Dear Subscribers to On Topic With Lori,

As you know my book, Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19, addresses the unprecedented damages imposed by the pandemic response, focusing on these key points:

· How already FDA-approved meds, that were effective at treating Covid-19, were suppressed to make way for,

· Expensive and ineffective Emergency Use Authorized (EUA) treatments, while waiting for,

· The development and coerced distribution of the dangerous EUA Covid-19 shots;

· How the pandemic was used to impose unprecedented stringent pandemic measures that violated civil liberties and human rights throughout the world;

· How propaganda and fear tactics were used to manipulate people into compliance

Now there is a declaration we can all sign, the Covid Justice Resolution, which outlines the “permanent lessons of the COVID-19 response.” The Resolution calls on the US Senate to “repudiate certain emergency measures as incompatible with constitutional liberty, and to establish binding principles for any future public-health emergency.”

It’s essential that we support this Resolution, calling for legally binding policies that will prevent a repeat of the pandemic debacle. Please take a few minutes to read through the Resolution and add your name to the supporters.

If you ever think back on the pandemic and consider:

· the harms of school closures

· the forced closure of churches while bars and box stores stayed open

· the destruction of small businesses

· how the elderly and sick were isolated in care centers and hospitals

· how children were forced into masks that hampered their speech and emotional development

· how people were forced to take the Covid shot to attend school, keep their jobs, and to travel

· how incidents of suicide and suicidal ideologies exploded among teens and college-aged students due to closures and restrictions on gathering

· how families and friendships were torn apart by government mandates

If you ever think about all of the above, plus the many other harms that resulted from the inappropriate and heavy-handed official response to the Covid-19 pandemic, now is your chance to speak up and demand that a public-health emergency will never be handled in this way again.

Please read the Covid Justice Resolution, add your name to the thousands who have already signed, and then share the Resolution with others via social media.

Your friend in support of the principles of freedom,

Lori Weintz

It’s a new year, and a chance to try something different! Brownstone Institute is expanding its Supper Clubs to locations throughout the U.S.

These clubs are a unique opportunity to join others in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere and enjoy delicious food and drink, while discussing important topics of the day. Each meeting includes a guest speaker, with time for Q&A.

The Brownstone Utah Supper Club inaugural event is Thursday, February 12, at the award-winning Harvest Restaurant in Thanksgiving Point, Lehi. Your ticket includes appetizers, beverages, salad, choice of steak or salmon entrée, and dessert, including tax and gratuity. (I am co-hosting the Utah Supper Club with Matt Warnock, of Ridgecrest Herbals.)

Join us for an evening of community gathering, conversation, and connection as we hear from Dr. Kirk Moore, who will weave his personal experiences into a discussion of the challenges that develop when health autonomy bumps up against public health and government overreach.

Perhaps the most important feature of each supper club evening is the ability for people, who may not agree on various issues, to gather in friendly discussion – a counterpoint to the polarity that is being promoted around us each day.

There are just a few tickets left for the inaugural Brownstone Utah Supper Club on Thursday, February 12^th. Please click here for further information, and to purchase tickets.

We would be so pleased to have you join us!

Lori & Matt

purse seine - a large wall of netting deployed around an entire area or school of fish. The seine has floats along the top line with a lead line threaded through rings along the bottom. Once a school of fish is located, a skiff encircles the school with the net. The lead line is then pulled in, “pursing” the net closed on the bottom, preventing fish from escaping by swimming downward.

Due to the relatively short lifespan of human beings, it can be difficult to put our own life experiences in perspective with history. This is why we have the saying, “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.” Combine a lack of historical knowledge with the fact that human nature doesn’t change much, and you have a recipe for human-caused misery, repeated over and over.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Cask of Amontillado, we see an example of human nature gone awry, with lethal results. From the first, the reader is privy to Montresor’s disgust toward Fortunato, and his desire to exact revenge for a perceived insult. As the story progresses it should be evident to Fortunato that Montresor has ill intent, but Fortunato cannot imagine the evil, so he continues into the depths of the catacomb, willingly walking toward his own demise while being plied with wine and called “friend.” Even as Montresor is about to place the last stone that will seal Fortunato’s death in chains behind the brick wall, Fortunato calls it a good joke that they will laugh about later. Montresor agrees, drops his torch into the opening, places the final brick, and piles old bones of his ancestors in front, where half a century later “no mortal has disturbed them.”

There are analyses interpreting Poe’s story, and its intended message, but surely one lesson is to pay attention when all the signs indicate that you are in a bad situation, even as others try to convince you of their solicitude and concern for your well-being. This is the dire situation of humanity today, in the form of the digital prison that is being formed right before our eyes under the guise of convenience, efficiency, and safety.

Casting the net:

While most of us go about our lives working, playing, taking care of ourselves and our families, and interacting with others who are equally engaged in similar life activities, the tech and surveillance industries are barreling forward with plans to change everything. The partnerships forming and strengthening among corporate, tech, academia, and government are explained and celebrated with all the right language and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

For example, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, framed his recent announcement that digital ID will soon be mandatory in order to work in the United Kingdom, as a policy that will appeal to all “decent, pragmatic, fair minded people.” Starmer intoned that mandatory digital ID would address the illegal migrant problem, and help the U.K. to “tackle poverty, conflict, climate change…” Besides, wheedled Starmer, now you won’t have to search through a drawer for your latest utility bill to show proof of residence; you can just show your digital ID. So convenient.

That citizens feel no need for digital ID, and don’t want it, is not of concern to the tech billionaires and their corporate, academic, and government partners, only insomuch as they have to deal with the populace’s viewpoints. That is, in democratic societies they have to at least try to appeal to the public. In tyrannies, the purveyors of advanced technology only have to convince tyrants that it will help them better surveil and control their people. Money is exchanged and tyranny is strengthened.

Those who have already been caught in the purse seine:

Currently in North Korea, Dictator Kim Jong Un uses the death penalty for citizens caught watching and sharing foreign films. Kang Gyuri, who escaped in 2023, told the BBC that three of her friends were executed after being caught with South Korean content. Aided by advances in technology, the North Korean state has increased surveillance and control over “all aspects of citizens’ lives,” according to the UN Human Rights Office.

Meanwhile in China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spends more money surveilling its own citizens than it does on its military, using cameras and smart phones to track their every move, all while coordinating with scientists and tech companies to develop increased capacities for monitoring facial expressions, gait, and under-the-skin signals of dissatisfaction with the government.

In the past couple of years, video and photos have shown us Venezuelan citizens protesting Dictator Nicolas Maduro’s unlawful rule, Cuban citizens protesting power blackouts and food shortages, and Iranian men and women calling for women’s rights. These uprisings, remarkable because they so seldom happen in dictatorships, have been crushed by the governments in each of their countries. There is no doubt that surveillance cameras and cell phone tracing were used to locate protestors, many who have been imprisoned and even killed, just for questioning their governments.

Covid vaccine passports were precursors to Digital ID:

It would be a comfort to think that these types of oppressive events cannot occur in western democracies, but that would be untrue. Have you processed that in the free world today there are surveillance cameras at store entrances, on city light poles and traffic lights, in parking lots, at the self-checkout, in the waiting room of the hospital, in school and hotel hallways, and on your neighbors’ doorbells?

One need only look back on the pandemic to see how tenuous our freedoms have become. The Covid virus was used to shut down society and suppress human rights, concurrent with banning people from the public square for not wearing a mask, and later for not taking the Covid shots. Within this framework came the push for vaccine passports, touted by billionaires and government leaders as the way to “get back to normal.”

“It’s so convenient,” they told us. You just show your vaccination status and you’re on your way. Unless you’re in China, where the CCP changed protesting citizen’s Covid status from green to red on their digital IDs, preventing them from accessing public transport, food, and all other aspects of society.

Naomi Wolf, feminist author and journalist, who was a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, is the CEO of a tech company. Wolf released a video in March 2021 titled, “Why Vaccine Passports Equal Slavery Forever.” Wolf, author of The End of America stated, “The vaccine passport platform is the same platform as a social credit system like in China that enslaves 8 billion people…Once this platform rolls out, any other function can be linked to it with no problem.”

The Covid vaccine passport did not take firm hold, although it had an oppressive run in places like New York, Israel, and Austria. Still, it is the stated intent of the United Nations to ensure that everyone on the planet has a digital ID by 2030. In 2022, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), one of 15 specialized agencies in the United Nations system, announced plans in Bucharest, Romania, to “accelerate the world’s digital transformation” in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

“We just don’t need the vast majority of the population”:

Also in 2022, Yuval Noah Harari, of the World Economic Forum (WEF), stated that he could “understand and connect to the deep resentment of people, in many places around the world.” He expressed that their discomfort is justified, stating,

The future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering, Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.

The WEF is tightly connected to the United Nations, through a Strategic Partnership signed in 2019, in which they agreed to implement the 2030 Agenda, merging the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals with the WEF’s plans for a “Great Reset” of Capitalism. The WEF’s “Great Reset” can be summed up in the now infamous video where they announced that in 2030 “you will own nothing and you will be happy.” The WEF/UN partnership identifies six areas of focus – climate change, health, digital cooperation, gender equality, empowerment of women, and education and skills – with a plan to “strengthen and broaden their combined impact by building on existing and new collaborations.”

They use words that evoke support from most people, but the actual agendas of these supranational organizations are harmful to humanity. Indeed, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, states that its aim is to develop “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

Imagine for a minute what it means to push forward with technology intended to “outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

Harari notes, that in contrast to past eras when great civilizations were built upon the strength and industry of its workers, with the advancements in AI, “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population.”

Dennis Meadows, an honorary member of the Club of Rome, and a member of the WEF, wrote the original depopulation book Limits of Growth in 1972. Meadows stated years later that Earth can only support 1-2 billion people, but posited, “We could even have 8 or 9 billion, probably, if we have a very strong dictatorship which is smart…If you had a smart dictatorship and a low standard of living, you could have it...” Meadows continues, “We have this fantasy that we will somehow solve climate change but without giving up our material standard of living, and for sure not doing that politically incorrect thing to try to talk about birth rates.”

We’re not talking here about the normal cycle of a new technology rendering some labor force skills obsolete, therefore requiring education for different jobs. People like Harari, Meadows, and other elites in their circle, are talking about eliminating the need for most people.

