Overwhelmed supply chains and truck driver shortages worsened when Canada imposed new border mandates prohibiting unvaccinated American truckers. With low vaccination rates among US drivers, Canadian supermarkets are already reporting rising food inflation and shortages of certain products, according to Bloomberg.
Canada’s vaccine mandate for truckers came into effect on Saturday. The new rule requires US truckers to be vaccinated to cross the border. We warned earlier this week such a mandate would have “consequences.”
The vaccine mandate has exacerbated the shortage of truck drivers and made wait times at border crossings even longer. Eighty percent of trade between the US and Canada is transited by truck. America exports about 90% of Canada’s fruits and vegetables during the winter season. As shipments decline because only about half of US truck drivers are vaccinated, grocery stores report shortages.
“We’re seeing shortages,” said Gary Sands, senior vice president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers. “We’re hearing from members they’re going into some stores where there’s no oranges or bananas.’”
The main concern is the mandate could create a domino effect and ripple through the already stressed supply chain. Logistical disruptions have been a significant source of soaring inflation. According to North American Produce Buyers, the cost of sending a truckload of fresh produce from Southern California to Canada is now $9,500, up from $7,000. That means companies are paying more for freight and will pass on costs to consumers.
Given the drop in eligible truckers, products bound for Canada will build in US warehouses with no place to go until new drivers are seen.
The situation will only worsen on Jan. 22 when the US begins imposing its vaccine mandate on Canadian truckers. The Canadian Trucking Association warned the mandate would sideline up to 16,000 truckers.
Canadian truck drivers are furious with the US decision and have blocked the highway near the US-Manitoba international border to protest the new mandates. Videos posted on social media show the chaos playing out on the other side of the border.
Truckers Stage Protest Against Mandates At The U.S.-Canada Border at Emerson Manitoba pic.twitter.com/iBwZHHlTJC
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. succinctly summarizes how Dr. Anthony Fauci wields his power to control and manipulate science across the globe
It’s Fauci’s job to conduct research on chronic diseases to figure out their etiology and environmental causes to protect public health, but instead, he turned the NIAID into an incubator for pharmaceuticals
Fauci has a $7.6 billion annual budget that he uses to develop new drugs, which he then farms out to universities
Fauci’s control — in collusion with that of Bill Gates — has rendered the majority of global scientific research nothing more than pharmaceutical propaganda
Fauci shares drug patents with universities sell them to drug companies, splits the patents with them, and walks those drugs through the FDA approval process, which he also controls; once approved, Fauci himself often profits
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. succinctly summarizes how Dr. Anthony Fauci wields his power to control and manipulate science in this riveting episode of The Jimmy Dore Show.1 Fauci has been painted as a hero throughout the pandemic, an image that is not only misleading but wildly inaccurate, as detailed in Kennedy’s best-selling book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.”
“I wrote the book because so many Americans were looking at Tony Fauci as this kind of savior,” Kennedy said. “… [T]he man on the white horse, or in the white lab coat, that would ride us out of this coronavirus crises but I knew from the beginning … that he does not do public health and has not done public health since the 1980s.”2,3
Rather than looking out for public health, Fauci and his agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), prioritize pharmaceutical promotion. Kennedy refers to Fauci as the “leader of the pack” when it comes to those promoting pharmaceutical products, profiteering from Big Pharma, and promoting their own personal power.
Public Health Plummeted During Fauci’s Reign
In 1984, when Fauci was appointed director of NIAID, 11.8% of Americans had a chronic disease, but this has risen sharply since.4 Fauci doesn’t talk about this public health failure — at least not publicly — but as Kennedy noted, it was Fauci’s job to figure out why cases of autism, food allergies, ADHD, sleep disorders, juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and much other chronic and infectious diseases have skyrocketed.
It was Fauci’s job to conduct research on these diseases to figure out their etiology and environmental causes to protect public health, but instead, he turned the NIAID into an incubator for pharmaceuticals. According to Kennedy:5
“When Tony Fauci came in, 6% of American children had chronic disease. By 2006, 54% had it. We went from being the healthiest country in the world with the healthiest children to the sickest. Literally, we do not even qualify as a developed nation. We are 79th in the world, behind Nicaragua and Costa Rica in terms of our health outcomes.
And why did that happen? Well, the one figure who is more responsible for that than anybody else in the world is Tony Fauci. He is the reason we take more pharmaceutical drugs than any other nation in the world. Three times the average among western countries. We pay the highest prices and have the worst outcomes.”
Fauci’s Multibillion-Dollar Budget Gives Him Immense Power
Fauci has a $7.6 billion annual budget, which in total during his entire tenure is more than half a trillion dollars that he’s been in control of. Instead of using that to reveal the environmental issues leading to outbreaks of chronic disease, he uses the money to develop new drugs, Kennedy explains, which he then farms out to universities:6
“He shares the patents with them, and then he sells them to the drug companies, splits the patents with them, and he walks those drugs through the FDA approval process, which he completely controls from the bottom up. And then he gets them approved and in many cases he himself profits. People within his agency can collect $150,000 a year from royalties off each of these products.”
The NIH owns half the patent for Moderna’s COVID-19 injection, which means that it stands to make billions of dollars as a result. Four of Fauci’s top deputies will also collect $150,000 a year for life as a result — from a product they’re responsible for regulating, an obvious massive conflict of interests.
“The mercantile and commercial interests have overwhelmed the regulatory function at that agency and it no longer does public health — it does pharmaceutical promotion,” Kennedy said.7 As an example, between 2009 and 2016 there were 240 new drugs approved by the FDA, all of which came out of Fauci’s “shop,” he added. “He is the incubator for the whole pharmaceutical industry.”8
How Fauci Controls Science Globally
Fauci has spread the notion that he is untouchable, going so far as to tell MSNBC that an attack on him is an attack on science:9
“It’s very dangerous … because a lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science.”
Throughout the pandemic, “trusting the science” has become a cultural statement and propaganda tool, but one that’s far from what true science is all about. Far from being a source of independent science, in essence, Fauci’s control — in collusion with that of Bill Gates — has rendered the majority of global scientific research nothing more than pharmaceutical propaganda. Kennedy explains:10
“Every virologist in the world knew that the coronavirus was engineered. All you have to do is look at the genome. Everybody knew that and they kept silent for a year, and here’s how. He gives away $7.6 billion a year. That’s two to three times what [Bill] Gates gives away. Him and Gates work tandemly. They partner up on everything. They talk together a couple times a week.
They are business partners … in 2000, in Gates’ library, the two of them got together and they formally formed a partnership. You take those two and one other guy — Jeremey Farrar — who is their other de facto partner who is the head of the Wellcome Trust, which is the U.K. version of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Between those three men, they control 61% of the biomedical research funding on Earth.
So if you want to get your study funded, you’ve got to go to those guys. Not only can they give you the money, but they also can kill a study because they control all of the other funding sources. They can kill a study, they can ruin a career, they can bankrupt colleges who do science that they don’t want done. So they are able to really dictate virtually all the science on the globe.”
Drug Companies and Universities All Benefit
Kennedy gives a theoretical example of how Fauci yields his immense power to influence science: In his lab, Fauci develops a molecule that kills a virus. This is done by scientists dropping molecules onto one of the countless viruses — influenza, Ebola, coronaviruses, zika, and others — in Petri dishes and test tubes to see if it kills them. If the molecule works to kill the virus in a petri dish, they move on to testing it on rats infected with the virus.
“If the rats don’t die, now he’s got a drug,” he says. “It’s antiviral and it’s usable in mammals because it will kill the virus but it won’t kill the mammal. Then he farms it out to the university.”11 There, a PI, or principal investigator, who is usually a person of power, such as the dean of a department, does a phase I trial, experimenting on animals and around 100 humans. Kennedy explains:12
“For each of the humans that he recruits — he’s a medical doctor, he brings in patients, persuades them to take part in the study — Tony Fauci’s agency gives him $15,000 for every one of those patients. The university keeps 50% of that so now they’re also part of this process. And then if the drug gets through that phase I, then they move on to phase 2 and phase 3. So now they have to bring in 20,000 or 30,000 people.
They bring in a drug company as a partner, and they go through the phase 2 and phase 3 [trials], and then at the end of it, they all split up the patents. So the drug company owns half, Tony Fauci’s agency may get part of it and he and his cronies take little slivers of it so they get paid for life. The university gets a part of it, so now you have all the medical schools in the country … dependent on this income stream.”
‘Independent Panels’ Aren’t Independent
At this point, the new drug still has to get regulatory approval, which brings it before a supposedly independent panel of experts. But this panel isn’t made up of independent scientists looking for the truth about whether or not the drug is safe and effective; it’s made up of Fauci’s and Gates’ PIs, who often have drugs of their own in development. Kennedy continues:13
“When this drug goes to FDA to get approved, it goes to a panel. Tony Fauci’s always saying it’s an independent panel who decides, based upon real science, whether or not this drug is worthy of approval. It’s not an independent science. They’re virtually all his PIs or Gates’ PIs.
Those guys go sit on that panel for a year, and they know that they’ve got their own drugs back at Baylor University they’re working on, or Berkeley or Columbia, that they know are going to be in front of that same panel next year. And they’re all scratching each other’s backs. And they approve that drug and then they go off the panel, finish their drug, and then that drug goes in front of a panel that’s similarly constituted and populated.”
These principal scientists act as gatekeepers to the public, spreading the official narrative under the guise of independent science, often pushing questionable COVID-19 policies. “These PIs control the journals, they control the public debate, they’re on TV all over the world, and these are the people that form the narrative, that protect the orthodoxy,” Kennedy says.14
“If you look at Tony Fauci as the pope, the PIs are the cardinals, the bishops and the archbishops. And they’re the ones that protect the orthodoxy, that make sure that the heretics burn, that doctors who disagree are … delicensed, that they get discredited, that they get gaslighted and vilified and marginalized. They’re the army that controls the narrative.”15
Waking up to Fauci’s façade is necessary to understand the orchestrated planned use of pandemics to clamp down totalitarian control. You can find even more details about the coalition of sinister forces — intelligence agencies, pharmaceutical companies, social media titans, medical bureaucracies, mainstream media, and the military — that are intent on obliterating constitutional rights globally in “The Real Anthony Fauci.”
Kennedy’s book has been a best seller for two months now and if you haven’t already picked up a copy I would encourage you to do so now.
Entertaining Content
Dore not only does interview with important guests like the one above, but he also is a comedian. It can be very depressing when we keep sharing all the devastation that has resulted from COVID. Dore’s mission is to take the news and share the obvious in an entreating way as can be evidenced below how he interprets CNN giving the CEO of Pfizer the CEO of the year award.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson today ended all Plan B pandemic restrictions in the UK, including working from home, vaccine passports, and mask mandates for public spaces, including schools.
“The Cabinet concluded that because of the extraordinary booster campaign, together with the way the public has responded to the Plan B measures, we can return to Plan A in England, and allow Plan B regulations to expire.”
Johnson first announced the Plan B measures on Dec. 8, 2021. The measures took effect on Dec. 15, 2021, after passing a parliament vote.
The ending of the restrictions means workers are due back in the office Thursday. The Department for Education also will end requirements tomorrow for facemasks in classrooms.
Mandates for vaccine passports to access businesses or public places will expire next Wednesday without renewal, the prime minister announced, as will public mask mandates.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid called the relaxation of measures a “major milestone,” adding: “But it’s not the end of the road and we shouldn’t see this as the finish line because we cannot eradicate this virus and its future variants.”
Javid added:
“Instead we must learn to live with COVID in the same way we have to live with flu. We will be setting out our long-term plan for living with COVID-19 this spring.”
The unexpected announcements came in the wake of signs the Omicron wave has peaked in the UK.
