The Unity Project Announces Newest Contributor: Alexis Wilkins
Authority Fallacy: The Pandemic was Just a Crack in the Door | by Unity Project Contributor Alexis Wilkins
The Unity Project is thrilled to introduce our newest contributor, country music singer and songwriter, cultural commentator, and award-winning writer Alexis Wilkins! She will be joining the team as a regular writer on our Substack, guest podcast host, and speaking at events across the country. She recently spoke at our Wine Country Conversations about navigating the woke culture and social contagions plaguing our youth. As an emerging voice in this space, Alexis has first-hand experience and knowledge of what it will take to empower this next generation of young adults and make conservatism cool again.
Alexis Wilkins is a multi-faceted country music artist and published writer, writing both her own music and economic and political pieces. Raised in Europe and Arkansas and based in Nashville, Alexis has taken her experiences as a public speaker, musician, and conservative student and used her platform for education, America-first values, and Veteran supportive causes. As a country artist, she’s opened the show for Lee Greenwood, Chris Young, Parmalee, and landed her Veteran’s Day single “Stand” in the top ten on iTunes. While she already worked in music, Wilkins decided to major in Business and Political Science and went on to win the Williams-Murray Writing Award for her essay work and be invited to be a part of the ethics debate team. A contributor for Townhall, Business Insider, and a regular guest commentator on the Tennessee Star, Alexis isn’t afraid of sharing her views and showing people that you can hold to your values, “make patriotism mainstream again,” and not bend the knee to accomplish your goals.
Read her first article for The Unity Project below
Authority Fallacy: The Pandemic was Just a Crack in the Door
By Alexis Wilkins
“It’s my job to tell you to put your mask on” and Reagan’s famous cautioning of “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help” are synonymous, and we’ve been sufficiently warned about both. The imposition of authority is something that is instilled within us from the time we’re young from school, teachers, and sports, but the softer generations have not been encouraged to respectfully question authority even when it is appropriate to do so. The “the experts say” – insert what they want you to believe here. The conditioning we have all endured through the process of modern education has not prepared us for the world or to make decisions through critical thinking but has instead trained us to listen to those we believe have authority over us and disarmed us against the kinds of authority we’ve seen implemented over the last few years.
Upheld authority, in practice, has threatened a dystopian pipeline since the beginning of history, but since 2020 we’ve seen how it’s expanded in the last few years and has affected our reactions to accept most of what was seemingly “normal” in the wake of the pandemic. While these were, as repeated, “unprecedented” times, there should’ve been an innate questioning after a normal period of understanding of what was happening around us. There is nothing normal about being told by a 16-year-old worker at a grocery store that you need to put your mask on. There’s nothing acceptable about someone asking about your medical history and qualifications to enter a restaurant. Some random and completely unqualified employee held up a gun-shaped thermometer to our foreheads and decided if we were allowed to enter a public space, infringing both personal space and medical sovereignty and privacy. The reality now is that society is in a place where we’ve been conditioned properly to accept this overreach in our everyday lives from other people, institutions, and our government. The normalization of these processes violates everything this country has been built upon, and we’ve been told that we have to relinquish our beliefs to even participate in society.
The bleed from the self-ordained authority fallacy has been quickly amplified and normalized in how we’ve lived since then, and it seems that nothing is off-limits. Legislation is being proposed in states to monitor homeschooling, having it pass certain standards and teach a certain curriculum, taking the freedom of choice away more heavily from the parents, and putting it into a board of teachers or the state. Parents are being faced with laws on the docket that would effectively take away their ability to parent their own child on the topic of allowing teachers to decide on implementing medical procedures and hormone blockers, even going as far as to say in the legislation that these decisions “may be kept secret from the parent.” If a kid strolled into a tattoo parlor, it would be illegal to give them a tattoo without parental permission, but a conversation with a school counselor as a 3rd grader should constitute a permanent change?
The left cries about bodily autonomy but completely strips it from those with whom they disagree. They will support a young teenage employee yelling at a patron years their senior but will not allow parents to make decisions for their kids. They want individuality and liberties but don’t want people to be able to make their own medical decisions when they disagree. The problem with this cycle is that the instance keeps getting worse, and the stakes keep getting higher. The authority they are stealing from you (over your own life) is not something they're borrowing anymore, they’re trying to keep it and entirely change how you live.
An authority fallacy is such an offense that it’s not just something we’ve seen here in this instance, but it’s a listed logical fallacy and a common reason to dismiss arguments completely. Every time we’ve heard “experts suggest” or “it’s true because we said so,” we’ve been very obviously lied to. Furthermore, the experts they use in fact-checking and imposing a factual and moral center do not, in fact, have a moral center and are owned by larger conglomerates with an agenda.
The pandemic was just a crack in the door to usher in other sorts of authority over our lives, and the thing about the powers that be is that they use the left to act as if we still are arguing for “autonomy” at all. We are given things to fuss over while our liberties are being infringed right under our noses. I think we can all admit that we feel less free than we did three years ago. Even now after the dust has settled, the authority that has infected each aspect of our lives during that time has mysteriously remained and then has repeatedly been proclaimed “the new normal.”