“Citizens will be on their best behavior”:

Others may not be interested so much in eliminating people, as they are interested in tracking and controlling them. Multi-billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, invited by President Trump to the White House on more than one occasion, is heavily invested in AI development. Ellison states that the “AI Revolution” is “a much bigger deal than the Industrial Revolution, electricity, whatever – everything that has come before.”

In an interview with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at the World Governments Summit on February 13, 2025, Ellison extolled the virtues of AI for treating cancers, and improving crop yields worldwide. “The secret is to get all of that data in one place. Without having the basic data, [AI] cannot answer the questions about your country well.” It might be wise to check first with the farmers to see if they really want a tech mogul surveilling and advising them on farming practices.

Ellison, who practically salivates at the idea of access to whole countries’ data made it even clearer in a September 2024 Oracle financial analyst meeting why he is in favor of A.I. technologies, when he enthusiastically envisioned an Orwellian future, free of crime due to constant surveillance:

The police will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly watching and recording everything that’s going on. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly watching and recording everything that’s going on. We’re going to have supervision…

The mantra today is that personal data is the new big commodity. Most just shrug their shoulders at the thought, others feel mildly uncomfortable but still participate in a growing surveillance system. It used to be only criminals were fingerprinted. Then a few high profile cases led to mandatory fingerprinting for many people in educational and religious employment, among other jobs.

Entering the net - trading autonomy for security and/or convenience:

Meanwhile, the requirement to give personal information to access apps and websites grows, and the freedom to work, associate, and travel becomes more and more limited to you carrying the “correct” identification. For example, you can no longer travel on commercial airlines in the U.S. without a passport, or “Real ID,” which is the gold star the Federal government required all 50 states to include in their driver’s license designs. Real ID was implemented after the TSA, bomb-sniffing dogs, biometric face scans, intrusive body scans, and invasive pat downs at the airport.

With the increasing emphasis on security, tracking, and data, is the world safer? The public assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah, the security-camera documented murder of Iryna Zarutska on a North Carolina commuter train, the trans-addled ambush of students participating in Mass at the Annunication Catholic Church in Minnesota, the mass shooting and burning of Latter-day Saints during a church service in Michigan, and the knife attack on Jewish faithful gathered for Yom Kippur at a London synagogue, would say no.

Yet, on cue, the call is always for ever more security in the wake of horrific acts.

Tightening the net:

Starmer’s imposition of digital ID was followed a few days later by the European Union’s announcement that beginning October 12, 2025 a passport is not sufficient for travel in EU countries. Specifically, fingerprints and facial scans will be required at border crossing points within the EU for all non-EU nationals.

The benefits of the EU “entry/Exit System” are explained as “making border checks more modern and efficient, making travel across borders easier and faster, preventing irregular migration, and increasing the security in the Schengen Area,” (the 29 countries of the EU).

Once again they’re employing the “efficient, easier, faster, safer” mantra, combined with claims of preventing irregular migration. To that they’ll easily add preventing terrorism, tracking drug cartels and illegal drugs, and other societal ills.

As a side note, efficiency is not a virtue. Every dystopian story is full of societies that run at peak “efficiency” while the human beings within them are treated as children to be controlled, and as something to be punished if they step out of line.

Concurrent with the EU rolling out biometric border crossing requirements, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), the third largest cruise line behind Carnival and Royal Caribbean, opened the world’s first “fully biometric” cruise terminal in the world on October 15, 2025. The facility is capable of processing up to 36,000 passengers daily, “using facial recognition and digital identity verification through 18 biometric face pods and 22 E-gates.” Cruise Report Advisor calls MSC a “transformative force in the cruise industry…inspiring global ports to adopt similar innovations.”

But why? Why do we need border checks, facial scans, fingerprints, and other restrictions? Who does this benefit? Not you or me. Not the countries involved. It benefits only those with financial ties to the technology, and the power that comes with its use. The MSC Miami Cruise Terminal cost $450 million to build. Strange, isn’t it, that MSC would spend so much money just so our wait times are reduced? Of course, collecting the unique biometric markers of every cruise passenger might have some financial benefit on the world information market, but let’s not think about that. Let’s just have a good time.

Over the past few decades, illegal migration has been pushed on a massive scale by complicit government “leaders” throughout Europe and in the U.S., destabilizing our countries. Now they want to “protect” us by implementing biometric technologies that would have allowed Hitler, Stalin, and other dictators to succeed in their failed attempts to rule the world. And they want us to go along with it voluntarily, luring the undiscerning with promises of efficiency, convenience, and safety.

The surveillance and control wall is being built around us, brick by brick.

It’s all designed to help you:

At the World Governments Summit, Tony Blair stated to Larry Ellison, “You’re revolutionizing the way the government works, right? The services it provides, the way that it operates…How can AI help a government operate more efficiently, more effectively, you know – give a more direct and better service to the citizen?”

Ellison replied “[A]s long as countries will give it, will put their data, their health care data, all of it in a single place where we can use AI to help manage the care of all the patients and the population at large. We can deliver a very, very high quality service.” Service to whom?

Comedian and commentator Russell Brand wryly summarizes the views of these supranational organizations and the billionaires who support them in this take:

Now one thing we could do to help you a bit more is get all this fragmented data all over there, passport over there, health information over there, nice and consolidated to help - not Tony Blair, not Larry Ellison, not globalism, not even some proposed or indicated at least world government - but you. Can’t you feel the help?

Busybody supranational organizations:

The World Governments Summit where Ellison and Blair conversed, is a non-profit (always look for that magical moniker) formed by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai, in 2013. It’s vision? “To inspire and enable the next generation of governments.” It’s mission? “To become the global platform for shaping future governments.” Why is anyone from a Western democracy participating in a summit on world governments, promoted by a sheikh in Dubai?

Keir Starmer’s September 26, 2025 announcement of mandatory digital ID was made at the Global Progress Action Conference hosted in London. What is Prime Minister Starmer doing announcing a United Kingdom ID policy at a conference hosted by “a progressive think tank” 501(c)(4) non-profit from the U.S.? Global Progress Action is an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which states it is designed to:

defend and promote liberal democracy and inclusive societies, at a time when democracy faces threats from both foreign autocrats and domestic illiberal forces. By addressing the underlying roots of social unrest and building policy ideas for inclusive and sustainable economies, the initiative sets out a policy direction that can advance progressive solutions for societies around the globe.

That’s a big goal for a little ol’ non-profit that the Internal Revenue Service categorizes as a “social welfare organization.”

Starmer states that Brits will not be required to carry their digital ID. It will solely be for the purpose of proving citizenship status in order to enter legal employment. Notably, the immigration crisis in the U.K. developed in spite of there already being a requirement to show proof of citizenship to secure work. Digital ID isn’t going to solve the problems the British government created by indiscriminately opening its borders over the past several decades. But it will allow for thorough tracking of all U.K. citizens.

Using digital ID to close the net:

Naomi Wolf explained in 2021 that if citizens accept digital ID, freedom is over. Wolf states,

There’s no coming back from this…there won’t be any choice. There won’t be Capitalism. there won’t be free assembly, there won’t be privacy, there won’t be choice in anything you want to do in your life, and there will be no escape.

Investigative journalist Whitney Webb, in an interview with Neil Oliver in August 2024, pointed out that Silicon Valley teamed up early on with the National Security State, which allowed them to become monopolies engaged in public private partnerships. For example, Google and Oracle have CIA origins, and everyone from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk have huge contracts with the U.S., and other governments, to provide their technology services.

Webb states that digital ID is essential to the UN/WEF Agenda 2030, noting that biometric digital IDs are going to be rolled out as a solution to illegal migration, voter fraud, cybercrime, and hacking, among other ills of society.

Webb predicted, correctly, that digital ID will be promoted as convenient and efficient, while not emphasizing the fact that those who own the technology, own the information, and have control because they are in charge of “the infrastructure, the software, and the platforms.” Webb states, “I think people need to consider that this ‘convenience’ is really the carrot, and maybe there will be a stick at some point.”

AI and digital technologies are not organic innovations:

When thinking about disruptive technologies over the past centuries, one observation that seems quite clear is that despite the displacement of some workers, over time the technologies increased the availability of food, fuel, consumer goods, and convenience for much of the world’s population. Electricity, sanitary water systems, indoor plumbing, automobiles, air travel, mass production of food and goods, appliances to aid with the day-to-day work of living, all have raised the standard of living for more people than in any other period of history.

Changes in technology have always been disruptive; that’s why we call them revolutions, starting with the Industrial Revolution of the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries. However, what some call Industrial Revolution 5.0, or the 5^th Industrial Revolution, (click here for an explanation of the other four), is significantly different. The merging of humans and machines is arguably not a push for improving the conditions of humanity, but rather a movement toward dehumanization.

That’s why we get this sentence from the article on MSC’s new cruises, “This collaboration marks the first end-to-end biometric cruise experience, where guests become their own passports, redefining convenience, security, and luxury from home to ship.” (emphasis added)

Warning voices:

There are many warning voices as the elite’s plans move full-speed ahead with AI technology. Journalist Bev Turner states, “Leaders lacking empathy are not troubled by reducing humanity to a mere data set upon which they can keep tabs, and at that point, we the people are nothing more than a commodity which can be monetized…We all need to become hypervigilant to the 2030 UN Agenda. Its endgame is control - where and when you travel, what you eat, who you can see, what you can say.”

The genie is out of the bottle with regard to digital technologies and AI, and certainly these technologies are not inherently nefarious or without beneficial purpose. However, what should be happening side-by-side, and even ahead of these developing technologies is the passage of laws and rules that will assure our Constitutional rights, and basic human rights, are protected in the face of these powerful technological developments. That does not appear to be happening.

In a recent interview about his new book, Against the Machine, philosopher and author Paul Kingsnorth states he has a sense, “We are living inside something that is quite inhuman, and becoming more and more inhuman. It’s a system that you can feel encroaching upon you and it becomes tighter and tighter...” Kingsnorth refers to Robinson Jeffers’ poem The Purse-Seine, prompting the title of this article. Kingsnorth noted the the fish do not sense captivity until the drawstring pulls tight and it’s too late.

Whitney Webb has been observing the machinations of the elites for some years, and is aware of the net being pulled tighter. Webb offers hope that we can prevent the tyranny of the globalists and the rising biometric state by refusing to participate. Digital ID and biometrics only work if the regulated cooperate. There are vast efforts and resources being made to try to normalize the invasive technological and even transhumanist agendas, but those driving these efforts are not all powerful.