Dr. Susan Hopkins, the chief medical adviser to the UK Health Security Agency, told a Downing Street news conference the latest seven-day average of COVID cases was 93,200 compared with almost 225,000 on Dec. 29, 2021.
She said hospital cases were back down to below 20,000 while there were only 703 on mechanical ventilators — levels not seen since last July.
Omicron is “not the same disease we were seeing a year ago” and high COVID death rates in the UK are “now history,” Sir John Bell, professor of medicine at Oxford University and leading immunologist said.
“While we welcome the prime minister’s statement to lift draconian COVID restrictions in the UK, we believe this ‘victory through COVID defeat’ narrative raises more questions than it answers. Why now? Has science really changed? Who is calling the shots?
“Children’s Health Defense will continue to seek truthful answers and real accountability for the harmful lockdown policies of the COVID pandemic era.”
Some suggested the timing of Johnson’s announcement is politically motivated as calls for his resignation increased Tuesday in the wake of “party game,” the scandal over numerous, alleged parties in Number 10 Downing Street during the pandemic in breach of government lockdowns.
The announcement also came after the prime minister received a petition on Monday, signed by more than 200,000 people, demanding an end to vaccine passports.
Despite also receiving a petition signed by 160,000 healthcare workers, Johnson said vaccination requirements for healthcare workers and the mandatory testing of travelers to the UK will remain in place.
Pandemic Narrative Undergoes Radical U-Turn | Dr. Joseph Mercola
In recent days, the pandemic narrative has undergone a remarkable number of U-turns
January 9, 2022, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky sent out a tweet saying “We must protect people with comorbidities from severe COVID-19,” in other words, focused protection, which is what tens of thousands of doctors have been calling for since the creation of The Great Barrington Declaration in early October 2020
January 10, 2022, Walensky admitted that the COVID shots cannot prevent transmission
The CDC is now saying you should not retest once you’ve recovered from COVID, as the PCR can provide false positives for up to 12 weeks after the infection has been resolved. They’re also cutting the isolation requirement from 10 to just five days — probably because the failing economy is hurting Biden’s approval rating so they need people to work
The narrative is also changing on what makes for a COVID case and how deaths are counted. Walensky recently admitted about 40% of “COVID patients” tested positive but do not have symptoms and are hospitalized for something else. She has also promised to deliver data on how many people have actually died “from” COVID and how many died “with” it
As noted by Dr. Ron Paul on January 10, 2022, Liberty Report above, U.S. authorities have suddenly started to change their tune with regard to COVID and the COVID shots.
“The opposition to our position is starting to wake up,” Paul says, as some shreds of truth are actually starting to be acknowledged. The good news, Paul says, is that “Maybe some of the things they’ve been saying are not quite accurate, and maybe what we’ve been saying is closer to the truth, and maybe they’re starting to recognize that.”
CDC Director Now Calls for Focused Protection
Indeed, in recent days, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has made a remarkable number of U-turns, completely reversing course on several narrative points.
For example, in a January 10, 2022, CNN interview, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky actually admitted that “what [the COVID shots] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission,”1 whereas before, the narrative was that if you get the jab, you have nothing to worry about anymore. In July 2021, President Biden promised that if you get vaccinated, “you’re not going to get COVID.”2 Well, it wasn’t true. Many knew that but were censored when pointing it out.
A day earlier, January 9, Walensky also sent out a tweet saying “We must protect people with comorbidities from severe COVID-19,” which is what tens of thousands of doctors have been calling for since the creation of The Great Barrington Declaration in early October 2020. It called for the focused protection of high-risk individuals, such as the elderly, rather than blanket lockdowns.
It was recently revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and his former boss, now retired National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, colluded behind the scenes to quash the declaration.3 For whatever reason, Fauci and Collins were hell-bent on pushing economy-destroying lockdowns instead. In an October 8, 2020, email to Fauci, Collins wrote:4,5,6,7
“The proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises …”
“Don’t worry, I got this,” Fauci replied. Later, Fauci sent Collins links to newly published articles refuting the focused protection solution, including an op-ed in Wired magazine, and an article in The Nation, titled “Focused Protection, Herd Immunity, and Other Deadly Delusions.”
CDC Follows Political Strategy, Not Science
Now, all of a sudden, Walensky is onboard with the “deadly delusion” of focused protection. Her about-face would be confusing were it not for the fact that COVID countermeasures were never about protecting the public from a virus. From the start, the pandemic had political goals, and it still does.
The pressure is now on to prove the Biden administration has made some sort of progress with the pandemic. Biden made a lot of promises, none of which have come to fruition, so now the political establishment is scrounging to come up with some plan that can make them look as though they’re getting somewhere.
The problem is that cases are now exploding when a successful vaccine campaign should have brought the situation under control. So, they now need a way to minimize the number of cases, whereas before, they used every trick in the book to overcount them,8 in order to scare people into complying with COVID restrictions and getting the jab.
New Testing Guidance Aims to Lower Case Rates
One simple way to cut down cases is to limit testing, and that’s another U-turn we’re now seeing. The CDC is now saying you should not retest once you’ve recovered from COVID. If you test positive, just quarantine for five days and don’t retest to confirm that you’re negative, as the PCR can provide false positives for up to 12 weeks after the infection has been resolved.
Well, we’ve known this for nearly two years already. From the start, experts warned that PCR cannot be used to diagnose an active infection, as it can pick up RNA from dead, noninfectious viral debris.
Health authorities are now spinning the tale that these revisions in the guidance are because we have two years’ worth of data, and they’re just following the science. But that’s pure baloney, seeing how the data never supported their COVID restrictions in the first place.
The CDC’s decision to revise quarantine guidelines down from 10 days to just five days also appears politically motivated. Polls show the economy is a primary concern of voting Americans right now, so they need to strike a balance between the desired demolition of the economy and keeping people at work — at least until the 2022 elections are over.
In short, I suspect most if not all of the recent changes in COVID guidance are to build a narrative that the Biden administration has successfully brought the pandemic under control and reestablished a working economy. The change in narrative is based on political strategy, not science.
CDC Highlights Role of Comorbidities in Vaxxed COVID Deaths
Here is the unedited version of Rochelle Walensky's comments, where it's clear that her comments about comorbidities were referring solely to a CDC study of vaccinated people, and not to all "Covid deaths," as ppl like Clay Travis have claimed. pic.twitter.com/Z7oJQv3gem
As noted by Paul in the Liberty Report above, Walensky recently stated that 75% of COVID deaths had four or more comorbidities, “So, really, these are people who were unwell, to begin with.” The admission went viral and was cited as proof that COVID is a lethal risk for none but the sickest among us.
The CDC quickly stepped in, clarifying that she meant “75% of COVID deaths among those who have received the COVID jab,” not COVID deaths overall.9 You can see the unedited segment above, where that context is made clear. Still, we know that COVID poses very little risk for healthy unvaccinated people as well and that comorbidities are a primary risk factor regardless of your COVID jab status.
COVID Death Risk Has Always Been Low — Vaxxed or Not
For example, a 2020 study10 found 88% of hospitalized COVID patients in New York City had two or more comorbidities, 6.3% had one underlying health condition and 6.1% had none.
In late August 2020, the CDC published data showing only 6% of the total death count had COVID-19 listed as the sole cause of death. The remaining 94% had had an average of 2.6 comorbidities or preexisting health conditions that contributed to their deaths.11 So, yes, COVID is a lethal risk only for the sickest among us, just as Walensky said, but that’s true whether you’re “vaccinated” or not.
As for the study12 Walensky discussed in that “Good Morning America” segment, it found that of the 1.2 million COVID jabbed subjects, only 0.0033% died of COVID between December 2020 and October 2021. (And of those, 77.8% had four or more comorbidities.) In this study, Walensky claims as evidence that the COVID shot works wonders to reduce the risk of death.
But does it really? Recall studies13 showing the noninstitutionalized infection fatality rate is on average just 0.26%, to begin with, and people under the age of 40 have only a 0.01% risk of dying from COVID.14
When we’re talking about a fraction of a percentage point risk, we’re talking about a risk that is close to statistical zero. So, does lowering your risk of death from 0.01% to 0.003% really translate into something worthwhile? And, more importantly, is that reduction worth the risks involved with taking the jab?
Clearly, it’s not a risk-free decision. OneAmerica, a national mutual life insurance company, recently warned that all-cause deaths among working-age Americans (18 to 64) are up 40% over pre-pandemic norms,15 and they cannot be attributed to COVID.
So, what’s causing these deaths? What potentially deadly thing did tens of millions of Americans do in 2021 that they’ve never done before? I’ll let you ponder whether Walensky’s claim that the COVID jab is saving lives is an accurate one.
CDC Admits Large Portion of ‘COVID Patients’ Aren’t
In another recent media appearance, Walensky stated that:16
“In some hospitals that we’ve talked to, up to 40% of the patients who are coming in with COVID-19 are coming in not because they’re sick with COVID, but because they’re coming in with something else and have had … COVID or the Omicron variant detected.”
This, again, is something that we’ve been highlighting since the start of the pandemic. Most so-called “COVID patients” simply weren’t, and still aren’t. They’re hospitalized for something else entirely, and just happen to get a positive test result upon admission — which very possibly is a false positive. Either way, voila, they’re a COVID patient, even though they’re hospitalized for a broken leg or a heart attack.
As noted by Delta News TV, “Comments like these have cast doubt on the severity of the current COVID surge even as the Supreme Court considers legal challenges to Biden’s sweeping private-sector mandates on that very issue.”17
Is the Political Pandemic in Its Final Death Throes?
In a January 10, 2022, blog post,18 Jeff Childers, an attorney, and the president and founder of Childers Law firm, presents a hypothesis for why we might be looking at the end of the pandemic, as the Biden administration has “no reasonable alternative but to wrap this whole thing up in the next 60 days or so.”
“There’s an interesting political dynamic shaping up, a kind of political vice grip that might just be driving federal COVID policy toward authenticity and an end to the pandemic … a lot of reality has been breaking through lately,” Childers writes.19
He points out how a federal judge recently ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to release all the Pfizer COVID jab data that the agency wanted 75 years to release. The bulk of that data is now due March 1, 2022, the day of Biden’s State of the Union address. Childers suspects the Pfizer documents will contain plenty of counternarrative fodder and politically embarrassing details.
Why We’re Seeing a U-Turn in the Narrative Now
Biden needs some good news by his State of the Union address, as it’ll be his last chance to “help move the needle back toward blue,” and the way he can do that is by declaring the pandemic over. He can then claim to be the great liberator who ended the pandemic measures for good.
“If they handle this right, they can give their voting base and sycophantic media agents all the necessary talking points to boost Dem prospects for the midterm elections,” Childers writes.20
But to pull off that U-turn with any semblance of credibility, they have to start cutting the case rate now, and that’s precisely what we’re seeing. For example, the CDC recently changed its guidelines so you don’t need to retest after you’ve recovered from COVID, so no more false positives from recovered people.
Florida’s official policy is now to only test high-risk individuals and those who are symptomatic. Childers points out that the left-leaning Sun-Sentinel even ran an article highlighting the fact that despite surging case rates, Florida has the lowest COVID death rate in the nation, second only to the sparsely populated Alaska. “What incredibly powerful force could make the Sun-Sentinel downplay the pandemic like this?” he asks.
Will We Finally Get a More Accurate Death Count?
The CDC also appears poised to change the definition of COVID death to what it should have been all along. Childers notes:
“Fox News … Bret Baier … asked [Walensky] ‘how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are FROM COVID or how many are WITH COVID?’
Director Walensky said … ‘those data will be forthcoming.’ Until about 10 minutes ago, the CDC said it didn’t HAVE any way to track that kind of information … But now, apparently, CDC plans to release information about deaths from and with. What do you want to bet they’ll be REDUCING total COVID deaths shortly? By a lot.”
