The images of people being shot at, beaten, bound and dragged by Australian police are shocking. In 18 months, Australia has gone from what appeared to be a free society to one that is a severe police state, where those who remove their masks or leave their homes are arrested.
Anchorage, in spite of voting for a mayor who values personal liberty and the U.S. Constitution, is heading in a similar direction, but bypassing the police beatings. The Anchorage Assembly is turning straight toward Stalinism.
Taking a page from the era of Stalin in the 1930s, Assemblywoman Meg Zaletel and Assemblyman Pete Petersen, with a nod from members Forrest Dunbar, Suzanne LaFrance, John Weddleton, Felix Rivera, Austin Quinn-Davidson, and Kameron Perez-Verdia, are going full communist on Anchorage.
Back in the beginning of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s regime used the method of mutual surveillance to get the people to control each other. The Stalinists coerced and cajoled families to report on their members or others living in the communes, urging families to report report disloyalty to the communist party. Families began to suspect each other. Russians did what they did to survive, turning in family members in exchange for the rarest of commodities — food.
What followed was the moral degradation of the nation: Millions of Russians were sent to labor camps in remote areas, or exiled to Siberia, or executed in cold blood. This happened within the lifetimes of Americans who are still alive today, our most elderly.
The Anchorage Assembly, with Anchorage Ordinance 2021-91, is a step in that direction.
Not only must all in the city limits wear masks when around others, the ordinance turns people into informants. The enforcement mechanism is the busybody, the tattler, the revenge-seeker, or the grievance-bearing brat.
A competitor can turn another business into the administrative judge for not enforcing the Assembly mask mandate to the competitor’s liking.
Family members can turn in their estranged spouses, as retribution in child custody battles.
Neighbors who want to get rid of a neighbor can turn them in for hosting a party where masks were not worn.
People can roam through events, cameras rolling, and turn the footage into the authorities, who are then required to act.
The Stalinist mask ordinance was developed in secret and introduced at a meeting that was as close to a secret meeting as the Assembly is allowed to have. It was posted in a difficult-to-find place on the municipality’s website, but it qualified as a legal notification. The Assembly members pushing it have not gone out of their ways to mention it on social media.
But clearly, the Assembly majority doesn’t want the public to give input, and public testimony will be limited on Tuesday night. The Assembly has already stacked the testimony with doctors who support their “Mask and Report to Authorities” ordinance. The “S” version — the latest version that the public could not get access to until Monday morning, carries the extremism to a whole new level, turning Anchorage residents on each other like attack dogs.
Assemblyman Forrest Dunbar opined on social media about the inability to shut down organizations like Must Read Alaska, which has shined the light into this area of extremism on the Anchorage Assembly. In a post about the Covid-19 virus, he fantasized about future deaths that he could blame on this author. In another social media post, he worried that there isn’t a way to shut down opposing points of view:
Anchorage, just because you have elected a mayor who did not support the proposed mandates of Dunbar, or the past mandates of Acting Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson or Ethan Berkowitz, you are far from being in the clear. There is a real and present danger posed by the extremist majority on the Anchorage Assembly: They are coming for your liberty, they are coming for your businesses, and they’re coming for your livelihoods. Australian brutality is not that unimaginable in today’s Anchorage.
Suzanne Downing is publisher of Must Read Alaska and Must Read America. She also writes for NewsMax.