GB broadcaster and podcaster Neil Oliver states, “I live in Sterling, which is a medium-sized town in Scotland. I talk to all sorts of people…across the demographic. I don’t know anybody who wants lab grown meat. I don’t know anyone that speaks up in favor of milk that’s derived from maggots, who wants to eat insects, who favors CBDCs over other means of exchange. I don’t know anybody who wants to live in a 15-minute city or who wants a digital ID. So although these things are being dangled over us, sort of Damocles style, there is no popular support for them…” Oliver rightly sees this as a source for optimism.

Webb agrees, but says the online environment is compromised enough that it will be manipulated to look like people are in favor of the technocracy the elites are planning. She states that the pushback will have to come in the analog world, starting at the local level, “talking to real people, making real human connections. That’s the only way we can beat this anti-human future that we’re being led into.” Webb, Oliver, Kingsnorth, Wolf, and others emphasize the importance of becoming more capable and self-reliant in our day-to-day lives in analog ways – gardening, sewing, learning how to fix things, reading an actual book, cooking. Also, they emphasize the importance of participating in community organizations and making connections in person, rather than spending so much time online.

Fortunato walked to his death, lulled by Montresor’s promise of Amontillado, and his feigned concern for Fortunato’s health. What would have happened if Fortunato at any point chose not to continue into the catacombs? Once he was chained to the wall, it was too late. It’s important we determine which aspects of the AI revolution we will allow into our personal lives, and which ones we won’t.

They can’t close the net if we don’t cooperate:

Many of us grew up learning the story of Rosa Parks, who said “No,” when told to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Her simple “No” fanned the flame of the Civil Rights movement. Ultimately, it is the small actions of integrity and human connection, performed by each one of us each day, that create a strong pushback against the anti-human forces threatening our continued existence as autonomous, free people.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and founder of Courage.Media, among many other roles, is an unabashed proponent for freedom and Western values. During her lifetime, Ali has gone from being part of a tribal clan in Somalia, to being indoctrinated with Marxism in public school, to joining the Muslim Brotherhood, becoming a prominent atheist alongside friends such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and through a deep depression that eventually brought her to Christianity. With regard to fighting the battles of our time, Ali states,

Bad things happen when good people do nothing about bad things happening. And good people always have a reason – look after your children, go to your job, and so on and so forth, and it’s not because we are bad people that we do nothing. It’s because we are so focused on the good things that we take for granted, that we end up focusing and not fighting…

Each of us is at a crossroads. Like Fortunato, will we walk willingly into our demise because we can’t imagine the evil intent of others? Will we go along with digital ID or biometric scans because we want to travel in Europe or take that next cruise? Will we take the next mandated injection during a future health crisis (real or manufactured), because our job or college admission is threatened? Will we agree to digital ID because it’s convenient and it’s easier to go along than to fight?

Ali speaks of the forces working against us in these times, gently chides us for having gone along with so many of them in the name of tolerance, and says that this has brought us to the brink of destruction. Ali states,

It is no longer about posturing. It’s about survival. It’s about self-preservation. And it’s our responsibility, those of us who have lived in America and in Europe, and who have benefitted from the fruits of what others fought for and died for, our duty is to pass it on to the next generations…Either we collectively commit suicide or we stand up - demographically, morally, spiritually, economically, militarily – to the forces, the barbaric forces that are here, the Woke, the Islamists, the Marxists. We better stand up to them while we can.

To Ali’s list of the barbaric forces working against us, I will add the transhumanists and those who are building our digital biometric prisons, and to her challenge that we stand up while we can, I say “Amen.”

Edited lightly on 10-26-25 and 10-27-25 to correct formatting and typos, and add a couple of links.

Thank you to Brownstone Institute for republishing this article on November 10, 2025 in the Brownstone Journal

https://brownstone.org/articles/escape-the-digital-purse-seine/

On April 10, 2025 The Washington Post sent me an email with the subject line, “Staying informed has never been more important.” The Post included three article links presumably selected to convince me to pay basically $24 for a first-year subscription, and then $144 per year thereafter. Here are the headlines to the three articles:

· The 18 hours that changed Trump’s mind on trade

· Trump told people to buy. Hours later, his tariff pause sent markets soaring.

· NIH scientists have a cancer breakthrough. Layoffs are delaying it.

Let’s rewrite the headlines to reflect The Washington Post’s actual take on the current Administration:

· Trump, not very smart and quite dangerous, finally listened to reason

· Trump engaged in behavior akin to insider trading before tariff pause

· DOGE and Trump’s cleansing of NIH is killing cancer patients

Therein lies the problem with The Post, and the other so-called “legacy” or “mainstream” media today. One-sided black and white reporting does not build reader confidence, nor does it provide needed perspective on complex issues.

Graduating with a B.A. in Mass Communications in the 1980s, I had a healthy admiration for the media and its role. As a student, I even wrote an impassioned research paper about how the free press provides “checks and balances” on the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches.

I was taught in my journalism classes that one-sided reporting was sloppy, unacceptable work. When covering the news, regardless of your personal opinion, every issue requires a balanced look at both sides. If The Post were following that rule of journalism, the headlines in the above-referenced email would not exist.

“Democracy dies in darkness,” proclaims The Post’s masthead.

Do we have a free press today in the U.S.? It’s guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, stated simply as follows:

Congress shall make no law establishing a religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of their grievances.

Those ten words, “or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” have protected the rights of U.S. citizens ever since they were ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights. Over the decades, “the press” grew from just the printed word, to radio, TV, cable, internet, and social media platforms. Combined, they comprise “the media.”

In theory, the media is still independent of the Government in the U.S., but in reality, the free press and freedom of speech have been severely compromised by a government that has used third party and foreign influences to covertly censor citizens. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo) states, “The censorship-industrial complex wasn’t built overnight. It’s been festering for years. But the Biden Administration mobilized an unholy alliance of government powers, taxpayer dollars, NGOs and Big Tech companies to build it into a global censorship powerhouse.”

We know from Murthy v Missouri, that during the Covid years the Federal government censored dissident voices by pressuring social media platforms to remove content and accounts. Although the U.S. Supreme Court largely dropped the ball in terms of protecting free speech in this case, the dissenting opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito clearly outlines the unconstitutional government censorship. (Dissenting opinion starts on page 36). Justice Alito noted,

The Court…shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think. That is regrettable. What the officials did…was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.

The majority of what passes for news these days is often little better than propaganda, parroting an official narrative provided by government or corporate interests. The fact that major media is propped up by Big Pharma dollars has a huge impact on how pharmaceutical and medical news is covered. See the following clip from Sinclair-owned news stations seven years ago, for an example of the state of “the news.” (Sinclair is the largest owner of stations that are affiliated with Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, MyNetwork TV, and The CW, among other digital and cable networks.)

This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy (1:36)

An independent media that provides nuanced coverage of both sides of an issue exists in democracies, not tyrannies. Every tyrant shuts down the information he doesn’t want distributed. A state-run newspaper is not news; it’s propaganda. A free press that is unduly influenced by government and corporate interests is not much better. In fact, it might be worse because there is the presumption of objective coverage.

Today alternative news outlets are made up of podcasters, Substackers, research institutes such as Brownstone, and a few relatively small news platforms, including larger outlets such as the Daily Wire, and Epoch Times. Many of these sprang up in response to an increasingly biased mainstream press. Lacking the history and reputation of the legacy media, they are largely unknown to the average news seeker.

What does it mean when a person who wants to know both sides of an issue, and the nuances surrounding it, needs to seek out many alternative voices and cannot rely on a legacy media, because it largely speaks for the system?

It means we are in trouble. Freedom is at risk.

Are we free?

In a February 2025 interview with Freddie Sayers of Unherd, writer N.S. Lyons stated,

China and the West are not that different in their systems of government. There’s many things that are very different about them – the sort of brutality of the Chinese regime, for instance -- but the fundamental idea is both are managerial regimes. And I use regime sort of just to mean the whole system of how society is run. Both of them…trying to make rationalistic decisions through the application of their systems of technocratic knowledge and just apply it to society,…believing that that trumps the democratic will because the people are too dumb to know what is good for them. And so you really have to sort of just nudge them. In our system you nudge them firmly to do what you want to do. In the China system you just tell them what to do.

Over decades in the U.S., the Constitutional effectiveness of the “checks and balances” of the three branches of government have given way to a Leviathan administrative state that continues virtually unchecked as elected representatives of the people come and go. Covid-19 revealed the beast. All of a sudden your freedom to work, attend school, breathe freely, leave your home, walk outside, attend church, visit family and friends – all of it was determined by public health and government leaders based on “case numbers” and other vague metrics.

A free and independent press should have been screaming at the top of their lungs that the rights of the individual, which we had come to think of as sacrosanct in Western democracies, were being violated. But they didn’t. Instead the mainstream media parroted and perpetuated the official narrative.

Lyons explains that the Covid-19 pandemic “tore the mask off the idea that we were living in liberal democracies.” Those of us living in Western democracies thought we had reasoned debate about what to do in all cases, with decisions made through democratic processes. “Instead,” said Lyons, “people found that they lived essentially in…a scientific dictatorship where an oligarchy of experts determines what you get to do based on their exclusive expert knowledge.”

During the pandemic, every human right and civil liberty we thought was guaranteed in Western democracies, was subverted and suppressed by the official response to Covid-19. It happened worldwide, leading to devastation. For example, government mandated closures that led to loss of schooling and opportunities in the U.S., were mirrored darkly by food insecurity, poverty, and an increase in child-bride marriages in poorer countries.

In the U.S. we were told to close everything and stay home for “15 days to slow the spread,” gaining various levels of compliance depending on a person’s State of residence. In China, citizens were welded into their apartments. Responses between those two extremes encompassed the countries of the world.

We were let down by our “free and independent media” then, as we are today. We now know that the whole pandemic response was not handled as a public health emergency, but as a military countermeasure, with the National Security Council heading the response in the U.S.