They’re also starting to accurately count only those who are actually sick with COVID rather than including people hospitalized for other reasons who just happen to test positive.
“Yesterday, New York Governor Hochul announced that almost HALF of patients are hospitalized for ‘non-COVID reasons,’ scattering the rotting corpse of the Narrative.
You might recall that just last week she ordered hospitals to start breaking down the reported figures and showing how many folks ACTUALLY are sick with COVID versus just testing positive in the hospital. We’ve been yelling about overcounting hospitalizations for two years now and they just noticed?”21
Same Narrative Switch Seen in Europe
The same sudden switch in narrative can be seen in Europe. Childers continues:22
“Yesterday, the Guardian UK ran a story headlined, ‘End mass jabs and live with COVID, says ex-head of vaccine taskforce.’ It says Dr. Clive Dix — former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce — has called for a ‘major rethink’ of the UK’s COVID strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the past two years and returning to a ‘new normality.’
Shocking the cores the oft-maligned authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Dix — without getting cancelled — said this:
‘We need to analyze whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary … Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.’ Ending mass vaccinations? Suddenly that idea is okay to discuss in the corporate media? Wow.”
In a January 3, 2022, interview with the Daily Telegraph, Professor Andrew Pollard, head of the U.K.’s Committee on Vaccination and Immunization who helped create the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot, also made a previously verboten statement: “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four or six months,” he said. “It’s not sustainable or affordable.”23 And, like Dix, Pollard was not canceled, censored, or de-platformed.
January 11, 2022, Bloomberg also reported that “European Union regulators warned that frequent COVID-19 booster shots could adversely affect the immune response and may not be feasible. Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune response and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency.”24
Marco Cavaleri, the EMA’s head of vaccines strategy, said during a January 11, 2022, press briefing:25
“While use of additional boosters can be part of contingency plans, repeated vaccinations within short intervals would not represent a sustainable long-term strategy. [Boosters] can be done once, or maybe twice, but it’s not something that we can think should be repeated constantly. We need to think about how we can transition from the current pandemic setting to a more endemic setting.”
That same day, the World Health Organization’s Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Composition (TAG-CO-VAC) also issued a statement26 saying that “a vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable.”
They also stated that COVID vaccines that actually prevent infection and transmission need to be developed. The timing of all these statements is nothing if not remarkable. It shows just how coordinated this plandemic narrative is, all around the world.
Justice Sotomayor Called Out
Perhaps the best example that the narrative is undergoing a radical overhaul, Childers says, is Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor being fact-checked and called out as a liar by The Washington Post:
“You’ll recall that Sotomayor confidently told the lawyers during oral argument Friday that ‘100,000’ children were in critical care and on ventilators with Omicron. The lawyers didn’t challenge her even though there aren’t that many total ICU beds in the whole country.
But on Saturday — the next day! — the Washington Post ran an article headlined, ‘Sotomayor’s false claim that ‘over 100,000’ children are in ‘serious condition’ with COVID.’ FALSE CLAIM?? What?? Here’s how the fact-checking article ended:
‘It’s important for Supreme Court justices to make rulings based on correct data … But Sotomayor during an oral argument offered a figure — 100,000 children in ‘serious condition … many on ventilators’ — that is absurdly high. She earns Four Pinocchios.’ It might be unprecedented for a major liberal newspaper to call out a liberal Justice. What could be going on? …
There seems to be a LOT of sudden momentum surging in the direction of ending the pandemic. If I’m right, we’re going to see even more of this, and pretty quickly, since Biden has to wrap it up in time to declare victory on March 1. Which would explain why they pushed the SOTU back a month. They need the time to get the pandemic wrapped up.”27
Dr. David Martin says that under the 21 CFR § 50.23 and 50.24, it is illegal to make anyone participate in an experimental program using coercion. He said that under 18 US Code § 2331, subsection 802, anytime a US citizen or a government inside the US is forced to do something that it would not otherwise do, that is not only coercion, but it is also domestic terrorism, which is a felony that carries a prison term up to 99 years. He also recommended mailing out his document that lists eight felonies to US Attorneys, Attorneys General, elected officials, school boards, or anyone who is trying to mandate Covid vaccines. His document may be used to put individuals and entities on notice that they are in felony violation of the law. He said that if you collect evidence of coercion, then you may be able to later recover damages in the courts.
Dr. Martin: You will actually be part of the class that one day recovers those damages. So I say, stand firm, inform yourself, get evidence, and take action.
Under 21 Code of Federal Regulations section 50.23 and 24, [21 CFR § 50.23, 21 CFR § 50.24] it is illegal to make anybody participate in an experimental program using coercion. That is, in fact, how in U.S. Law we actually embraced in U.S. Law the Nuremberg Code. So coercion is illegal and we need to call it coercion. We don’t want to call it leverage. We don’t want to call it pressure. We want to call it the illegal act that it is. It’s coercion.
And that becomes important because under 18 U.S. Code section 2331, and then subsection 802 [USA PATRIOT ACT, search to second occurrence of “802”], inside of the definition of domestic terrorism is, any time a U.S. citizen or a government in the U.S. is forced to do something that it would not otherwise do, that’s also not only coercion but domestic terrorism.
Now this conversation and every other conversation, I encourage people to, in fact, take those two laws; and when they are met with somebody telling them they’re supposed to get the shot, actually ask the person and record this. Use your phone, use a recording device, record the conversation and ask, if they are in fact violating 20 Code of Regulations, section 50.23 and 24. Are you interested in doing a civil violation of the law? And if they say, yes, they’re cool with that, then say, Are you willing to violate 18 U.S. Code section 2331, which says that it is illegal to coerce the population and that is a felony, and the felony has a 99 year prison term.
And so here’s the problem. We need to arm ourselves as a big community to not only do what we’ve done, and by the way, kudos to everyone who has done the resistance up until now. But now we have to arm ourselves with the very weapons they’re using and throw them back. I always say the metaphor for me is if somebody throws a hand grenade at you, pick it up, pull the pin out, and throw it back. Give me a hand grenade. Use it. What we need to be doing is we need to be informing ourselves and most recently, Patrick, and this will be a punch line I get to at the end, but I just put all of the felony statutes and all of the felony evidence into a single document that everybody can use, everybody can reference and just go to your employer, to your local grocery store, to your local theater, to your local school board, whatever it is.
Just say, Hey, which one of these felonies do you want to be implicated in, because all of them carry 99 year prison terms and up to $100,000,000 fine. So, and that’s $100,000,000 for an institution. So, it’s actually a big deterrent.
And as we have been manipulated and coerced as a population, we now need to actually take the offensive position and say, stand up, be informed, and provide the eight felony counts that you can ask any employer, any business, anybody who’s trying to push the mandate, which one of these felonies do you want to now be liable for?
Patrick: That’s brilliant. And I like the idea of going on the offensive.
As protests grow in EU countries and worldwide against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and so-called “vaccine passports,” some countries appear to be backtracking or at least harboring second thoughts about enforcing such measures.
Some policymakers point to evidence COVID is here to stay and we need to live with it since Omicron is similar to the common cold or seasonal flu. Others appear more willing to accept natural immunity in lieu of vaccination.
Still, other governments are digging in their heels and moving forward with punitive restrictions on the unvaccinated.
Here’s a look at the latest shifting policies outside the U.S.
Austria, citing ‘technical complications,’ won’t enforce mandates until at least April
Austria garnered much attention in November 2021 when it became the first country in the world to impose an all-encompassing vaccine mandate for its entire adult population and minors 14 years old and up.
This mandate, set to take effect in February, would be accompanied by fines of up to 3,600 euros per quarter. To that end, Austria recently reportedly began hiring “headhunters” to track down those who continue to remain unvaccinated.
The mandate has resulted in frequent large-scale protests against the mandate, as well as a political movement opposing this policy.
An open letter recently sent to Austria’s Interior Minister, Gerhard Karner, signed by 600 police officers, also expressed opposition to mandatory vaccination.
This opposition may be having an impact. Recently, the firm responsible for the technical implementation of the mandate announced that due to “technical complications,” the mandatory vaccination law cannot be enforced until at least April.
This news came amidst calls in Austria that the mandate should be reevaluated in light of the spread of the Omicron variant.
Germany struggling with mandate implementation; support not unanimous
Similar concerns over the feasibility of rapid implementation of a vaccine mandate have been raised in Germany, which has also mulled the implementation of compulsory vaccinations and has already approved such a mandate for healthcare workers.
In December 2021, Germany’s Ethics Council also gave its stamp of approval for vaccine mandates.
Nevertheless, concerns have been raised in Germany that parliamentary debate and subsequent technical implementation of a vaccination database cannot be completed before June at the earliest, calling into question the feasibility of the mandate in light of rapidly changing conditions.
Such hesitation comes despite renewed calls from German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier for an immediate full parliamentary debate on a potential vaccine mandate, and from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for COVID vaccines to be mandated.
Similarly, German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach recently suggested vaccine mandates, not natural herd immunity stemming from the rapid spread of the Omicron variant — which he described as “dirty vaccination” — represent the only way “out” of the crisis.
In November 2021, Lauterbach’s predecessor, Jens Spahn, publicly predicted that by the end of the coming winter, everyone would be “vaccinated, recovered, or dead” — due to the Delta variant.
Soon thereafter, in December 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden made a similar warning, predicting a winter of “severe illness and death” for the non-vaccinated.
Despite these public proclamations from German politicians though, recent reports suggest support for a vaccine mandate in Germany’s three-party governing coalition is far from unanimous.
Nevertheless, some localities in Germany are moving ahead with their own innovative means of confirming individuals’ vaccination status.
The city of Saarbrücken will soon launch a system where individuals who received a COVID vaccine or who have recovered from infection can voluntarily wear a colored wristband to indicate their status.
Greece pushes ahead with age 60+ mandate policy, threatens fines for unvaxxed
Greece was one of the first countries in Europe to implement a vaccine mandate for a portion of its general population when, in December 2021, it imposed such a policy for everyone age 60 and over.
The policy is set to take effect on Jan. 16, with fines of 100 euros per month levied against anyone who doesn’t comply.
Despite this policy, which has received broad and highly sensational media attention in Greece, and despite the burden the policy would place on pensioners in a country where the average pension is just over 700 euros per month, a significant number of individuals 60 and older appear to have opted to remain unvaccinated.
In late December 2021, it was reported that 400,000 people in this age group had not received the COVID vaccine.
In a televised appearance on Jan. 11, Greek government spokesperson Giannis Oikonomou stated that 200,000 people aged 60 and over had gotten vaccinated as a result of this mandate, touting this as a “big success.”
However, this would suggest approximately half of the relevant population in question had chosen to remain unvaccinated, despite the looming threat of a financial penalty.
It is perhaps, for this reason, the Greek government reportedly “froze” any further discussion of expanding the mandatory vaccination policy to those aged 50 and over, while it has been suggested the measure is unconstitutional and may eventually be struck down judicially.
However, despite rumors that the enforcement of fines against individuals 60 and older who have not been vaccinated would be postponed, Greece’s far-right Interior Minister Makis Voridis announced the policy would be enforced as originally planned.
Nevertheless, the Greek government will now extend existing measures, which include a midnight curfew and ban on music for dining and entertainment venues, and a 1,000-spectator capacity limit at sporting events, for at least an additional week past the original sunset date of Jan. 16.
In the Balkans, protests lead to a standstill on mandates
Major protests against the so-called “Green Pass,” or vaccine passport, took place recently in both Bulgaria and Romania.
In Bulgaria, protesters on Jan. 12 stormed the parliament building in opposition to the “Green Pass” and other restrictions. Attempts to enter parliament resulted in clashes with police and multiple arrests.
