middle road, who would not veto the legislature’s requiring of exceptions for private-company mandates. And to my knowledge, Cox provided no leadership against the state university vaccine mandates. It was the legislature, pressured by consituents like myself, that pushed Cox, and the Utah universities, to arrive at apparently more moderate positions, whenever they did so. And I remain furious that several of these universities essentially fooled their less-saavy students into bowing to their “mandates,” by never making it clear that the exemptions to them—ones required by the legislature—were easy to obtain.
It’s beyond frustrating when you try your best to reason with someone who is unwilling to even hear you. Like reasoning with a child who sticks his fingers in his ears and cries “lalalalala I can’t hear youuuu”....especially when you’re just trying to warn them to not make a reaaaally bad decision.
But at the very least, you can know in your heart you tried- you put it out there, and possibly spread some seeds of truth, pray they might germinate and grow. Blessings to you.
I’m not sure he could be much worse than Brad Little. Noem is the only governor in America that did it mostly right, but I’ll give a little credit to DeSantis and Kemp for defying Trump on lockdowns after a short time. Today from Idaho Freedom Foundation: https://mailchi.mp/idahofreedom/iff-week-in-review-f4c7d0zssu-1692444?e=9425d2ad21