COVID-22 for those renouncing U.S. citizenship

by philg

“Americans seeking to renounce their citizenship are stuck with it for now” (Guardian):

For almost two years, since the pandemic struck in March 2020, most US consular missions around the world have suspended their expatriation services for those wishing to give up US citizenship. The US embassy in London, the largest of its sort in western Europe, announces on its website that it is “currently unable to accept appointments for loss of nationality applications” and is unable to say when services will resume.

My friend who lost his passport circa March 2020 remains stuck in the U.S. His COVID-22 situation is that replacing a passport requires an in-person interview, but no in-person interviews have been available for the past two years.

One thing that coronapanic has demonstrated is that government is the least adaptable of enterprises. Friends’ kids who were in private school back in Maskachusetts left their in-person school on a Thursday afternoon in March 2020 and on Monday morning they started back up in Zoom-based school, with teachers working their regular 6 hours per day and delivering the planned curriculum to the planned standards. Maskachusetts public school children, on the other hand, did not begin to receive any education until September 2020, unless you count teachers hosting one or two hours per week of Zoom chat with no required assignments or grades. Similarly, the government hasn’t been able to develop any alternative processes for passport replacement or citizenship renunciation. Yet half of Americans vote enthusiastically for a bigger government that will be responsible for more aspects of American life.

10 thoughts on “COVID-22 for those renouncing U.S. citizenship”

  1. Prohibiting citizens to leave the country was a favorite feature of communism.

    Today it is illegal for the Unvaccinated to travel in Austria, so they cannot emigrate. Staying unvaccinated on the other hand will have severe fines:

    https://nypost.com/2021/12/13/austria-to-fine-unvaxed-citizens-over-15000-a-year/

    (Note the newspeak: Minister for constitutional affairs Karoline Edtstadler said: “We do not want to punish people who are not vaccinated. We want to win them over and convince them to get vaccinated.”)

    Perhaps your friend can escape over the Rio Grande without a passport!

  2. > Yet half of Americans vote enthusiastically for a bigger government that will be responsible for more aspects of American life.

    Apparently the believe the disinformation. Here is an excellent video by Konstantin Kisin about the media contradictions in the past 5 years. I’d like to know how educated Democrats can deny even a single point in this video:

    • Thanks for the video. How come YouTube hasn’t banned him? A Congresswoman got banned from Twitter a few months ago for some pretty mild statements. See https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/twitter-suspends-marjorie-taylor-greene.html

      She said there were too many reports of infection and spread of the coronavirus among vaccinated people, and that the vaccines were “failing” and “do not reduce the spread of the virus & neither do masks.”

      In a statement circulated online, Ms. Greene said: “I have vaccinated family who are sick with Covid. Studies and news reports show vaccinated people are still getting Covid and spreading Covid.”

      Data from the C.D.C. shows that of the so-called breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated, serious cases are extremely rare.

      ———–

      Compare her (proven false by Science) statements to https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/us/coronavirus-puerto-rico.html

      Puerto Rico Faces Staggering Covid Case Explosion
      The island had a 4,600 percent increase in cases in recent weeks after mounting one of the nation’s most successful vaccination campaigns.

      (or to the vaccinated friend I described in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/11/18/maybe-it-is-time-for-that-booster-shot/ )

    • The congresswoman has been on Twitter’s blacklist (deny-list!) for a long time, they finally found a technicality that violates the “guidelines”. According to the British State Television it was this remark that was sufficient for the bureaucrats:

      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59854916

      “The congresswoman’s ban comes after she had tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about ‘extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths’ in the US.”

      Nowadays one has to be a weasel, like the BBC:

      “Despite the US struggling to contain the coronavirus, from which more than 825,000 people now died, she has been a determined opponent of measures designed to tackle the virus.”

      This is technically correct, but loaded with implications, e.g., that the measures actually work and the vaccines are safe in the long run (for which there is no data).

      I think they cannot cancel Kisin (yet!), he is more careful with his statements.

    • We are informed that years of lockdowns, mask orders, vaccine coercion, etc. are justified if they can “save even one life”. Therefore, if even a single person has died as a result of vaccine side effects, wouldn’t it be factually accurate to say that this was an “extremely high” number of deaths (from the current American perspective)?

      Would the BMJ also be banned by Twitter? They reported that the Pfizer vaccine tended to kill “frail elderly” people in Norway: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1372 (between 1 and 3.5 deaths for every 3,000 shots in elderly nursing home residents)

    • A congressman has put up a transcript of the censored Rogan episode (it is still on Spotify though):

      https://nehls.house.gov/posts/joe-rogan-experience-1757-dr-robert-malone-md-full-transcript

      https://d12t4t5x3vyizu.cloudfront.net/nehls.house.gov/uploads/2022/01/JRE-Rogan-Malone-Transcript.pdf

      The following passage was depicted as a “Nazi comparison” (page 38 in the PDF):

      “Let me illustrate that the other day I was looking through New York Times recent articles about Omicron and pediatrics in preparation for this and for making some slideshows and um and I saw this headline in the New York Times um epidemiologist and a vaccinologist and the title was how you should think about children and Omicron. It was blatantly saying this is how you should think- we’re going to tell you how to think okay. People kind of got to get that in their head that’s the world we’re in right now. Now what Matthias Desmond has has shared with us brilliant insight is another one of those aha now that part makes sense which is that this comes from basically European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany in the 20s and30s you know very intelligent highly educated population and they went barking mad. And how did that happen? The answer is mass formation psychosis. When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere and one of the aspects of that phenomenon is the people that they identify as their leaders the ones typically that come in and say you have this pain and I can solve it for you I and I alone okay can fix this problem for you then they will lead they will follow that person through Hell. It doesn’t matter whether they lie to them or whatever the data are irrelevant and furthermore anybody who questions that narrative is to be immediately attacked they are the other. This is central to mass formation psychosis and this is what has happened we had all those conditions. You remember back before 2019 everybody was complaining the world doesn’t make sense blah blah blah um and we’re all isolated from each other we’re all on our little tools we’re not connected socially anymore except through social media and then this thing happened and everybody focused on it. That is how mass formation psychosis happens and that is what’s happened here. Now there’s ways to get out of it um Matthias’s recommendation is you got to get people to realize that what we’ve got is a situation of global totalitarianism.”

      The PDF is loaded with other heresy, e.g., he states that hospitals receive substantial financial benefits for reporting deaths as “from COVID-19”. He also had a severe adverse reaction to the vaccine.

  4. My wife replaced a lost passport by mail in 2021, took about 4 weeks. She had photos of the old one. We live in the deep red zone of the Florida Free State, so the government is more competent per philg.

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