Similar events transpired recently in Romania, where on Dec. 21, 2021, protesters attempted to enter Romania’s parliament as part of a protest against proposed legislation making the “Green Pass” mandatory for workers.
Disagreements that have since followed between the parties which comprise Romania’s governing coalition have resulted in talks on this proposed policy coming to a standstill.
Notably, Bulgaria and Romania have the lowest and second-lowest COVID vaccination rates in the EU as of this writing.
Herd immunity as official policy?
As attempted moves toward wide-ranging vaccine mandates and broader implementation of vaccine passports appear to be floundering in Europe, such hesitation has increasingly been accompanied by ever more vocal suggestions that a form of herd immunity, via natural infection stemming from the rapid spread of the milder Omicron variant, should be considered at the policymaking level.
In Israel, for instance, a country that was among the first to move forward with a mass vaccination and booster campaign against COVID, health officials are mulling a “mass infection model.”
On Jan. 11, EU regulators, who had previously supported the administration of COVID booster shots every three months, had a sudden about-face, warning about the dangers the continued administration of boosters could pose for the human immune system.
That same day, the World Health Organization issued a remarkably similar warning, stating that “a vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable.”
Just one day prior, on Jan. 10, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez suggested European officials should move towards treating COVID as an endemic illness, calling for a debate on the issue and for a move away from the detailed pandemic case tracking system in place since early 2020.
Dr. Clive Dix, former chairman of the UK’s vaccine task force, Nick Moakes, a chief investment officer of the Wellcome Trust (Britain’s largest independent funder of medical research) made similar remarks. Moakes suggested coronavirus be treated like the common cold.
Meanwhile, certain European countries appear to be shifting away from considering a mandatory vaccination policy for their populations. Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin said his country will maintain a system of voluntary vaccination, while Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said his intention is to give people a “free choice” on the matter.
This shift is occurring despite remarks made on Dec. 1, 2021, by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission, who said it is time to “potentially think about mandatory vaccination within the European Union” and to have a “discussion” about this possibility.
Punitive measures continue elsewhere
The gradual shift away from vaccine mandate policies in Europe and elsewhere is far from uniform, with punitive restrictions and policies continuing to be implemented in several countries.
In Italy, for instance, mandatory vaccination was expanded on Jan. 5 to everyone age 50 and older. The unvaxxed will face a potential fine ranging from 600 to 1,500 euros.
French President Emmanuel Macron made waves in an interview with the Le Parisien newspaper on Jan. 4, justifying the implementation of his country’s “Green Pass” by stating “I really want to piss them off, and we’ll carry on doing this — to the end” and that “irresponsible people [the unvaccinated] are no longer citizens.”
On Jan. 11, the premier of the Canadian province of Quebec, Francois Legault, stated adults who refuse the COVID vaccine will face a “significant” financial penalty.
This statement came on the heels of remarks made on Jan. 7 by Canadian Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos. When asked whether mandatory vaccination was on the horizon in Canada, Duclos stated, “I personally think we will get there at some point.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau previously stated, in May 2021, that “[w]e’re not a country that makes vaccination mandatory.”
Other countries have resorted to more extreme, albeit “temporary,” measures.
Non-vaccinated individuals in one Australian state, the Northern Territory, were recently required to stay home for a four-day period, with limited exceptions. The conclusion of this four-day ban coincided with the launch of vaccine passports in the territory.
And in the Philippines, the country’s president, Rodrigo Duterte, called for the arrest of non-vaccinated citizens who venture outside their homes, in light of what he described as the “galloping” spread of the coronavirus.
This nevertheless may represent a milder stance on the part of Duterte, who in April 2020, empowered the police and military with shoot-to-kill orders against lockdown violators.
Dr Robert Malone: “Our government is out of control and they are lawless… Wake up, folks!” | Video Plus Transcript
Dr. Robert Malone, co-inventor of the mRNA technology, says that our government is out of control, lawless, and they completely disregard bioethics. Furthermore, he explains how tens of thousands of physicians & scientists are being canceled simply for questioning the official narrative. He concludes by warning that we are on the verge of becoming just like China, with no free speech, the government tells them what to do and think, and their lives are controlled by a social credit system. Malone concludes with: “Wake up, folks!” Because otherwise, the U.S. will become another China!
This is a short excerpt from the recent interview with Dr. Robert Malone on the Joe Rogan Podcast. ▹ Special thanks to the Joe Rogan Experience: joerogan.com
TRANSCRIPT (Dr. Robert Malone)
Our government is out of control and they are lawless. They completely disregard bioethics. They completely disregard the federal common rule. They have broken all the rules that I know of that, I’ve been trained on for years and years and years. These mandates are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg code. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Belmont report. They are flat-out illegal and they don’t care.
When you see this kind of decoupling of public policy from logic, then it causes thinking people to say what the hell’s going on here. And then we go down the rabbit hole: is at this that or the other thing. One of the things in that spectrum of what’s going on is that the emergency use authorizations are predicated on policy determinations that we’re in a state of emergency. Those are now two years old – they’re expiring.
I’m not saying this is what’s going on in their head, but there is another perverse incentive here to amplify the fear porn and to amplify… If you buy into the hypothesis that for some reason, there are incentives for the government to maintain the state of emergency, that is one explanation given that those declarations are expiring and will have to be re-implemented because if they’re not, then all of this emergency use authorization vanishes like dust.
It’s hard for me to reconcile the behavior of the government and its public health decisions with the data. Is it incompetence? Or is there some ulterior political motive? Or are they just dumb stupid? We’re in an environment in which truth and consequences are fungible. This is modern media management and warfare. The truth is what those that are managing The Trusted News Initiative say it is.
In my case, I’m the president of The International Alliance of Physicians and Scientists. We are over 16,000 people from all over the world – physicians and scientists. And you can find our website at GlobalCovidSummit.org. We are gobsmacked about what’s going on. And we are shut down, censored, demeaned, fill-in-the-blank – all over the world. And they’re taking our licenses because we are speaking about these matters.
And you can label me however you want to label me. I don’t care. I’ve done what I’ve done in my career. I’m at a stage at 62 years old. I’ve got a farm, it’s almost paid off. I raise horses. I love my wife. You know, I’ve been married a long time. My kids are both married. I got grandkids. Man, I don’t need this. This claim I’m doing all this because I seek attention. Trust me, this is not a fun thing to be doing at this stage.
Physicians at FLCCC in senior positions: Peter McCullough, people at the culmination of exceptional careers. Paul Marik, an exceptional physician by any standards – run out of his hospital, demeaned, destroyed, actively attacked, trying to take his license. People are losing faith in the whole system. They’re losing faith in the scientific enterprise. They’re losing faith in our government.
I like to say when I give rallies: do you remember back a couple of years ago when you felt sorry for the people in the People’s Republic of China because their internet was filtered. They weren’t allowed free speech. Their government told them what to do and think. Now, here we are. And the next thing that we all feel sorry about: their social credit system.
Kids in California, New York, Illinois, and a number of other states are required to wear face masks every day at school. Nearly 40% of schoolchildren nationwide are required to do so. Other states leave it up to local rules, which means about half the kids in the country are wearing face masks every day, social distancing, eating lunch outside, and performing athletics in masks.
Close to 30% of all schools are legally prevented from implementing mandates, or face pending legal challenges to restrictions, which means few in those states are imposing restrictions as we saw in 2020-2021. Below are those states with and without face mask requirements in schools.
There are two things that would almost assuredly amaze most parents across the country. Many parents in states like California or Illinois with mask mandates would likely be shocked how normal school protocols are in Texas, Florida, Utah, Iowa, and other states are shown in dark green or orange. Those with school-aged children in the green states would be stunned to learn that those in blue are requiring kids to wear face masks in school, socially distance, and eat outside in the cold or rain.
Some universities are requiring students to wear masks while on campus, even outdoors, including the University of Southern California and the University of Arizona.
COVID-19 is currently surging all over the country. Fortunately, a combination of a less lethal variant, recovered immunity and vaccinations are preventing many from the highly serious conditions we have seen in the past. You can see below that positive tests have skyrocketed over the past few weeks. Why so many people who aren’t sick are waiting in long lines and panicking to buy at-home tests is the subject for another article, but it’s clear that millions are currently contracting COVID-19:
In looking at the grouping of the states (CA/OR/WA/IL/NY/DE/MA/CT/NJ/MD/NV/NM/VA/RI) with required masking in schools compared to those without mask mandates (UT/FL/AZ/TX/OK/MO/IA/AR/TN/SC), where very few students are wearing them, we see nearly identical trends, and those with little to no masking have lower current case rates:
The proportion of pediatric positive tests is similar in all parts of the country right now, about 20% of all positive tests across the three 0-17 age groups shown below. This is about the same regardless of weather (seasonality) or restrictions:
It made us wonder. Are the school restrictions in some states working? It’s not about cases; cases are really a product of community spread and how much testing we do. It is about sickness. Are more kids getting hospitalized for or with COVID-19 in the states with normal school protocols than those requiring face masks?
We reached out to Josh Stevenson (@ifihadastick on Twitter), who has repeatedly produced amazing data analysis throughout the pandemic. Below is what he uncovered. This is an original compilation you won’t see anywhere else. For the states requiring masks, COVID-19 pediatric hospitalizations are averaging 4.23 per 100,000 kids:
For the states not allowing face mask mandates (or close to not requiring), COVID-19 pediatric hospitalizations are averaging 4.90 per 100,000 kids:
The hospitalization rate is nearly identical. There is no discernible difference between outcomes of infection or hospitalization for kids in communities where face masks are required in school and those where face coverings are optional.
Kids should be in school with normal protocols. They should be in class without masks, without plexiglass dividers, socializing while they eat lunch, and participating in sports without face masks. Logic clearly tells us this, and this data overwhelmingly proves there is no health benefit to requiring kids to wear face masks in school.
Ian Miller is the author of the upcoming book “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.” His work has been featured on national television broadcasts, national and international news publications and referenced in multiple best-selling books covering the pandemic. He writes a Substack newsletter, also titled “Unmasked.”
“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.”—George Carlin
Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs.
Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted, or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.
In this way, the most controversial issues of our day—race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support.
This tendency to censor, silence, delete, label as “hateful,” and demonize viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite is being embraced with near-fanatical zealotry by a cult-like establishment that values conformity and group-think over individuality.
For instance, are you skeptical about the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines? Do you have concerns about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election? Do you subscribe to religious beliefs that shape your views on sexuality, marriage, and gender? Do you, deliberately or inadvertently, engage in misgendering (identifying a person’s gender incorrectly) or deadnaming (using the wrong pronouns or birth name for a transgender person)?
Say yes to any of those questions and then dare to voice those views in anything louder than a whisper and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms.
This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility, and love (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized, and tyrannical.
In the past few years, for example, prominent social media voices have been censored, silenced, and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram for voicing ideas that were deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous, or conspiratorial.
Most recently, Twitter suspended conservative podcaster Matt Walsh for violating its hate speech policy by sharing his views about transgendered individuals. “The greatest female Jeopardy champion of all time is a man. The top female college swimmer is a man. The first female four-star admiral in the Public Health Service is a man. Men have dominated the female high school track and the female MMA circuit. The patriarchy wins in the end,” Walsh tweeted on Dec. 30, 2021.
J.K. Rowling, the author of the popular Harry Potter series, has found herself denounced as transphobic and widely shunned for daring to criticize efforts by transgender activists to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender. Rowling’s essay explaining her views is a powerful, articulate, well-researched piece that not only stresses the importance of free speech and women’s rights while denouncing efforts by trans activists to demonize those who subscribe to “wrongthink,” but also recognizes that while the struggle over gender dysmorphia is real, concerns about safeguarding natal women and girls from abuse are also legitimate.