We were so violated and abused by our governments, with the complicity of legacy media, that most people today have not even processed what happened. Instead, if the topic comes up, we’re likely to hear propaganda such as the following:

· The authorities did they best they could with what we knew at the time

· Masks protect against the spread of respiratory diseases

· Covid-19 was the most deadly pandemic in 100 years

· The Covid vaccines saved millions of lives

· Lockdowns prevented the spread of Covid-19

· Personal freedom must bow to the public good during a pandemic

And on and on. Lyons calls these types of statements the result of the “expert planner.” Lyons notes that in managerial regimes, “the sort of expert planner is correct. In China that is literally called…scientific Marxism. That’s what they call it. It’s scientific. So the government operates through scientific law which determines what is correct. They’ll say, ‘This policy is correct’; arguing against “this policy is incorrect.’ It’s a Marxist term.”

Yes, and in the U.S. political correctness around the pandemic was justified with these three words, “Follow the science.” A ridiculous phrase, to anyone who understands the scientific method, “follow the science” was cited by The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, and most major news outlets as they sycophantically repeated government leaders and unelected bureaucrats, and remained silent when they should have been asking questions.

“Democratic Fascism” is what we are in danger of living under in Western democracies, if trends of the past few years are left unchecked. Fascism is a system of total government control of political, economic, cultural, religious, and social activities. Overtly, there is a dictator, and everyone knows they’re living under fascism. Democratic Fascism is a system under which citizens retain the façade of freedom as long as they do and say what a supposedly expert-staffed, powerful government finds acceptable. Bump up against your Democratic Fascist government and find your bank account frozen, your voice silenced, your job in peril, your reputation savaged, and maybe even find yourself being arrested for sharing your opinion.

Democracy does indeed die in darkness, as global elites continue to make plans for how to control all the rest of us. Meanwhile mainstream media parrots the official narrative about everything from climate change, to avian bird flu, to how the Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the bureaucratic state and globalism are a “threat to democracy,” and a “constitutional crisis.”

A classic example of the utter failure of the legacy media to provide a balanced view is their overwrought coverage of the shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Has there been one mainstream news article or broadcast acknowledging the corruption in USAID and the way it has been a front for years to cause indoctrination and regime change in other countries? When you slap the lipstick of rice and medical supplies on a $40 billion per year intelligence community slush fund, it’s still a big pig.

Another example of failed legacy media is the third Washington Post headline I referenced at the first of this article, “NIH scientists have a cancer breakthrough. Layoffs are delaying it.” Will the The Post examine the fact that NIH scientists put their names on the patents of products they fund for research, thus profiting from successful product sales? Will The Post report on how NIH has been granting research funds to projects that analyze climate change and woke social agendas, while rejecting funding for studies that might question official narratives?

Perhaps most importantly, will The Post’s article ask why the multibillion dollar cancer research and treatment industries have grown tremendously while cancer diagnoses increase and cancer deaths continue at more than 1,600 per day in the U.S. alone? It’s doubtful. Instead, The Post and the rest of the largely pharma-captured legacy media will continue to promulgate the idea that the Trump Administration is hurting “the Science™” by having the temerity to reduce the size of a bloated, inefficient, taxpayer funded, control mongering, often corrupted bureaucracy.

We’ve all heard the quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” For years we’ve been told to trust “the experts” while government grows more invasive with the aid of a complicit mainstream media. The Covid years revealed it all, but perhaps that was a gift in the long run. N.S. Lyons states, “Covid was very important because it helped generate a tremendous amount of the backlash we are now seeing to the managerial state.” Hopefully so.

Today the question that transcends left and right, liberal or conservative, and political party is this: Are you in the group that believes a few elites and experts should tell everyone else what to do, or in the group that believes in self determination and the rights of the individual? Those who trust compromised news sources that still center on outdated paradigms of political conflict are likely unaware of how deeply the landscape has changed, and what is really at stake.

Edited 05-08-25

Generally the goal on this Substack is to present my own writing, as I assume that’s what my subscribers signed up to read! However, today I’ll be posting links to two important works by others, that provide necessary perspective on Covid-19.

It was five years ago on March 11, 2020 that the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. On March 16, 2020 the White House announced that the U.S.A was shutting down, sheltering in place except for “essential workers,” supposedly for “Fifteen days to slow the spread.” That is not what happened.

Following is a link to the Conclusion of Brownstone’s eloquent and detailed review of the Covid Response at Five Years. Whether you spend 13 minutes listening to the audio, or read this free article, but please take the time. It’s important:

https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-response-at-five-years-conclusion/

The second link I’m sharing is to a preview of “Follow the Silenced,” premiering at the Santa Monica International Film Festival on March 15. The movie documents “the “the human cost of censorship,” following the lives of everyday Americans who have been been seriously injured by the Covid-19 vaccines. The documentary also uncovers the larger story behind a successful campaign to continue the release of these Covid shots on the world’s population, despite knowledge of the harms they were causing.

https://followthesilenced.com/

“Follow the Silenced” should be watched by anyone who is concerned about the sudden and unusual health problems and deaths they’ve experienced among their family, friends, and neighbors since the Covid vaccine rollout began in 2021. The movie will be made available to the public soon, with information on release dates and times available at the above link.

Following is a 27-minute interview with the filmmaker, Matthew Guthrie, for those who are interested in learning more:

https://thehighwire.com/ark-videos/follow-the-silenced-exposing-the-cover-up-of-covid-19-vaccine-injuries/

Drawing by Bianca Bagnarelli

Perhaps you have observed, or even experienced, the trend in recent years of adult children cutting off their parents and also withholding grandchildren from associating with them (see here, here, here, and here) . The reasons behind these separations often center on claims of boundary violations and “trauma” as perceived by an aggrieved adult child looking back. To label a parent as so inadequate as to not be worthy of any association is one of the most cruel actions an adult son or daughter can take. Having encountered two parents (one in a surgery waiting room, and one at the tire store) in the past week who are experiencing this estrangement, now seems a good time to address the topic.

Following is an open letter on the matter from “A Parent Who Cares.” Feel free to repost or share with others:

Dear “Boundaries & Toxic Relationships” Generation,

Your parents are not commodities to discard when they don’t “fit” quite right or meet your every need. I know your therapist and your online friends are giving you a lot of support for cutting contact with your mom/dad or both. They tell you that you’re being brave and strong, and doing what’s best for your emotional health, but you might consider the motives behind voices promoting family fracturing. Many of them have their own issues and ulterior motives that have nothing to do with your happiness or well-being.

As I understand it, your grievances fall into the following kinds of categories. Your parents:

· Said something that hurt you or made you feel insecure

· Raised you in a religion you believe is “toxic”

· Didn’t let you do something you wanted to when you were growing up

· Voted for a candidate you despise

· Didn’t approve of your course of study in college or your career choice

· Treated you differently than your siblings

· Said things about current social issues that you find offensive

· Criticized you

· Made you do something you didn’t want to do

· Didn’t respond the way you wanted when you made decisions they didn’t agree with

· Made decisions in their own life that hurt you

Unfortunately, there isn’t a parent out there who hasn’t done one or all of the above. It’s inevitable because generations clash, and parents are imperfect people. I know you think you’ll do it all better. Your kids are going to think you’re great, and they will never turn on you, because you love them so much. You’re going to do things “right.” Maybe, but the truth is all parents make mistakes, and most of what you’re labeling as “toxic” or “abusive” were not intentional errors, but the result of human failings.

For the record, when it comes to differences in politics, religion, and social issues, telling people you won’t associate unless they say and do certain things is not a boundary – that’s control and coercion.

As to the other issues, it would be wise for everyone to learn to give their parents grace. It’s part of the human experience, and it’s part of being an adult.

Breaking news to those who have cut off parents: Your kids are likely going to do the same thing to you. And they will feel justified in it, because they’re watching how you treat your parents now. Then what? Do you think in 10 or 15 years the therapist who encouraged you to cut off contact with your family will still be listening to you? Hopefully not, because good therapy helps you gain skills for healthy living, and the therapy ends. Bad therapy goes on for months and years and encourages you to wallow in hurt and resentment, fragility, safe spaces, and self-absorption.

When your heart is broken by the disdain of your grown children, will the online influencers who encouraged you to break with your family be there for you? Will the friends who also cut off their parents, and encouraged you to do the same, be your support group? Or will they have moved on to other people and places? When you are less capable of caring for yourself, will your children stick around? Or will they find that you no longer meet their needs, so it’s more “healthy” for them to focus on other people and priorities?

There’s a reason why family relationships should be prioritized and nurtured, even when they’re difficult. Your family members are the people you go through life with. You can cut them off, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are your blood. You can complain about your parents and justify to yourself that you don’t have space for that “toxic relationship,” but it doesn’t change the fact that they brought you into this world and voluntarily sacrificed in many ways to provide you the best life they knew how to give.

Contrary to the contemporary feel-good concept of family being whoever you choose, you have actual genetic and/or legal ties to the people who birthed you and raised you.

Therapists and friends are only one piece in a support system. Your parents are your parents no matter what you say or do. You may wish they were different, but they’re the only parents you have. Whether or not you reject them is up to you, but you can’t choose the effects of that decision, nor can you presently imagine how far-reaching the consequences will be.

Success in career, social standing, accomplishments, material goods, and your own growing family may be providing enough that you don’t feel the need for a relationship with your parents, but that will change. Life has a way of giving and taking from everyone. Ultimately, it is the lasting relationships with family that carry us through the ups and downs of life. Breaking with your parents shatters relationships along generational lines and tears at the strength of family associations and shared traditions.

Reconsider what you’re doing. Right now you may feel free from the constraints of your upbringing, and the tension in your relationship with your parents, but it won’t last. Casting off responsibilities, such as honoring your father and mother, may seem easier in the moment, but a generation that discards parents like clothes they’ve outgrown, will find there is an emptiness and regret in later life that cannot be assuaged.

You have one thing going for you. Your parents still love you. Please reach out today and start mending the breach while you still can.

Sincerely,

A Parent Who Cares

Lightly edited 04-28-25

I hate airports. I hate them…Every time I went into an airport after 9/11 I thought, ‘They’re training everyone to accept the doctrines of a totalitarian state.’ You have to line up like sheep, to do stupid things that mean nothing, that give the illusion of security, implemented by faceless authoritarians, and then acted out by powerless minions.

Jordan B. Peterson, January 9, 2025, 32:30

A recent trip to the eastern U.S. involved my being in seven different airports. Not being a frequent flyer over the years, the increase in airport “security” is shocking. My trip began at a lovely, clean airport with shops and holiday décor throughout, but I could never shake that “Big Brother is watching you” feeling, precipitated by the following:

1) There were agents with bomb-sniffing dogs walking the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) check-in line.

