If you wonder how authoritarian societies can impose their will on people and get some to go along with it, a new Rasmussen poll is both instructive and just a downright scary view of what a lot of Democrats are thinking.

While most Americans seem tired of COVID restrictions, a stunning number of Democrats would be supportive of imposing draconian measures against unvaccinated people.

Most Democrats support vaccine mandates. But it doesn’t stop there.

According to a Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports poll, 55 percent of Democrats would support fining people who refused to get vaccinated. 59 percent would favor a government policy requiring citizens to remain confined in their homes at all times, except for emergencies if they refused to be vaccinated. 45 percent favor forcing people to temporarily live in “facilities” if they refuse to get vaccinated. (Hello, camps!) 47 percent also support a government tracking program to track those who are unvaccinated.

That’s bad enough. But then comes the censorship and suppression of dissent and free speech. You are not allowed to question the narrative or you should pay. Almost half of Democrats believe that federal and state governments should be able to fine and imprison people who dare to publicly question the efficacy of vaccines on social media, television radio, or online media. Fascist much, Democrats? This is where the “misinformation” campaign that we see rolling out — to shut down anything that differs from the acceptable narrative — ultimately ends up. If they were truly honest, they might want to check all the Democratic misinformation when it comes to COVID and what the Democrats, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, said in 2020 about the vaccine.

Perhaps worst of all, 29 percent of Democrats would support temporarily removing kids from their parents if the parents refused to get vaccinated. Yikes.

All this for a virus that can be transmitted by the vaccinated and has over a 98 percent survival rate.

That’s some Orwellian stuff right there. But if you think it’s not real, you can go on social media, you can see some of that mania, all because of the fear porn pushed by the government and the media. As we reported yesterday, in the Salt Lake Tribune — not exactly a place one would think is a hotbed of liberalism — they had an op-ed saying the National Guard should have been deployed to keep those who couldn’t prove they were vaccinated locked in.

Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.

If it were a “truly civilized place.” And that’s Utah. Imagine the mania in the truly blue areas among Democrats. Yes, it’s bad, unhinged from all reality.

Now, what saves us from that nightmare and becoming China or Australia, is the Republicans and the
independents/unaffiliated voters who swing the majority against all of the above measures in the poll. A point to remember when Democrats start talking about “attacks on democracy” and who is standing where, if you didn’t already have enough reasons to vote for Republicans.

When the latest COVID variant surge begins to dip, unfortunately, this dangerous Democratic attitude will still be there.