Ironically enough, Rowling’s shunning included literal book burning. Yet as Ray Bradbury once warned, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
Indeed, the First Amendment is going up in flames before our eyes, but those first sparks were lit long ago and have been fed by intolerance all along the political spectrum.
Consider some of the kinds of speech being targeted for censorship or outright elimination.
Offensive, politically incorrect, and “unsafe” speech: Political correctness has resulted in the chilling of free speech and growing hostility to those who exercise their rights to speak freely. Where this has become painfully evident is on college campuses, which have become hotbeds of student-led censorship, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and “red light” speech policies targeting anything that might cause someone to feel uncomfortable, unsafe, or offended.
Bullying, intimidating speech: Warning that “school bullies become tomorrow’s hate crimes defendants,” the Justice Department has led the way in urging schools to curtail bullying, going so far as to classify “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.”
Dangerous, anti-government speech: As part of its ongoing war on “extremism,” the government has partnered with the tech industry to counter online “propaganda” by terrorists hoping to recruit support or plan attacks. In this way, anyone who criticizes the government online can be considered an extremist and will have their content reported to government agencies for further investigation or deleted. In fact, the Justice Department is planning to form a new domestic terrorism unit to ferret out individuals “who seek to commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of domestic social or political goals.” What this will mean is more surveillance, more pre-crime programs, and more targeting of individuals whose speech may qualify as “dangerous.”
The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning, and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.
Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.
The end result is mind control and a sleepwalking populace.
In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.
In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance.
Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, and infantilism.
The social shunning favored by activists and corporations borrows heavily from the mind control tactics used by authoritarian cults as a means of controlling its members. As Dr. Steven Hassan writes in Psychology Today: “By ordering members to be cut off, they can no longer participate. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Thought-stopping and use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls members through fear and guilt.”
This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.
As Rod Serling, creator of TheTwilight Zone, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”
The problem as I see it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.
In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.
As Nat Hentoff, that inveterate champion of the First Amendment, once observed, “The quintessential difference between a free nation, as we profess to be, and a totalitarian state, is that here everyone, including a foe of democracy, has the right to speak his mind.”
What this means is opening the door to more speech not less, even if that speech is offensive to some.
Understanding that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society, James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely.
We haven’t done ourselves—or the nation—any favors by becoming so fearfully polite, careful to avoid offense, and largely unwilling to be labeled intolerant, hateful, or closed-minded that we’ve eliminated words, phrases, and symbols from public discourse.
We have allowed our fears—fear for our safety, fear of each other, fear of being labeled racist or hateful or prejudiced, etc.—to trump our freedom of speech and muzzle us far more effectively than any government edict could.
Ultimately the war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is: a war being waged by Americans against other Americans—is a war that is driven by fear.
By bottling up dissent, we have created a pressure cooker of stifled misery and discontent that is now bubbling over and fomenting even more hate, distrust, and paranoia among portions of the populace.
By muzzling free speech, we are contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can’t take part in American public life unless they “fit in.”
The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world. When there is no steam valve to release the pressure, frustration builds, anger grows, and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.
Be warned: whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.
Eventually, “we the people” will be the ones in the crosshairs.
At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.
When that time comes, there may be no one left to speak out or speak up in our defense.
After all, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing the truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
We are on a fast-moving trajectory.
In other words, whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, for the sake of the greater good or because you like or trust those in charge, will eventually be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.
This is the tyranny of the majority against the minority marching in lockstep with technofascism.
If Americans don’t vociferously defend the right of a minority of one to subscribe to, let alone voice, ideas, and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant, or merely different, then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt-in, opt-out, or forge our own paths as individuals).
No matter what our numbers might be, no matter what our views might be, no matter what party we might belong to, it will not be long before “we the people” constitute a powerless minority in the eyes of a power-fueled fascist state-driven to maintain its power at all costs.
We are almost at that point now.
Free speech is no longer free.
On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak.
In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google, or YouTube—may allow.
The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist, and obedient to Big Brother.
The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying, and policing.
The German-American lawyer Reiner Füllmich told Maria Zeee that the long-awaited international criminal trial, which many also call “Nuremberg 2.0″, will begin in a few weeks.
In all likelihood, a committee of inquiry will look into the case. Charges are to be brought against four leading figures: Bill Gates, Christian Drosten, Anthony Fauci, and WHO chief Tedros, said Füllmich. “You will pay a very high price. You will go to jail. “
All sorts of experts will testify about what is really going on, about the agenda that has been developed to divert our attention from population reduction on the one hand and population control on the other, the lawyer said.
He added that a new judiciary is being worked on as the system “is so corrupt that we can no longer rely on it”. “We have to set up our own system,” he said.
An important part of the case is a “vaccine manufacturer” investigation conducted by Mike Yeadon, a former vice president of Pfizer. This investigation found that some batches of vaccine caused no problems at all, while others were highly dangerous, causing thousands of deaths.
“They are trying to find out how to kill as many people as possible without the alarm bells ringing,” emphasized Füllmich. “It’s diabolical. How can people be so angry? “
The attorney went on to say that this entire operation, which takes decades, is being carried out by a few hundred, at most a few thousand people. They try to get as many doctors and politicians on their side as possible through bribery and blackmail. For example, think of ritual child abuse, he said.
In my teaching, I prepare undergraduate students to become high school history teachers. In one course, teacher candidates prepare and deliver mock lessons. Their peers play the role of high school students, and I observe and give feedback following these practice lessons. Whether coincidence or a reflection of the times, this fall a good number of mock lessons covered the rise of totalitarianism. In one excellent lesson, a teacher candidate had his students examine the contexts that gave rise to totalitarianism. He accompanied this lesson with an excerpt from a world history textbook listing characteristics of totalitarianism.
This lesson hit on the true purpose of including totalitarianism in high school curricula. That purpose is not to honor the likes of Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini. Nor is that purpose to provide the methods of totalitarianism as an instructional manual to follow. Rather, the purpose of teaching on totalitarianism is to deliver a warning: heed well the conditions that yielded totalitarianism, so you can recognize and avoid them. As I observed this teacher candidate’s lesson, I could not help but think about that purpose in the context of our present time.
One passage from the lesson’s textbook concerned me the most: “Totalitarian leaders often create ‘enemies of the state’ to blame for things that go wrong. Frequently these enemies are members of religious or ethnic groups. Often these groups are easily identified and are subjected to campaigns of terror and violence. They may be forced to live in certain areas or are subjected to rules that apply only to them” (pg. 876).
Creating an enemy of the state requires othering: a process of dehumanizing through marginalizing a group of humans as something different, less than, and other. Such othered groups become an easy target to scapegoat, unfairly bearing the blame for a society’s ills.
History is replete with examples of othering. The Ancient Greeks othered based on language, labeling those who did not speak Greek barbarians. In the United States, chattel slavery and segregation were sustained through othering based on skin color. In Nazi Germany, Hitler othered based on religion, casting Jewish people as enemies of the state.
Othering frequently plays on people’s stereotypes and fears. In the United States, for example, black men have been othered as “thugs,” playing on fears about violence and criminality. In another example, public health officials in Nazi-occupied Poland played on the primal human fear of disease. Propaganda posters proclaimed “Jews Are Lice: They Cause Typhus.”
Now, some politicians are othering the “unvaccinated.” These politicians attempt to scapegoat and marginalize this minority group, despite knowing that vaccinated and unvaccinated persons alike can contract and spread COVID-19. Below, I provide the words of three politicians as examples of othering language. I also encourage you to read their words in context.
In the United States, President Joe Biden’s September 9 press conference announced sweeping vaccine mandates. He expressed that “many of us are frustrated” with unvaccinated persons. He laid blame on them for the continued pandemic; Biden claimed that this “pandemic of the unvaccinated” was “caused by…nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot.” He faulted “a distinct minority of Americans” for “keeping us from turning the corner.” And he promised, “We cannot allow these actions to stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans who have done their part and want to get back to life as normal.”
In a September 17 interview on the Quebec talk show La Semaine des 4 Julie, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau labeled those opposed to vaccination “misogynists” and “racists.” Then, he exclaimed that Canada needed to make a choice: “Do we tolerate these people?”
In France, President Emmanuel Macron gave an interview with Le Parisien on January 4. In this interview, he categorized the unvaccinated as non-citizens, referred to their “lies and stupidity” as the “worst enemies” of democracy, and proclaimed “I really want to piss [the unvaccinated] off.” Macron argued these unvaccinated persons to be only “a very small minority who are resisting,” and asked a chilling question: “How do we reduce that minority?”
In these communications, Biden, Trudeau, and Macron employed several practices of othering.
They created a majority in-group, signaled by the use of the first person plural (we, us), and a minority othered group, signaled by the use of the third person plural (they, them).
They cast blame for government pandemic policies on that othered group (“keeping us from turning the corner”).
They used words to signal to the in-group that they should be angry at the othered group (“many of us are frustrated,” “I really want to piss them off”).
Trudeau and Macron specifically used labels that devalued this othered group: misogynists, racists, enemies, non-citizens.
Most worryingly, Macron and Trudeau questioned whether and how to eliminate this othered group (“Do we tolerate these people?” and “How do we reduce that minority?”).
My hope is that this will all amount to nothing more than ignored political rhetoric – empty bluster these politicians hope will score a few popularity points with their electoral base. My fear is that it will not. Either way, this dangerous othering language must be recognized and condemned.
Historians study causality: contexts, conditions, events, and their outcomes. We have examined the conditions that yielded chattel slavery, the gulag, the Holocaust, Jim Crow, Rwanda. This is not an attempt to equate current pandemic policies with these past tragedies.
Rather, this is a warning call. We have seen these conditions before, and we have seen where they lead. Turn back now – that way leads to darkness.
Jared McBrady is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at SUNY Cortland.
THIS WORK IS LICENSED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL LICENSE
Why Is the Human Being Not Like a Machine?
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CLN Editor Note: The article by Jeffrey A. Tucker is below. But first, watch this short video showing the incredible stupidity of some of the Supreme Court members regarding vaccine mandates:
In defense of regulatory mandates during oral arguments, the following words were spoken by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor: “Why is a human being not as a machine if it’s spewing a virus?” For her, it is a simple matter: regulatory impositions rule the machine world so why not the human one too?
The question came across to listeners (millions heard these arguments for the first time) as shocking. How can anyone think this way? Human beings carry pathogens, tens of trillions of them. Yes, we infect each other, and our immune systems adapt as they have evolved to do. Still, we have rights. We have freedom. These have granted us longer and better lives.
The Bill of Rights doesn’t pertain to machines. Machines don’t comply with Constitutions. Machines have no volition. Machines are things that must be powered by external sources, programmed by humans, and behave exactly as they are managed to behave. If a machine doesn’t do what is expected, it is broken and therefore repaired or replaced.
All this seems incredibly obvious and undeniable, so much so that one can only stand back in awe that anyone would doubt it, particularly a judge who holds the fate of human liberty in her hands. It seems utterly astonishing that such a person would not quite grasp the difference between the human experience and a mechanized widget.
And yet, what she said is actually not out of the left field. It wasn’t a point she made up on the spot. The presumption that people should be managed like machines has been a baseline assumption pervasive in pandemic planning for the better part of 15 years. The delusion was born in the heads of a handful of people who happened to be close to power, and it has grown ever since.
Many great thinkers have tried to blow the whistle on these intellectual trends for a very long time. Twenty years ago, Sunetra Gupta warned us. Nonetheless, the modelers and planners carried on, building more models, fantasizing of central plans, cobbling together mitigation strategies, and otherwise plotting to remove human volition from the list of unknowns during a pandemic.