2) Despite having my Department of Homeland Security mandated “REAL ID,” and my boarding pass, they automatically scanned my face.

3) I took off my belt, my shoes, and my zippered jacket, and also removed everything from my pockets and put it all in a big bin. Another bin held my backpack and suitcase, with my laptop removed.

4) I had to wait my turn to go through a body scanner where my legs were spread and my hands were behind my head, like a criminal.

5) Upon exit, the TSA agent informed me that there had been an alert in the groin area. Right there, in front of everyone, she did a hands-on invasive front and back swipe and dig that would have been grounds for assault charges in any other setting.

6) My suitcase and backpack were flagged, opened, and pawed through. (I guess the M&Ms looked suspicious.)

7) Feeling furious and violated in many ways, I then joined the ruffled throngs putting on their shoes and other clothing items, and reassembling their luggage on their way to spacious food courts and accommodations.

8) Despite this screening of all passengers, a message frequently played over the intercom warning me not to leave my bags unattended, and not to accept any bags or packages from strangers.

And that was just one airport. At another, I forgot to empty my water bottle before going through security. My options were to throw it in the big garbage for such dangerous items, or go back out to empty it and have to go through the whole “security” check again. I tossed it, thinking about all the full-size hygiene items, food, sentimental pocket knives and embroidery scissors, and myriads of other items people have had to throw away because of TSA regulations.

The indignities we’ve been forced to endure at airports, ever since the horrific actions of a few psychotic, radicalized nut jobs on 9/11, prepared us for the illogic of the Covid response. In fact Covid put airport security on steroids with the added masking, sanitizing, and “social distancing” requirements.

When I walk through my local grocery store, I remember the arrows telling me which way to go in the aisle, the little circles instructing me to stand 6-feet apart, and the signs mandating I wear a mask to enter. I remember the time I left my cart full of groceries and exited because of an employee, mask worn below his nose, tracking me through the store and getting in my face to tell me I was putting others at risk for not having a mask on mine.

I can’t forget Covid and the myriad violations of personal privacy and freedoms that assaulted me every time I left my house, and sometimes even in my house in the form of government-stated rules on who could visit, how many, and requirements to wear masks and distance. Not for one minute did I even consider obeying the overreaching Governor and his minions in my own home, but my rebellion didn’t convince all my family and friends, and relationships were strained.

The 4^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

We were violated repeatedly during Covid. We are subjected to unreasonable search and seizure every time we deal with TSA. Tulsi Gabbard’s recent experience with Silent Skies is just a visible tip of the iceberg. Gabbard is a former Representative to Congress, saw active duty serving in the National Guard, and was a former Presidential candidate when she was put on the Silent Skies terrorist watch list due to her political views.

TSA reports proudly that it intercepted 6,678 firearms at airport security checkpoints in 2024. A simple metal detector and luggage scan used to do that job just fine. For that matter, the terrorists on 9/11 didn’t even attempt to bring guns on the planes but that didn’t stop their heinous attack. Our shoes have been coming off ever since one mentally challenged guy put an ineffective mini-bomb in his shoe in December 2001.

As we’ve all complied like good little sheep in airports, not wanting to cause a scene or miss our flights, the authoritarian state has spread. We have cameras filming us in every store, and atop traffic lights and street lamps. There are increasingly invasive security measures being taken at sports arenas and large venues. The push for digital IDs continues apace. The generations born since 9/11 don’t even remember a U.S. that wasn’t a quasi-security state. But are we safer? No. Just less free.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” That’s where we’re at today in our safetyism culture. The indignities of airport security are infuriating as “just doing my job” agents grope grandmas, pat down elderly veterans, and discomfit people in wheelchairs – harassing passengers who paid hundreds of dollars for a ticket, and obviously are not doing anything but trying to get from one place to the other. The hundreds of thousands of dollars lost in personal items seized, and then turned over to state surplus property agencies, is a crime.

Obviously I’m not the only one who feels this way. Utah Senator Mike Lee posted on X, in response to the news that Pres. Trump fired the head of the TSA one day into his second term, “He should fire the rest of TSA now.” The replies to his post indicate a deep and abiding loathing for the invasive, ineffective, authoritarian TSA. (Click the link below the image.)

https://x.com/BasedMikeLee/status/1882253750980518275

Pres. Trump eliminated the divisive, racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that have infested federal government with one brilliantly written executive order on January 21, 2025. He can easily disband the TSA with another.

It’s time to break up with the TSA.

Following is the new summary of my book, Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19, published by Brownstone Institute. Please take a few minutes to look through Mechanisms of Harm, available in print and Kindle formats, and then share it with family, friends, coworkers, and across social media. Let me know in the comments what you think!

https://www.amazon.com/Mechanisms-Harm-Medicine-Time-Covid-19/dp/163069262X

Of course I would love for you to make a purchase, but my main motive in writing the book was to get the information out there, so there is also a free PDF version:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rqF15uh-ioNaz9W1BFm6wj0ydR24hgW_/view?usp=drive_link

Covid-19 has been proclaimed the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918. However, Mechanisms of Harm documents that it was the pandemic response that was so harmful, and not the disease itself.

If during the pandemic you found yourself questioning lockdowns, social distancing, and mask and vaccine mandates, this book is for you.

With over 900 links to original sources, Mechanisms of Harm is a user-friendly compendium of information and insights into the manipulations behind Covid-19. Arranged in concise sections, this book explores the sad truth that money, reputation, and power - not public health and well-being – drove the pandemic response.

Review how already FDA-approved medications were suppressed to make way for expensive, experimental, and ineffective Covid-19 treatments that caused widespread deaths and injuries.

Ultimately, the Covid-19 pandemic response was a mass experiment in how to control the general population through fear and manipulation. We need to understand what happened in order to better protect ourselves and our loved ones against the same tactics in the future.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Thanks,

Lori

Happy New Year! Wishing you and yours peace, stability, and strength in 2025.

I know it can be hard to feel hopeful and peaceful in a world bombarded by jarring headlines, with daily violence and atrocities being committed somewhere in the world. Even if it’s not our immediate world that is rocked, we feel it when our sisters and brothers on this planet are suffering or abused.

Today I’m featuring a powerful poem by Margaret Anna Alice titled Mistakes Were NOT Made, as read by childhood Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav. (Click on the link below the image.)

https://x.com/MargaretAnnaAl1/status/1874519888087425181

Vera Sharav is quoted in my book, Mechanisms of Harm on p. 66 (Kindle), and the poem is featured on p. 388 (Kindle) read by Dr. Tess Lawrie, who is a warrior in the pushback movement against Covid harms.

We must not allow ourselves to be lulled into forgetting the damages inflicted on all of us by the inappropriate, orchestrated Covid response. Why not? Why not just move forward and be glad that it’s all in the past? Because unfortunately it is NOT in the past. As I wrote in the introduction to my book:

On May 11, 2023, the Covid pandemic emergency officially ended in the U.S. My concern, and the impetus for this [book], is the belief that the Covid-19 pandemic response was a dress rehearsal. So much was accomplished during the pandemic by those who embrace authoritarianism under the guise of safety and protecting society. Emboldened, they will try to force us all into a repeat, as soon as they can stir up the next fear – another variant or a new pathogen, climate change, compromised food supply, energy shortage, international unrest – any “emergency” will do.

You may, or may not, believe that the Covid-19 pandemic merited the response we gave. Either way, consideration should be given to what we were forced to do, and what was lost over the past four years – all under the banner of fighting a virus.

Weintz, Lori. Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19 (pp. 19-20). Brownstone Institute. Kindle Edition.

Margaret Anna Alice’s poem finishes with this repeated line:

Don’t let them get away with it!

We have a responsibility to combat, eyes wide open, the dark forces moving toward global totalitarianism, while still remaining hopeful and living our best lives in the day-to-day. Each of us has a circle of influence with the family, friends, and others who we interact with every day. Let’s put our best efforts into what we can impact, while still not burying our heads in the sand. The ostrich isn’t safer simply because he can’t see the danger.

I fully believe that God is in charge of the big picture, but we human beings have agency to do just about anything we want. We are allowed to choose our actions, but not the consequences of those actions.

Isolation, lack of connection, and selfishness lead to almost all the sorrows in our world, which means we can combat the evil by choosing to engage in the opposite. In 2025, let’s make a concentrated effort to be a little kinder, more generous, and meaningfully engaged with family, friends, neighbors, and our communities.

Lori

A scientific journal on Tuesday retracted the March 2020 study that introduced the world to hydroxychloroquine early in the COVID-19 pandemic – and confirmed that the attention was undeserved from the start…The International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, which is owned by Elsevier and the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, issued a formal retraction.

USA Today, December 18, 2024

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, most people gave little thought to medical journals, pharmaceutical companies, and government regulatory agencies. Any passing thought was likely to involve the idea that medical journals were credible, helpful drugs were being developed, the taxpayer funded FDA was scrupulously testing for safety and effectiveness before approving products, and the media was doing its best to report both sides of every story.

Now we know better.

A global scandal:

The above referenced USA Today article states that the study and its retraction are the “cornerstone of a global scandal.” That’s true, but not for the reasons the reporter indicates. In fact, the assault on Raoult is bold evidence that the forces which harmed the world’s population during the Covid-19 pandemic continue to work unabated, at the expense of our health and well-being.

In the past we would have assumed the Journal knew what it was doing, that Raoult’s study was deserving of revocation, and that USA Today was providing balanced reporting on the situation. After all, what do most people know about medical research and studies? Even those in the medical field often rely on what they read in the professional journals to help stay up to date on the latest in medicine. The public expects media to be a check on corporate and government corruption, but we’ve been betrayed.

Punishing those who oppose the official narrative:

Didier Raoult’s situation is emblematic of the rot that was revealed throughout the medical, media, and regulatory industries during the pandemic. In relation to the retraction four years later of Raoult’s hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) study, consider the following excerpt from my book, Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19, published by Brownstone Institute in April of this year:

In Marseilles, France, Dr. Didier Raoult’s team conducted a study of 1,061 patients treated for Covid with a combination of HCQ and azithromycin from March 3-April 9, 2020. The study reported, “A good clinical outcome and virological cure was obtained in 973 patients within 10 days (91.7%).”1

The study further noted, “The HCQ-AZ combination, when started immediately after diagnosis, is a safe and efficient treatment for COVID-19, with a mortality rate of 0.5%, in elderly patients. It avoids worsening and clears virus persistence and contagiosity in most cases.”