In other words, treating people like machines is not a radical idea and it is not purely the cranky invention of an ideologically motivated court judge. What Sotomayor said isn’t unusual at all, at least not in the confines of her intellectual bubble. She offered up a summary statement concerning many of the presumptions behind lockdowns and now mandates. It has been part of the agenda for a very long time, a view held by some of the world’s leading intellectuals that gradually gained influence within the epidemiological profession over the last decade and a half.
All of this is well documented. We just hadn’t fully experienced it until 2020. That was the year in which they found the opportunity to test the theory that humans can be managed as machines and thereby generate better results.
Have a look at Michael Lewis’s mostly awful book on the topic. For all its failings, it does a deep dive into the history of pandemic planning. It was born in October 2005 at the urging of President George W. Bush. The innovator was a man named Rajeev Venkayya, who today runs a vaccine company. Back then, he was head of a bioterrorism study group within the White House. Bush wanted a big plan, something similar to the big vision that led to the Iraq War. He wanted some means to crush a virus. More shock and awe.
“We were going to invent pandemic planning,” Venkayya announced to the staff. He recruited a group of computer programmers who had zero knowledge of viruses, pandemics, immunity, and no experience at all in the management and mitigation of diseases. They were computer programmers and their programs all presumed exactly what Sotomayor said: we are all machines to be managed.
Among them was Robert Glass from the Sandia National Laboratory, who cobbled together the idea of social distancing with the help of his middle-school-aged daughter. The idea was that if we all just stayed away from each other, the virus would not transmit. What happens to the virus? It was never clear but they believed that somehow a virus that could not find a host would then somehow disappear into the firmament, never to return.
None of it ever made sense, except in the models. In the world of computer modeling, everything makes sense according to the rules as set up by programmers.
You can read the original Glasspaper on the CDC website, where it still lives today. It is called Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza. It’s a central plan that removes all human volition. Everyone is mapped according to their likelihood of spreading the disease. Their choices are replaced by the plans of scientists. The model is based on a small community but it applies equally to an entire society.
Targeted social distancing to mitigate pandemic influenza can be designed through simulation of influenza’s spread within local community social contact networks. We demonstrate this design for a stylized community representative of a small town in the United States. The critical importance of children and teenagers in transmission of influenza is first identified and targeted. For influenza as infectious as 1957–58 Asian flu (≈50% infected), closing schools and keeping children and teenagers at home reduced the attack rate by >90%. For more infectious strains, or transmission that is less focused on the young, adults and the work environment must also be targeted. Tailored to specific communities across the world, such design would yield local defenses against a highly virulent strain in the absence of vaccine and antiviral drugs.
Here is a small map of infection transmissions as presented in this seminal paper.
Wait, this is my community? This is society?
You see here how this works. They have mapped what they imagine to be the infection path. They replace this path with closures, separations, capacity limits, travel restrictions, forcing everyone to stay home and stay safe. Do you wonder why they targeted schools? The models told them to.
Thus pandemic planning was invented, contradicting a century of public health experience and millennia of knowledge concerning how pandemics really end: through herd immunity. None of this mattered. It was all about the models and what seemed to work on their computer programs.
As for human beings, yes, in these models, they are machines. Nothing more. When you hear the claims reduced to preposterous quips by a judge, they are laughable on their face. Or scary. Regardless, they are plain wrong. Surely every intelligent person knows the difference between a person and a machine. How can a person believe this?
But in a different context, you can take that same worldview, throw up some colorful charts, back it with a Powerpoint presentation, add variables that can change the model’s workings based on certain presumptions, and you can generate what appears to be highly intelligent computerization that reveals things we otherwise would not see.
Blinded by science, we might say. Many people in the White House were indeed blinded. And the CDC too. They had hoped to deploy the newly codified system of virus control in 2006, with the Avian bird flu, which, experts warned, could kill half of the people who got the bug. Anthony Fauci said the same thing: a 50% case fatality rate, he predicted.
And yet many people were disappointed: the bug never jumped from birds to humans. They could not try out their great new scheme. Still, the modeling movement grew steadily over a decade and a half, gaining recruits from many sectors and then enjoying enormous funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Obviously, Gates himself was and remains convinced that the best way to deal with pathogens is through antivirus programs we call vaccines, while otherwise mitigating spread through human separation.
In 2006, I had speculated that disease planning was a new frontier for state control of the social order. “Even if the flu does come,” I wrote, “the government will surely have a ball imposing travel restrictions, shutting down schools and businesses, quarantining cities, and banning public gatherings. It’s a bureaucrat’s dream! Whether it will make us well again is another matter.”
“It is a serious matter,” I continued, “when the government purports to plan to abolish all liberty and nationalize all economic life and put every business under the control of the military, especially in the name of a bug that seems largely restricted to the bird population. Perhaps we should pay more attention.”
At the time, most people just ignored all this as so much noise. It was just another White House press conference, just another wacky bureaucratic dream from which our laws and traditions would protect us. I wrote about it not because I believed they would attempt it. My alarm was that anyone could dream up such a crazy plot, to begin with.
Fifteen years later, that noise became the calamity that has fundamentally destabilized American liberty and law, wrecked trade and health, shattered countless lives, and thrown our future as a civilized people into grave doubt.
Let us not turn away from the reality: all of this was a product of intellectuals who did and do think exactly as Sotomayor. We are not humans with rights. We are machines to be managed. In fact, if you look back at the March 16, 2020, news conference at which these lockdowns were all announced, Dr. Birx said just in passing the following sentence:
“We really want people to be separated at this time, to be able to address this virus as comprehensively that we cannot see, for we don’t have a vaccine or a therapeutic.”
Here we have a leading advisor to the president essentially advocating for completely new and radical social transformation, as managed by public health professionals. A comprehensive plan for everyone to be separated, exactly as the disease planners 15 years earlier had advocated in their hare-brained computer models.
Why did reporters not ask more questions? Why did people not scream that this whole cockamamie scheme is inhumane and deeply dangerous? How could people have sat calmly listening to this gibberish and pretended it was normal?
It’s sheer madness. But madness can transverse the decades so long as its creators live within intellectual bubbles, enjoy generous funding, and never have to confront the results of their schemes.
This is the story of what happened to liberty in the US and all over the world. It was shattered by fanaticism, all rooted in a core presumption that we’d be far better off as human beings if our ruling class regarded us as no different from machines spewing sparks. They were permitted to reorganize the whole of our lives based on that principle.
What Justice Sotomayer said strikes us now as both dangerous and delusional. It is. And yet her conviction is widely shared and has been for at least 15 years, among the class of intellectuals who gave us lockdowns and pandemic controls. It’s their template. At their parties and conferences for all these years, such thoughts were considered normal, responsible, intelligent, and wise.
Now that they have had a go at it, where are they to defend the results? Instead, they have mostly left the scene, leaving the bag of intellectual rubbish in the hands of a Supreme Court justice who is both their accidental mouthpiece and their sacrificial victim. It was the statement that will define her career, forever cited as proof that she should never have been approved for that position.
In fact, what Sotomayer said about machines and humans was not rooted in ignorance as such; it was the fulfillment of the delusions of countless intellectuals the world over for most of this century. She was summarizing countless papers and presentations in the form of a casual quip, thus revealing it for the fundamental insanity that it truly is.
“Madmen in authority,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Sometimes that very distillation is what reveals precisely what we’ve tried so hard for so long to ignore. Sotomayer revealed the existential threat, in a way that was mortifyingly ridiculous but also encapsulated everything that has gone wrong in our times.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. tucker@brownstone.org
Judge Gives FDA 8 Months, Not 75 Years, to Produce Pfizer Safety Data
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will have eight months — not the 75 years it requested — to release all documents related to the licensing of Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID vaccine, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
In his ruling, Judge Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, quoted President John F. Kennedy, writing, “a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
Judge Pittman rejected the FDA’s claim that it could release redacted versions of documents at a rate of only 500 pages per month, which would have meant the full cache of documents wouldn’t become public until 2096.
The documents in question relate to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021 by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT), a group of more than 30 medical and public health professionals and scientists from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and UCLA.
In his four-page order, Judge Pittman ordered the FDA to produce more than 12,000 pages of documents on or before Jan. 31, and thereafter to “produce the remaining documents at a rate of 55,000 pages every 30 days, with the first production being due on or before March 1, 2022, until production is complete.”
According to this timeline, the almost-400,000 pages of documents will have been made public, sans redactions, within eight months, rather than by the year 2097.
In its FOIA request, PHMPT asked the FDA to release “all data and information for the Pfizer vaccine,” including safety and effectiveness data, adverse reaction reports, and a list of active and inactive ingredients.
PHMPT had initially requested expedited processing of its FOIA submission on the basis there is a “compelling need” for the swift release of the documents in question, further arguing that the documentation should be fully released within 108 days — the number of days it took the FDA to approve Pfizer’s vaccine.
When the organization’s request was rejected by the FDA, PHMPT filed a lawsuit against the agency.
The FDA, in its argument, recognized that it had an “obligation” to make the information public, but claimed its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which maintains the records in question, has only 10 staff members, two of whom are “new.”
Suzann Burk, head of the FDA’s Division of Disclosure and Oversight Management, said it takes eight minutes a page for a worker “to perform a careful line-by-line, word-by-word review of all responsive records before producing them in response to a FOIA request.”
As a result, the FDA initially claimed that it required 55 years to fully release redacted versions of these documents. The agency later amended this request to 75 years.
A ‘great win for transparency’
In his order, Judge Pittman recognized the “burden” placed on the FDA in meeting the timeline for the release of these documents, but nevertheless made clear that it must be a priority for the agency:
“Here, the court recognizes the ‘unduly burdensome’ challenges that this FOIA request may present to the FDA … But, as expressed at the scheduling conference, there may not be a ‘more important issue at the Food and Drug Administration … than the pandemic, the Pfizer vaccine, getting every American vaccinated, [and] making sure that the American public is assured that this was not rush[ed] on behalf of the United States.”
Pittman, in addition to quoting Kennedy in his order, also drew on the words of former U.S. President James Madison:
“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both.
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Attorney Arron Siri of the Siri & Glimstad law firm, who represented PHMPT in its lawsuit, told Reuters that the judge’s order “came down on the side of transparency and accountability.”
“This is a great win for transparency and removes one of the strangleholds federal ‘health’ authorities have had on the data needed for independent scientists to offer solutions and address serious issues with the current vaccine program — issues which include waning immunity, variants evading vaccine immunity, and, as the CDC has confirmed, that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.
“No person should ever be coerced to engage in an unwanted medical procedure. And while it is bad enough the government violated this basic liberty right by mandating the Covid-19 vaccine, the government also wanted to hide the data by waiting to fully produce what is relied upon to license this product until almost every American alive today is dead. That form of governance is destructive to liberty and antithetical to the openness required in a democratic society.”
PHMPT pledged to publish all the FDA documents on its website.
In a filing submitted to a federal judge in November, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), arguing on behalf of the FDA, initially claimed the agency could process some 329,000 pages of documents at a rate of only 500 pages per month, in order to have time to redact legally exempt material.
According to the DOJ, such material includes “confidential business and trade secret information of Pfizer or BioNTech and personal privacy information of patients who participated in clinical trials.”
However, the legal team representing PHMPT argued in its court papers that the FDA, as of 2020, had 18,062 employees, indicating the agency could find the necessary manpower to rapidly fulfill the FOIA request.
It is unclear whether the FDA will appeal Thursday’s decision. If not, both the FDA and PHMPT are required to submit a report by April 1, detailing the progress being made regarding the release of the documents.
The submission of additional reports will then be required every 90 days thereafter until all documentation has been released.
Several significant rulings pertaining to COVID vaccines and related measures have come out of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in recent days.
On Jan. 3, the court issued a preliminary injunction barring the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) from disciplining military service members who object to COVID-19 vaccination on religious grounds.