A microbiological and clinical scientist, at the time of this study Raoult was the most highly-published infectious diseases expert in Europe, and was founder and head of the IHN Mediterranee research hospital, the premier infectious disease facility in France. Raoult was familiar with earlier studies of HCQ as an infective inhibitor of coronavirus disease progression. His report was likely influential in the FDA’s initial approval of HCQ for the treatment of Covid.

HCQ was over-the-counter in France for decades before some behind-the-scenes political maneuvering led to its reclassification as a “poisonous substance” in January 2020.

When Raoult released his findings in May 2020, prescriptions for HCQ went from an average of 50 per day to several hundred, and then even thousands. The French government quickly acted to recommend it not be prescribed for Covid except in clinical trials, in part based on the falsified Surgisphere study.

Raoult continued to have success using HCQ, combined with other drugs, as a treatment for Covid-19. From March 2020 through December 2021 Raoult conducted a retrospective cohort study of 30,423 Covid-19 patients. A pre-print version of the study concluded that, “HCQ prescribed early or late protects in part from COVID-19-related death.”

It would appear that Raoult poked a hornet’s nest in conducting a routine study using routine drugs with decades’ long safety profiles. After the pre-print of the study was published in March 2023, a group of French research bodies called for Raoult to be disciplined for the “systematic prescription of medications as varied as hydroxychloroquine, zinc, ivermectin and azithromycin to patients suffering from Covid-19 without a solid pharmacological basis and lacking any proof of their effectiveness.”

Just to review: Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are on the World Health Organization’s list of essential meds and have almost no side effects or interactions with other medications. Zinc is an essential nutrient found in a variety of plant and animal foods and is available in pill form in any drug store. Azithromycin is an antibiotic widely prescribed for decades and is also a WHO essential medicine. Multiple doctors and hundreds of studies have found ample evidence that these and other off-label meds were effective in treating Covid patients. Just what are these French research bodies so worried about?

Biased media leads to public harm:

The information and links in the above excerpt from Mechanisms of Harm are all from publicly available sources, which reporters should be accessing when covering these types of news stories. Instead, too often Legacy media has a cozy relationship with Big Pharma advertising dollars, and government regulatory agencies. In the case of this USA Today article, it appears the reporter took quotes and info given to him by those with an interest in discrediting Didier Raoult, without presenting the other side of the story, which means this particular USA Today article is more propaganda than news.

Hydroxychloroquine is safe unless given in toxic doses:

The USA Today article quotes the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics saying that Raoult’s paper “constituted a clear example of scientific misconduct…to falsely present the drug as effective against Covid-19.” The society claims, without citing any evidence, that Raoult’s work led to ‘unwarranted risks to millions of people and potentially thousands of avoidable deaths.’”

Yet Raoult’s work with HCQ in early 2020 and afterward was an undeniably successful and hopeful effort, by a respected disease expert. Raoult explored effective treatments for Covid-19 in a hospital setting, observing actual patients, and sharing his findings in pre-print studies – a common practice in medicine and academia. This is one of the important ways doctors and scientists learn from each other and build on each other’s work.

USA Today states that “Hydroxychloroquine has been linked to serious side effects, including cardiac arrest, heart rhythm issues, as well as liver failure and kidney disorders,” and reminds us that “FDA issued a warning for its use to treat a Covid-19 infection.” This statement is misleading.

Hydroxychloroquine has been used for more than 60 years to treat malaria and other diseases, and has such a good safety profile that it is routinely given to pregnant women and children. It is an over-the-counter medicine in many countries. The alleged “serious side effects” from HCQ only occur if the patient is overdosed, a fact that was established by the World Health Organization’s consultant, H. Weniger, hired in 1979 to look at episodes of adult poisoning by chloroquine drugs.

Dr. Richard Urso, another early proponent of using HCQ to treat Covid-19, stated, “The whole political situation has driven the fear toward this drug.” He explained that the safety profile for HCQ is safer than aspirin, Motrin, and Tylenol, but noted that the large clinical trials testing HCQ against Covid-19 were set up to fail. Dr. Urso said they “used massive toxic doses and guess what they found out? When you use massive toxic doses, you get toxic results.” He explained that HCQ concentrates in the lungs, which is where Covid-19 disease develops. Dr. Urso noted that combined with zinc, HCQ is highly effective as both a prophylaxis and early treatment of Covid-19 disease.

Weintz, Lori. Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19 (p. 69). Brownstone Institute. Kindle Edition.

Dr. Urso, Dr. Raoult, and many others, including Dr. Tony Fauci, knew at the beginning of the pandemic that hydroxychloroquine was a prime candidate for treating Covid-19. A National Institutes of Health (NIH) study found in 2005 that chloroquine, a precursor to HCQ, was a “potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread” in cell culture studies. Chloroquine had also shown promise against MERS in vitro. USA Today failed to mention this relevant history about HCQ.

Elsevier and compromised medical journals:

The USA Today article exhibits an odd lack of curiosity about Elsevier, the part owner of the journal that retracted Raoult’s study.

Wikipedia identifies Elsevier as “a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content.” The motto on Elsevier’s webpage is “For the benefit of society,” and states, “We help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve healthcare outcomes.”

However, Elsevier is a multi-billion dollar for-profit company that owns many of the medical and scientific journals, and has been accused by multiple sources of having a negative impact on research sharing. Its high subscription prices, and its support of organizations that wish to prohibit open-access to articles and studies, has led to paywalls.

While abstracts are freely available, access to the full text of articles is often pay-per-view or by subscription, even for studies that were funded by public tax dollars. Elsevier has also created a situation where researchers are sometimes blocked from their own published work due to company policy on research and copyright. Editorial boards of journals (often nonprofit) have resigned due to disputes with Elsevier over pricing, and librarians have boycotted Elsevier in response to pricing schemes.

While ignoring Elsevier’s less than honorable business model, the USA Today article does note just 3 of the 18 authors of the retracted study agreed to withdraw it. Lead author Didier Raoult was not among the three, and apparently neither he, nor anyone who might share a counter perspective for the article, was interviewed.

HCQ was approved by the FDA to treat Covid-19:

The USA Today article states, “In 2020, then-President Donald Trump said he had been taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent a COVID-19 infection, despite warnings by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over its effectiveness.” However, in May 2020 when Pres. Trump said he was taking HCQ, it was emergency use authorized by the FDA for treating Covid-19, and was being tested in several clinical trials. It was not until June 15, 2020 that the FDA revoked its EUA approval for HCQ to treat Covid-19, stating “the known and potential benefits of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine no longer outweigh the known and potential risks for the authorized use.”

The FDA cited concerns over “cardiac adverse events and other potential serious side effects,” and “recent results from a large randomized clinical trial in hospitalized patients.” As stated earlier serious side effects from HCQ would only result from overdose. The details behind the sabotage of clinical trials testing HCQ as a treatment for Covid-19 can be found here, but the short version behind the motive is this: By the FDA’s own rules, under section 564 of the FD&C Act, the FDA can only give Emergency Use Authorization to an experimental vaccine if there is no other effective treatment.

If Covid-19 could be treated effectively with already FDA-approved meds, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, there would be no legal justification to give Emergency Use Authorization to the Covid vaccines in development.

Weintz, Lori. Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19 (p. 74). Brownstone Institute. Kindle Edition.

An article like the USA Today column referred to in this post is problematic not only because of what it says, but because of what it doesn’t say. The real story is how already FDA approved drugs, which multiple doctors were finding effective at treating Covid-19, were sabotaged and suppressed to make way for highly profitable, poorly tested, ineffective, and harmful Emergency Use Authorized medications and vaccines.

Conflicts of interest at the FDA and NIH:

There is a need to separate Big Pharma and other third party dollars from being paid to regulatory agencies. Almost half of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) budget comes from the pharmaceutical companies whose products the FDA approves and regulates.

In another conflict of interest, National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists receive royalties on product discoveries. NIH is described on its website as “the nation’s medical research agency,” with billions of taxpayer dollars going toward research each year. A May 2022 report from government watchdog group Open the Books notes that, “Essentially, taxpayer money funding NIH research benefits researchers employed by NIH because they are listed as patent inventors and therefore receive royalty payments from licensees.” Open the Books estimates “up to $350 million in royalties from third parties were paid to NIH scientists during the fiscal years between 2010 and 2020.”

Open the Books, notes, “When an NIH employee makes a discovery in their official capacity, the NIH owns the rights to any resulting patent. These patents are then licensed for commercial use to companies that could use them to bring products to market.” Open the Books states, “[N]one of these payments are receiving any scrutiny whatsoever and to the extent that a company [is] making payments to either leadership or scientists, while also receiving grants...then that just on its face is a conflict of interest.”

Although separate agencies, both are under the umbrella of Health and Human Services, in 2010 the NIH and FDA entered into a Joint Leadership Council Charter to facilitate “collaboration between NIH and FDA” noting, “The NIH and FDA “share a common goal of advancing public health by promoting the translation of basic and clinical research findings into medical products and therapies. The agencies are complementary in their roles and functions—NIH supports and conducts biomedical and behavioral research and FDA ensures the safety and effectiveness of medical and other products.” That sounds good on paper, but as we’ve experienced in the past five years, these agencies are not protecting the public health.

There is also the problem of the so-called revolving door between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies. For example, nine out of the last 10 FDA commissioners went on to work for the pharmaceutical industry or to serve on a prescription drug company’s board of directors after leaving the FDA. Then there is the reality of Big Pharma campaign contributions and lobbying to Congress. Fully two thirds of Congress cashed a check from the pharmaceutical industry ahead of the 2020 election according to STAT news.

There aren’t many articles on these topics in the mainstream media, because the system is largely corrupted. Big money and powerful forces are behind the drive to keep the current system in place. Take note of how often your program or news is “brought to you by Pfizer,” or another drug company. Consider the fact that only two countries in the world allow direct marketing of pharmaceuticals to the public – the United States and New Zealand. Big Pharma and pharma-related corporations have outsized influence over our media, the scientific and medical journals, and our government regulatory agencies.

Time to shake up the status quo:

We need accountability, and a separation of Big Pharma money from the agencies that regulate medical research and pharmaceutical products. Also, it’s time to put a stop to the myriad commercials that end with “ask your doctor about (fill in the blank).” If the Legacy media can’t survive without Big Pharma advertising dollars, then it’s time for a new media model.

With the incoming Trump Administration, and the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as director of the Department of Health and Human Services, we have the chance for a desperately needed course correction.

I don’t usually repost other authors’ work on my Substack, but Brownstone Institute has been so influential in giving independent writers a wider reach, that I am building on their Giving Tuesday email. If you are able, please donate to Brownstone and help them keep up their very important efforts.

https://brownstone.org/articles/rebuilding-begins/

Read The Rebuilding Begins, from Brownstone Institute today, and consider helping in any way you can. Brownstone is a nonprofit completely funded by donations from people like you.

The past 4 1/2 years have shown how important alternative viewpoints are to countering an official narrative that is often one-sided and driven by special interests.

Thanks so much for any amount you can give!

Lori

https://www.bitchute.com/video/rYbA6W0E1CRk

Thank you to Brownstone Institute for republishing this article on October 31, 2024.

Click here to listen or read.

Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft (in Salem, Massachusetts). He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion, which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The House of the Seven Gables

First published in 1851

The “influential classes”:

It’s striking to read a quote from a mid-19^th Century author referencing the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 as an example of how “the influential classes” are just as prone to mob mentality and error as all the rest of humanity. Hawthorn reveals two truths 1) Humanity never changes much. Technology and education advance human conditions, but human nature is as prone to the same errors as it always has been.  2) People in authority often have a tendency to abuse power.

This concept was exemplified in the Stanford Prison Experiment put together by psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in 1971. Zimbardo’s intent was to study people’s behaviors in a simulated prison environment. He built a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building, and recruited male college students as participants. The experiment volunteers were randomly assigned as guards or prisoners – with both groups knowing the experiment was designed to last one-to-two weeks. “Prisoners” were given uniforms and instructed to abide by the rules. “Guards” were given uniforms and tasked with maintaining order in the prison. All participants knew it was only a simulation, but the “guards” began behaving authoritatively and sometimes abusively, and the “prisoners” largely became passive and obedient. Things got so out of hand, in terms of increasing cruelty, that the experiment was terminated after just six days.

Knowing that the “influential classes” are as prone to mob mentality as anyone else, and that people who believe they have authority have a tendency to abuse it, one is left to ask, “How do we protect ourselves against influential people who abuse their power?” The answer is multifaceted.

Oppression gains strength when people are silent:

Protection against tyranny starts first and foremost with people who are willing to shine a light on it and push back when tyranny first appears, and secondly with laws and rules that prevent tyranny from taking root. That protection was the intent of the Founders of the United States of America. Having been subjected to the whims and edicts of monarchs, they were well aware of how miserable life is when the “influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people,” sink into self-indulgence and domination of others.

The American experiment has at its heart the idea that people tell the government what to do, and not the other way around. Government of the people, by the people, for the people has led to the most freedom and prosperity for the greatest number of people in the history of the world, but it created its own possibly fatal flaw: complacency. Citizens in the Western world have had freedom for so long, they assume it is the natural state of humankind, rather than the historical exception. In the U.S. we hear the phrase “Freedom isn’t Free,” but what that means to many is, “Our grandparents had to fight to save the world from Hitler in WWII,” and “We love our Troops,” truths that are often comfortably removed from personal effort or sacrifice.

Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, wrote in 2014, “[T]he Constitution cannot protect you, if you don’t protect the Constitution with your votes against anyone who violates it. Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.” In the same piece Sowell wrote, “They may not be consciously aiming at creating a totalitarian state, but shameless use of government power to crush those who get in their way can produce totalitarian end results.”

The elites would like you to be quiet:

And that’s where we are today, only it’s not just privileged government officials, or a king, or a dictator trying to return humanity to a state of serfdom. It’s also unelected multibillionaires, heads of NGOs, and leaders of international organizations, masquerading as concerned philanthropists. They feel called to rule, and compelled to preserve Earth’s resources - for themselves. They feel smarter, better, and more qualified, due to their wealth, education, and connections, and are so confident in their self-coronation as rulers of humankind, that they aren’t even bothering to hide their plans. Thus we are favored with these kinds of insights from our self-appointed overlords:

“We should have free speech, but if you’re inciting violence, if you’re causing people to not take vaccines…even the U.S. should have rules…Is there some AI that encodes those rules? Because you have billions of activity and, you know, if you catch it a day later, then the harm is done.”

Bill Gates

September 6, 2024

“There are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases criminally charged, is something that would be a better deterrent…”

Hillary Clinton

September 16, 2024

If people go to only one source, and the source they got to is sick and has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to just be able to hammer it out of existence.

John Kerry

WEF Sustainable Development Impact Meetings

September 2024

We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment. You can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation. It’s one thing to have differing opinion, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false.

Rep. Alexandra Orcasio-Cortez

January 13, 2021

During the COVID-19 pandemic, falsehoods about masks, vaccines and “lockdowns” spread as fast as the virus itself, and were almost as deadly. (“Falsehoods” being anything that didn’t agree with the official pandemic response, which, by the way, has been proven wrong in almost every aspect.)

World Health Organization

Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

October 13, 2024

There has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media platforms to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.

Sen. Kamala Harris

October 15, 2019

For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarization within our societies.

World Economic Forum

Davos, January 2024

Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President

Why are these people and organizations, who claim to be so concerned with making the world a better, safer place, so afraid of people speaking their minds? Because words are powerful, and the elites who are in charge don’t like the words of people who disagree with them. The first thing to go when tyranny gains control is freedom of speech. 

GB NEws reporter Bev Turner states, “Whenever governments try to control the behemoth that is the online world, every road leads to the suppression of free speech, and the ludicrous idea that someone somewhere, in a lavishly glazed office, can decide what is factual information and what is misinformation.”

The Founding Fathers knew that free and open discussion is the bedrock of freedom and self-rule. That’s why the First Amendment to the Constitution states that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, or the right of citizens to assemble and petition the government for a redress of their grievances. There is no caveat in the Bill of Rights saying they may be suspended in times of emergency.

“Do not suspend your own judgment about right and wrong:

The Covid-19 pandemic response was not the start of our problems in the West, but served as a spotlight and accelerant – a turning point in a destructive movement embracing anti-freedom trends.

There is discussion today about the need to move on from the pandemic – to let it go and get on with things. “Forgive and forget, because we just did the best we could with what we knew at the time” say those who ruled. No. We didn’t do our best with what we knew at the time. We can’t just move on, not because we’re vindictive and have a desire for revenge, but because we were collectively abused, and caused to abuse each other, and that needs to be acknowledged. Untreated wounds fester, and bad behavior needs to be corrected, or it will be repeated.

Just as in the Stanford Prison Experiment, during the pandemic some enjoyed a reason for abusing and discriminating against fellow human beings who had been identified as “bad,” directing their ire against the questioners, the unmasked, and the unvaccinated. Many others just went along so as to deflect the anger and abuse from being directed at themselves and their families. However, history shows that when dealing with would-be tyrants, the tactic of keeping your head down to avoid trouble is not a good long-term strategy. No one really escapes the damage and abuse, regardless of which side of the equation they’re on.

Konstantin Kisin grew up in the Soviet Union, was there when it collapsed, and eventually immigrated to the U.K. as a student. Kisin recounts that his grandmother knew several gulag guards in her small town, who killed themselves after the end of Stalin’s regime. She said the guards allowed themselves to believe the Communist party knew what was right, so the neighbors they were beating, torturing, murdering, and raping in the camps “deserved it.” But once they were living side by side again with people they had abused and even tortured, they took their own lives.

Kisin states, “Do not suspend you own judgment about right and wrong, about morality, about truth and justice for the sake of some system, some oppressive ideology, for not being fired form work, or for convenience. Do not be a useful idiot, because you will regret it.”

American journalist and educator Milton Mayer conducted a post-WWII study of ordinary Germans who lived under Hitler’s Third Reich. An academic explained to Mayer how Nazism gradually took over in Germany, stating:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise…Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside…in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest and certainly sees none…in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do, but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad,’ or ‘You’re seeing things,’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’ And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it...”

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy…and you see that everything, everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit…is changed…Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

They Thought They Were Free, The Germans. 1933-45, by Milton Mayer

University of Chicago Press, copyright 1955, Chapter 13

The crimes perpetuated by Nazi Germany have long been widely acknowledged as evil. The Third Reich was a system that lost the thread of what it means to be human and humane. Post WWII, steps were taken to assure that such atrocities would never happen again, and an international emphasis was placed on the value of individual rights and human dignity. Yet somehow, 75 years later, the pandemic led to a great shift in Western democracies toward the violation of individual rights in the name of public health and safety.

Now a couple of years after the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the vaccines mandates, the ostracizing and persecution of the unvaccinated, and the overall trampling of human rights, far too many people look around and see the restoration of “the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays,” and feel grateful that things are back to normal. But they aren’t. Things may look the same, but the spirit has changed.

“Without responsibility even to God”:

The academic quoted previously noted that Nazi Germany became a system “without responsibility even to God.” Do today’s influential classes value God, and should we care whether or not they do? The following quote from Yuval Noah Harari, at the 2018  Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), provides perspective on that question:

In the coming generations we will learn how to engineer bodies and brain and minds…Organisms are algorithms…[W]hen the infotech revolution merges with the biotech revolution, what you get is the ability to hack human beings…By hacking human organisms, the elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself…This will not be just the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, this will be the greatest revolution in biology since the very beginning of life four billion years ago… Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Not by intelligent design of some god above us in the clouds, but our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds, the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud – these are the new driving forces of evolution.

Harari’s musings stem from WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s vision of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Originally presented in a book he authored by that name in 2016, Schwab explains that “the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be driven largely by the convergence of digital, biological, and physical innovations…redefining and blurring the boundary between the digital and physical worlds.

During the pandemic, Harari stated at the October 2020 Athens Democracy Forum:

“Covid is critical because this is what convinces people, to accept, to legitimize total biometric surveillance… Yes, now they’re using it to see whether you have the coronavirus, but the same technology can be used to see what you think about the government…This is the kind of power that Stalin didn’t have…but in 10 years, the future Stalins of the 21^st Century they could be watching the minds, the brains of all the population all the time. And also they will have the computing power to analyze all that…Now you don’t need human agents; you don’t need human analyzers. You just have a lot of sensors, and an AI that analyzes it, and that’s it -  you have the worst totalitarian regime in history.”