The same court also recently ruled against the implementation of a mask and vaccine mandate for participants in federal Head Start programs.
‘COVID Chronicles’ | Dr. Joseph Mercola
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The filmmakers of Covid Chronicles are allowing for a FREE special stream until 1/10. CLICK HERE to support this important mission and own the film for life!
“COVID Chronicles” gives a concise look at the pandemic, answering some of the questions that have left many people scratching their heads because reality and science don’t seem to match up with what the media is reporting
Every positive COVID-19 test is considered a case, but these are two completely different things since you can test positive without being ill
When COVID-19 was left to behave in a manner that would allow it to spread amongst the healthy, about two-thirds of the population displayed antibody levels naturally
Mask mandates did not noticeably change the number of cases or deaths the way they should if they actually reduce transmissibility; countries that used minimal masks were not worse off than neighboring countries with mask mandates
It’s important to stay grounded and think critically to avoid falling victim to unnecessary panic and stress
The “COVID Chronicles” movie1 gives a concise look at the pandemic, answering some of the questions that have left many people scratching their heads because the reality and science don’t seem to match up with what the media is reporting.
Ivor Cummins is a biochemical engineer with a background in medical device engineering and leading teams in complex problem-solving. On his website, TheFatEmperor.com,2 he offers guidance on how to decode science to transform your health. He produced “COVID Chronicles” along with Donal O’Neill, a documentary filmmaker in the field of health and human performance.
There were red flags in the pandemic from the start. Because the symptoms of COVID-19 overlap with so many other diseases, the only way to know you have it is to test for it.
The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests used for COVID-19 use a powerful amplification process that makes them so sensitive they can even detect the remains of a dead virus long after infection, Cummins explains. But even beyond that, every positive COVID-19 test is considered a “case” — and therein lies a major problem.
A Positive Test Isn’t the Same as a Case
Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an internal medicine doctor and former head of health at the Council of Europe, is among those who referred to the COVID-19 pandemic as a “test pandemic” due to the PCR test.3
“It was accepted by WHO, and they said when the test is positive, we have a case of COVID-19. And this is how they started counting the cases,” Wodarg says. “What they counted was the activity of testing. And the more they tested, the more cases they found.”4 When labs use excessive cycle thresholds, you end up with a grossly overestimated number of positive tests, leading to a “casedemic”5,6 — an epidemic of false positives.
Wodarg says COVID-19 “was a ‘test’ pandemic. It was not a virus pandemic,”7 because PCR tests may give a positive result when it detects coronaviruses that have been around for 20 years.8 In “COVID Chronicles,” Cummins speaks with John Lee, a former clinical professor of pathology at Hull York Medical School and consultant histopathologist at Rotherham General Hospital, who later became the Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust’s director of cancer services.
He echoes Wodarg, stating that during the pandemic, every positive test is considered a case, but “these are two completely different things.”9 Normally, if you have a typical cold, for instance, you only become a “case” if you’re hospitalized, but this all changed with the pandemic. Lee says:10
“In coronavirus, we’ve been counting every single positive test as a positive case. Now this is scientifically and medically wrong. You can have a positive coronavirus test and be completely well. You can have a positive coronavirus test and be excreting minimal amounts of the virus.
To conflate positive tests with cases is simply wrong, and yet the positive cases have been driving government policy and the entire panoply of restrictive actions that have been taken.”
January 13, 2021, “WHO finally questioned the accuracy of PCR testing,” the film notes and released an information notice that clarified instructions for interpreting results of PCR tests, including the fact that “careful interpretation of weak positive results is needed.”11 “Reported case rates collapsed in the U.S. the following day,” “COVID Chronicles” points out.12
Lockdowns Didn’t Work
Lockdowns can be effective if they’re implemented when no one has the disease, but once it’s already spreading in your population, they don’t work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown was implemented far too late and caused much more harm than benefit.
The film highlights COVID-19 outcomes around the globe, including in vastly different regions, like densely-populated Khayelitsha in South Africa. It was originally assumed that COVID-19 would devastate the area. They were strictly locked down along with the rest of South Africa, but due to the dense population, the lockdown in Khayelitsha only served to force people further right on top of one another.
Because the area has a long history of battling diseases like HIV and tuberculosis, it was easy for officials to use data from the area, which quickly showed that those most at risk from COVID-19 were elderly, frail, or suffering from other conditions like Type 2 diabetes. What surprised many, however, is that Khayelitsha fared much the same during the pandemic as everywhere else in South Africa.
Further, as the second and third waves struck, those in Khayelitsha were much better protected, even as new variants emerged. It was later found that as many as 68% of local residents had COVID-19 antibodies.13 As noted in “COVID Chronicles”:14
“[A]s Delta cut a swathe across the world and indeed South Africa, it was bigger here than any of the prior waves or the variants that we had seen. But in Khayelitsha, that 68% level of antibodies across the community proved to be extremely powerful and very, very protective, even against the new Delta variant.
So while the U.K. was in complete disarray, here we had an informal settlement in an economically deprived region with a population of half a million outperforming the U.K. and many First World nations … they had not intended … for COVID to spread throughout the community. But in doing so, they arrived at a point where herd immunity, if you like, had been reached.”
Other communities also enjoyed high levels of COVID-19 antibodies in the community, including in India, the Orthodox Jewish community in London, and Amish communities in the U.S. So, when this virus was left to behave in a manner that would allow it to spread amongst the healthy, they were typically getting to about two-thirds of the population displaying antibody levels.15
Mask Mandates Didn’t Work
Like lockdowns, mask mandates are another pandemic control measure that’s been pushed as gospel despite lack of effectiveness and evidence of harm. The “Danmask-19 Trial,” published November 18, 2020, in the Annals of Internal Medicine,16 found that among mask wearers 1.8% (42 participants) ended up testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 2.1% (53) among controls.
When they removed the people who reported not adhering to the recommendations for use, the results remained the same — 1.8% (40 people), which suggests adherence makes no significant difference. Initially, numerous research journals refused to publish the results, which called widespread mask mandates into question.17
If masks work, the film points out, you should immediately see a dramatic change in the curve, within 14 days. “If you look at around 10 or 12 countries where they brought in mask mandates, there was no impact on the curve … whatsoever so the empirical science of our own eyes is screaming at us: masks and lockdowns don’t really move the needle much, maybe a little, but no one wants to know. It’s an ideology now. It’s a religion,” Cummins says.18
Dr. Reid Sheftall also studied mask usage extensively and found mask mandates did not noticeably change the number of cases or deaths the way they should if they actually reduce transmissibility. Countries that used minimal masks were not worse off than neighboring countries with mask mandates.19
“That makes sense,” Cummins says, “because 40 years of science have been unanimous, pretty much, that for influenza viruses, surgical masks and coverings are highly ineffective. So it agrees with the science.” Yet, the media claim masks are effective, based on a “flurry of papers” that came in around June 2020 saying masks could be good. “So a few weeks of papers have overturned a few decades of scientific sense,” he adds.20
Injections Aren’t Working
It’s now been uncovered that the viral loads of COVID-19 are similar among people who’ve been injected and those who have not.21 “What kind of a vaccine needs three vaccinations, and maybe a fourth, and more, within months?” Cummins asks. “The answer is a vaccine that’s not really working very well at all.”22
The media message that the pandemic is now a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is also misleading since data from Israel showed that similar numbers of people were being hospitalized for COVID-19, whether they were injected or not.23 Cummins notes:24
“There’s a lot of trickery with the data. The hospitalizations are difficult because you can’t get the raw data, and they’re very confounded data. In one case … the U.S. came out with shock stories that 99% are unvaccinated. However, they were accounting for way back … before the vaccines were available.
So the lion’s share back then were unvaccinated because the vaccines weren’t here yet. So there’s a lot of trickery — I would say fraud — in the way the data’s being presented.”
People who’ve received only one injection of an mRNA series are also referred to as unvaccinated, which further biases the data to again make it look like more uninjected people are being hospitalized. What’s more, the film notes, “In 2021, professor Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, stated that, ‘… herd immunity by vaccination is not a possibility because it [Delta] still infects vaccinated individuals.’”25
Is This a Pandemic of Lifestyle?
Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a consultant cardiologist and chairman of public health collaboration in the U.K., is also featured in “COVID Chronicles,” speaking about the underlying factors that make certain people more vulnerable to COVID-19 — namely lifestyle-related diseases driven by poor diet.
This aspect of prevention via a long-term healthy lifestyle, which could save lives in future pandemics, is another tenet that’s ignored by the dominant narrative. Malhotra explains:26
“I think what we’ve had is a fast pandemic, in terms of COVID, that has exacerbated and taken advantage of a slow pandemic, which is the pandemic of chronic, lifestyle-related diseases that have been putting stress on our health care system for many, many years, and our NHS, certainly even before COVID, was already at a breaking point.
But actually, COVID has broken the back of the NHS, and the main reason behind this is because we failed, for many, many years, to tackle prevention head on, specifically the biggest driver of these chronic diseases: poor diet.
Ultraprocessed food, which is the heart of the problem, is now half of the calorie consumption in the British diet. It’s about 60% of the calorie consumption in the United States, and there’s a very clear correlation between, already, countries that had 50% or more of the population overweight or obese had 90% of the deaths from COVID-19. So, poor metabolic health means poor immune health.
But beyond this, we know that the real drivers of this problem are structural. These are to do with the environment and with misinformation that is being subjected on the public for the purposes of profit. And the two real culprits behind this, in my point of view, are the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry.
And the collusion of academics, medical journals, doctors and politicians for financial gain with these industries is the heart of the problem. This needs to be exposed, and the public needs to understand and realize that the biggest enemies of democracy are the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry.”
If Not for Media, Would You Know There’s a Pandemic?
The film implies that COVID-19 presented an opportunity that multiple entities have used to further their own agendas, while media have served as a tool for overriding science and common sense. It’s important to stay grounded and think critically to avoid falling victim to unnecessary panic and stress. Cummins notes:27
“A key thing to remember, I think, is if you turned off the media, no one would know there’s an epidemic. Even during the surges in Ireland, in both seasons, if you did not have access to the media, you would never know.
No one really knew anyone who died — outside of someone in a nursing home, someone of elevated age or with stage 4 cancer — most people did not know anyone who died. Right? Isn’t that incredible, in a massive pandemic, as we’ve been told?”
Tyranny is rearing its ugly head all over the planet
The tyrants have a rich arsenal of weapons, such as direct violence, destruction of food supply chains, going after the children, blatant deceit, fake “community values,” and the “New Moral”
We are in a spiritual battle of our time, and we are the heroes we have been waiting for
The year is 2021, going on 2022. It’s been two weeks … sorry, two years of bullying. It’s been two years of being disrespected and deceived. We are at a crossroads, and the tension is palpable. There is a war on privacy, on free expression, on human contact, on love, on natural immunity, on medical sovereignty, on bodily autonomy, and even on math, allegedly. It’s hard to believe it’s real. We are pinching ourselves every day but the bad dream is not disappearing.
In Germany, the police are measuring the distance between people in the street with a ruler. In South Korea, they are building an “untact” society, a society with limited physical contact (“a potential economic engine for the country,” they say).
“Introduced in 2020, ‘Untact’ is a South Korean government policy that aims to spur economic growth by removing layers of human interaction from society … Robots brew coffee and bring beverages to tables in cafes … At Yongin Severance Hospital, Keemi – a 5G-powered disinfection robot – sprays hand sanitiser, checks body temperature, polices social distancing, and even tells people off for not wearing masks …”
“Seoul City plans to build a ‘metaverse’ – a virtual space where users can interact with digital representations of people and objects – and avatars of public officials will resolve complaints.
Several local governments have launched AI call bots to monitor the health of those self-isolating … Loneliness among elderly people – an existing problem in South Korea only exacerbated by the pandemic – is also receiving the untact treatment … The long-term impact of untact on society remains unclear, but Prof Choi believes an untact future is inevitable to increase economic efficiency.”
In America, the Green Party just went full-on brown, and the FDA is working to intercept international mail containing ivermectin.
Statement from the Green Party US Steering Committee supporting "the use of vaccines, vaccine mandates and quarantines as part of a comprehensive public health effort to curb and eradicate the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic." https://t.co/5s16hZGPHbpic.twitter.com/UC3MA2drQ9
In my hometown of New York, segregation of the vermin is “normal.” In Australia … oh Australia. Why, Australia?!
Welcome to the New Normal, where "Unvaccinated" (i.e., perfectly healthy) people "escape" from pseudo-medical concentration camps and are hunted down by New Normal Gestapo agents on live television … while those who should be shouting from the rooftops cower in silence. https://t.co/G3sn06oaFBpic.twitter.com/14MOT4Iy1l
So we have to accept the fact that it’s happening. Yes, it’s happening. It is happening to us and to our children — here and now, bizarrely — and yet the logic of a Hollywood film doesn’t apply. It is not a history book, not a story about a place far away, it is here and now. We are suddenly “that” generation. We are suddenly the heroes we’ve always wanted to save us.
And it’s nuts — but as insane as it is, the world is still ancient and beautiful, and the choice to push back against bullying is an ancient initiation. We are holding the line.
Tyranny, Fascism, Domination
What is that force that wants to control us completely? Some people call that force Fascism, some call it Tyranny, or Domination, or the Machine. Today’s technocratic version of total control goes under the names of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial revolution. It aims to turn us into inanimate and obedient wheels fueling new digital slavery and the fully controlled financial system. But it is much more than a political force.
Yes, Tyranny has political faces. Yes, today it laughs at the gullible by pretending that it wants to “build back better,” just like before it came up with any other “respectable” lies. Yes, it throws treacherous slogans around and employs politicians and corporate leaders to promote its various weapons and poisons.
But deep underneath, it is much more than a political force. It’s a test for the soul. It’s a force whose cruel predation helps us discover the courage inside us that some of us have almost forgotten.
“What Did We Do to Deserve This Abuse?”
That is a question that many of us ask ourselves very often. Personally, I believe that the abusive force is allowed to be temporarily menacing because it serves an existential purpose. It is here to motivate us to snap out of slumber and start respecting and protecting the life force inside us. The wisdom we learn from making mistakes is more lasting than the wisdom we learn theoretically.
I also believe that the duration of torture is not supposed to belong, unless we prolong it by the willingness to cooperate with the tyrants with our actions or psychologically. Like the mysterious balance between Yin and Yang, the tyrants are the ugly facilitators of our freedom. But if we get scared and agree to comply with abuse, it creates a domino effect and snowballs with no ending in sight, until we remember that we are of spirit and water — and stand up for ourselves.
Meanwhile, the tyrants are here, and they are hard at work trying to bully us and confuse us as much as they can.
How Do Tyrants Make People Comply With Their Agenda?
Tyrants have many tricks up their sleeves. Some are physical and some psychological. Some are applied “on first contact with tyranny,” and some are designed to maintain the state of confusion to keep us weak. And while the specifics may vary from moment to moment and from one tyrant to another, there are some general principles.
Physical Violence and Imprisonment
Physical violence is a force that tyrants have been using throughout history very effectively. We can be smart and see through the lies — but when one’s life is threatened or when one faces imprisonment, things are not easy. But what the tyrants don’t realize is that by pushing too far, they make people mad. And the people are rising!
Limiting Access to Money or Food
What comes to my mind is the time when the buffalo were being slaughtered en masse to ensure that “hostile Indians” couldn’t eat. That was a deliberate strategy to starve out the people who had been enjoying a free existence and weren’t quite asking to part with their land or their lifestyle in favor of their version of the “Great Reset.”
Before that and after that, different invaders arranged for food blockades and supply chain disruptions in order to create the kind of starvation and suffering that would make the targeted people so distraught that they would either die or succumb.
Today, there is an attack on our land, on our food systems, and on farmers — with the idea of weaning us off our traditional food and selling us the “new normal” food, such as lab-grown proteins, bugs (see this yummy article about cockroach milk), and other “delicacies” we did not request. Keep in mind that Bill Gates is the largest private landowner in the U.S. Good times.
Going After the Children
That, sadly, is another classic signature of many abusive reforms. For any aspiring tyrant or invader, it is important to create a chasm between the children and their parents so that the children can be influenced and corrupted — and the parents can’t help because the children have no love and no respect for what their parents stand for.
The dark reminder from the history of our country is the notorious “kill the Indian, save the man” campaign, in which a large amount of Native American children have been ripped away from their parents (often by force) and sent to boarding schools where they were punished with great cruelty for attempting to speak their language or doing anything reminiscent of their traditional culture.
Not only did it lead to heartbreaking and destructive interruption of cultural ties and loss of important family legacies — but also the children were so traumatized that it resulted in generational havoc: broken relationships, domestic abuse, a high rate of suicides, and so on. As they say, hurt people hurt people …
And then in my birth homeland, the post-revolution children were encouraged to choose “politically correct” ideology over family loyalties and to rat out their parents. Which allegedly some did. (See Pavlik Morozov.
What they are doing to the children today may be falsely described in the warm and fuzzy language of “care” and “public health” as opposed to the straight-up language of domination — but abuse is abuse.
The masking of children — against all rhyme and reason — is unconscionable. Setting the children against their “vaccine-hesitant” parents and encouraging the children to get the COVID injections without even telling the parents is criminal.
And then there are stories like this: According to a parent in Florida, “school officials forced a little girl with Down Syndrome to wear a mask by tying it to her head for six weeks.” Another parent reported that their non-verbal son, who can’t communicate whether he can or cannot breathe, had his mask duct-taped to his face at school. In what world?!!
Psychology of Deceit
Tyrants wouldn’t be tyrants if they were truthful. In the words of Tom Mullen, as he commented on the cognitive anomalies of the New Normal, the “New Normal paradigm can’t collapse in the face of anomalies, no matter how numerous they are, because the anomalies are now simply ignored. Anyone who calls attention to them, no matter how credentialed or qualified, is systematically discredited.” I recently explored the topic of deceit in detail here and here. The gist:
“It’s possible for the not-so-benevolent people to create, sell, and enforce temporarily satisfying make-believe realities. It works like a drug. Let’s say, if one feels dissatisfied with one’s life, one can temporarily block the discomfort and even experience euphoria based on purely sensory stimuli.
But of course, as powerful or invigorated one may feel inside an artificial reality, sooner or later one has to wake up to the real reality — and the sweeter the dream, the more bitter the fall.”
Yet it’s “possible to create an infinite number of ‘make believe’ realities and feed those realities by recruiting willing participants. And here is where the history of the world comes to play. How many important events and cultural narratives took place strictly because there were enough people willing to participate in them — not because they were grounded in the real reality?”
“If one is convinced on a sensory level that a healthy person without a mask is a danger, then demanding that other people wear the mask becomes a real emotional need. The message that one wants to imprint is of totalitarian mask-up.
The message is not based in reality, and may not even be the person’s own message — but the feeling is real — and because the person is not spiritually grounded, he feels hysterical. And the predators love it when people are spiritually ungrounded. They love eating zombies.”
“By the way, the entire Fourth Industrial Revolution is an industrial-level project of disconnecting everybody from the real reality and vampiring their energy. It’s about abolishing human agency — which is actually unabolishable, but it can be temporarily stolen at the price of great suffering. Sometimes people tell me that maybe it’s not such a bad idea to live with a million sensors in the body.
Well, here is an analogy. Imagine a really bad marriage. Imagine a really clueless and tactless spouse who believes that he/she knows better what’s good for you. Your spouse doesn’t need to be a thief or a murderer (even though they could be), he/she can simply be totally clueless and not “get” you at all. And that is enough to turn your life into hell!
Life under the Fourth Industrial Revolution is like a million bad marriages without a right to divorce.”
The “New Moral”
In addition to the “New Normal,” there is also an implicit “New Moral.” The “New Moral” is predicated on emotional hunger, a certain degree of suffering, and a great amount of deceit. A few months ago, Charles Eisenstein published a widely circulated beautiful piece, called, “Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed.” It moved me greatly and really hit the nail on the head:
“We would like to think that modern societies like ours have outgrown barbaric customs like human sacrifice. Sure, we still engage in scapegoating and figuratively sacrifice people on the altar of public opinion, but we don’t actually kill people in hopes of placating the gods and restoring order. Or do we?”
“Sacrificial subjects carry an association of pollution or contagion; their removal thus cleanses society … It matters little whether any of these pose a real threat to society. As with the subjects of criminal justice, their guilt is irrelevant to the project of restoring order through blood sacrifice (or expulsion from the community by incarceration or, in more tepid but possibly prefigurative form, through “canceling”).
All that is necessary is that the dehumanized class arouse the blind indignation and rage necessary to incite a paroxysm of unifying violence. More relevant to current times, this primal mob energy can be harnessed toward fascistic political ends. Totalitarians right and left invoke it directly when they speak of purges, ethnic cleansing, racial purity, and traitors in our midst.”
An Imaginary “We”
That particular weapon of tyrants is very close to my heart. I spent many years unwrapping the messes that were bestowed on me by the totalitarian culture of my birth homeland (I am Russian).
There was this fake concept of “we” that was without a doubt created by various elites at different times of history, as a “Russian doll” of lies. Fake as it was, it was nonetheless internalized by many people — and growing up, I had to compare my actions to this imaginary “we” or, in today’s language, “community values.”
And by the way, I do believe that being gracious and good to one’s community is wonderful and satisfying — but a good community is rooted in spiritual health and genuine respect — not in neurotic, guilt-ridden marching to the drum of totalitarian ideologies. Enough said.
“Recruiting” Friends and Family, a.k.a. Collective Trauma
That one is very painful to many of us. It’s not very hard to accept the fact that the tyrants are mean. But when they manage to seduce, corrupt or scare the people around us, and when the tyrants’ rotten ideas come to us from our loved ones, that hurts. And it requires all the courage in the world to face that extremely difficult challenge and stay grounded and remember that our fight is for love. I personally believe that this could be the challenge of our time.
I should also mention using technology for overall emotional manipulation and “scientific” behavioral modification. That is a vast topic that requires a separate article but it needs to be mentioned because it’s not a conspiracy theory.
And Finally, What if the Tyrants Mean Well?
Let me answer that tricky question with a less tricky question: Why should I care? Suppose, some tyrants think of themselves as saviors. It could be. There is usually inner logic to everything people do. There is an inner logic to the actions of madmen and serial killers — and perhaps some of the tyrants believe themselves to be messiahs. But why should I care?
Perhaps some of the Great Inquisitors also believed that by burning witches alive they saved them from eternal burning, and thus it was a service to the slain.
Perhaps some of the people who forcibly ripped Native kids away from their parents and placed them in boarding school believed that it was good for “progress” or for the kids. Perhaps some of the German Nazis believed that ridding the country of Jews was a noble and scientific idea.
Perhaps today’s eugenicists believe that reducing the population of humans is good for the planet and is necessary for the survival of the human species. Perhaps they believe that if the population isn’t reduced, then the entire species might perish. Perhaps they believe that we are too stupid to understand, and so they are just “doing what needs to be done.” Maybe yes, maybe no. But they are deranged, and so why should I care?
They are not qualified to decide my fate or the fate of humanity — and while I wish them their kindest experience with the truth because that is how I sincerely feel about the world, I am not obliged to submit their or any other abuse. We are not their slaves. Hold the line.
About the Author
To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.