This may sound a bit fantastical to some, evoking a headshake and a “that will never happen” comment. However, a framework is being put into place worldwide to do just that – biometric surveillance and control of human populations.

In March 2022, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a new research program that analyzes preconscious brain signals. As explained by an online tech newsletter:

Under the premise of identifying people at risk of depression and suicide, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the Neural Evidence Aggregation Tool (NEAT) program, which focuses on “aggregating preconscious brain signals to determine what someone believes to be true.”

Consider Executive Order 14081, “Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy.”  Signed by Pres. Joe Biden on September 12, 2022, the Executive Order states:

“Although the power of these technologies is most vivid at the moment in the context of human health, biotechnology and biomanufacturing can also be used to achieve our climate and energy goals, improve food security and sustainability, secure our supply chains, and grow the economy across all of America.”

Something that has become apparent in the past few years, is every time the government, or some global group, comes up with a plan for more control of people, it’s couched in some claim of “improvement,” “safe and effective,” or “growth, sustainability, and security.”

Rather than sounding innovative, the Biotechnology Order sounds menacing and anti-human. This article on the Bioeconomy from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) states that the “USDA supports the development of circular bioeconomies, where agricultural resources are harvested, consumed, and regenerated in a sustainable manner.” The USDA is talking about farming as though it won’t happen without the government. Lofty executive orders and sciency-sounding words do not legitimize additional top-down intrusion into every aspect of human life.

Another passage from Executive Order 14081 states:

“We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale-up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.”

Note the phrase “We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuity for cells and predictably program biology.” Do we need that? Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Combing a “circuitry for [human] cells,” and “programming biology,” with products that can be commercialized and “reach markets faster,” rings of profits, and has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of each human being.

The Order basically considers humans as a resource for biological data, just at Harari described. The whole 11-page document is full of lofty plans to harness “biotechnology and biomanufacturing R&D to further societal goals,” and involves many government agencies including Homeland Security, Defense, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Management and Budget, and several other agencies with unrecognizable acronyms such as APNSA, APEP, and the APDP. Quite frankly, it’s a mess of obfuscation and confusion.

It has become very obvious to the observant, that many of our leaders have largely gone off the rails. Making themselves the new “gods in the clouds,” they’ve lost the thread of what makes life worth living, as they plan and write into law a future that is anti-human, setting societal goals for citizens who have not been consulted.

Harari, who seems mostly fascinated, but also slightly horrified, by the prospect of the biotechnological digital tyranny, states his opinion that most human beings will be superfluous in the future. Harari foresees a world where “smart people” and the “common people” actually develop into different species. “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” Harari mused in a 2022 interview, because “the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering. Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.”

This godless view of human beings as blights on the earth, and nothing more than hackable bioengineered products is not inspiring, ennobling, or accurate. Disturbingly, there are multiple international organizations intent on restructuring human life as we know it, for the “greater good.”

The Elites Merge the WEF, U.N. and G20:

At the May 2022 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme Achin Steiner said, “Our future is digital. If you’re not part of it, you’re out of it.” This supremely cold and arrogant statement, exemplifies an elitist view that they know what’s best for everyone else. Steiner surrounded his dystopian anti-human statements with terms like “empathy, and the ‘power of one.’

Lest anyone dismiss the WEF as just a self-made organization, full of unelected eccentrics, it’s important to note that each annual meeting is attended by many government, corporate, NGO, and international leaders. They are singing from the same hymnbook, so to speak, and using the same playbook. For example, on June 13, 2019 the United Nations and the World Economic Forum entered into a formal partnership to “accelerate the implementation of Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.” The Agenda is a “plan of action for people, planet and prosperity,” and incorporates the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include positive-sounding statements about ending poverty and hunger, providing clean water and sanitation for all, gender equality, and protecting the planet from degradation.

The problem is these goals are being imposed, not recommended, which means they’re not goals – they’re mandates. In addition, human beings are not seen as being of any more value than the soil or bugs and, in fact, are considered exploiters of the planet and spreaders of disease.

Take for example what is currently happening in Europe where governments, attempting to reach climate “goals” are imposing zero carbon emission zones and License Plate Recognition (LPR), allowing for fines against those who enter. In Holland they are removing thousands of parking spaces, imposing car-free “15-minute cities,” and limiting parking permits. In addition to installing “smart meters” that regulate energy usage in homes, they are building noisy transformers in residential areas, forcing a switch from gas to electricity, and promoting unsustainable wind and solar programs. These top-down changes are a result of the governments complying with the EU imposed Horizon 2020 and Green Deal programs, which harken back to the WEF’s Agenda 2030 and the U.N’s SDGs.

The number of people, organizations, and agencies working toward the top-down imposed agendas only continues to grow. In June 2019 at the G20 meeting in Japan, Agenda 2030 was officially merged with the principles of the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution in the presentation of Society 5.0 by Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. 

Take note of the highly invasive technological aspects that have been added to the SDG “goals.” For example, added to #3 Good Health and Well-being, is this text: “Developing early warning system for the prevention of infectious disease by combining different types of monitoring data.” So…surveillance. Got it.

To #2 Zero Hunger is added this explanation of what that means to the globalists: “An increase in product manufacture by the development of ‘smart agriculture’ using the Internet of Things, AI and Big Data. An improvement in the nutrition state due to the use of ‘smart food’ produced by advanced biotechnological methods.” These are smart-sounding words for taking over the world’s food supply. If that sounds like a conspiracy theory, consider the assault by the government on farmers in the Netherlands, and the directives to Irish farmers to cull tens of thousands of cows from their herds to meet climate goals.

On September 22, 2024, at the United Nation’s Summit of the Future, the Pact for the Future was approved, with the intent to accelerate the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which are intended to all be achieved by the year 2030. As GB News reporter Bev Turner explains in this 12-minute video, the UN’s Pact for the Future is another step toward ending the sovereignty of individual countries and establishing global governance. Turner states:

“It is not possible to achieve these utopian ideas without a deliberate, perhaps forced redistribution of food, goods, property, and rights…Just like good old fashioned communism, the ambition for equal outcome for everyone always results in the very rich getting supremely richer – the very poor, perhaps, being lifted up a little, but the billions in the middle getting colder, poorer, hungrier, and enslaved within their digital prison.”

As Turner and others have explained, the U.N.’s Agenda 2030 is all about control. Turner notes, “Leaders lacking empathy are not troubled by reducing humanity to a mere data set upon which they can keep tabs, and at that point, we the people are nothing more than a commodity which can be monetized.”

An enlightening perspective on the “Shapers of the Future” was provided by Dr. Jacob Nordangard on March 7, 2023. His 40-minute presentation is available here. In introducing Nordangard’s speech, biochemical engineer and author Ivor Cummins states, “I genuinely believe that without internalizing the content of a talk like this, you really can’t have the proper context for what’s been happening the last few years and what will happen in the coming years.”

Combining our efforts to prevent dystopia:

It can feel overwhelming, as we realize the huge national and global forces that are intent on restructuring the lives of all humanity in accordance with their elitist, dystopian visions, but each of us has the power to push back. It starts with educating ourselves, but equally important is speaking up, and refusing to comply when we feel that something isn’t right. In Holland, citizens have been showing up to Town Halls to say no to the changes being imposed on them, and there is also a significant movement to use cash for purchases, rather than cards, to prevent the government move toward digital currency.

GB News commentator Neil Oliver states:

“If the world around you just feels wrong at the moment, if it makes you uncomfortable in your skin, it’s not because you’re going mad, but because you know the difference between right and wrong, and so much is so wrong. It’s absolutely not the job of governments and leaders to make so many people so unhappy, so frightened of the future. It’s utterly wrong that meaningful influence is in the process of being ceded to transnational bodies comprised of unelected unaccountable placemen and women – the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum. It’s time to assess whether they’re fit for purpose – NATO, the United Nations, and the rest. Any and all groups can and do go wrong, and when they do, it’s the responsibility of everyone to say so and to do something about it.”

When writing about what happened in Germany in the 1930s, political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined the term Spiral of Silence. Author Eric Metaxas explains the Spiral of Silence “refers to the idea that when people fail to speak, the price of speaking rises. As the price to speak rises, still fewer speak out, which further causes the price to rise, so that fewer yet will speak out, until a whole culture or nation is silenced.” (Letter to the American Church, Salem Books, p. 52) We cannot allow that to happen.

In evaluating these past five years, we would do well to learn from the lessons of the past. The right to self-determination is what is at stake in our lives today, as those who govern and those who have taken upon themselves to be unelected leaders of humanity, abuse power while attempting to mold the world into their dystopian view of the future.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”

The battle between good and evil that is being waged in the world today tasks us with the responsibility to examine that line passing through each of our hearts, and with a choice to act or silently comply. We are under attack, but we don’t have to go along with the elites’ globalist agendas. We can choose to defend our families, faith, and freedom. It starts by speaking up and pushing back as we encounter anti-human, anti-freedom agendas in our own communities and countries.

Edited 11-03-24 for updated image and minor corrections.

While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupted public health are global. Bird flu will likely follow the same course as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will do so. While the risk from pandemics is not significantly different than decades ago, there is an industry dependent on making you think otherwise.

David Bell, Public Health Physician

What’s Really Happening with Mpox

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

C.S. Lewis

Screwtape Letters

You may be aware of rumblings in the news about mpox (formerly monkeypox) and avian influenza, or bird flu. This month the World Health Organization (WHO) even declared mpox a “public health emergency of international concern,” based largely on an ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

David Bell is a public health physician, and former medical officer and scientist at the WHO. Bell explains that the current pandemic agenda has huge money behind it, spanning across “thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure.”

Bell notes that, yes, about 500 people have died of Mpox in DRC this year, but during that same period about 40,000 people in DRC died of malaria. In fact, this year hundreds of thousands of people in DRC and surrounding African countries died from malnutrition, unsafe water, and diseases such as tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS. In other words access to clean water, healthy food, and basic medicines would go a long way toward preventing deaths in Africa, and mpox is the least of their – and our –worries.

I think we can agree that none of us want a repeat of the restrictive pandemic measures we all experienced during Covid-19, but it appears others in positions of power are heading in that direction. The question is, was our pandemic response necessary in order to “prevent spread” and keep us “safe”? My book, Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19 is a response to that question. (Click on the following hyperlinks to read or listen to the Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3.)

Today I’m happy to provide a free PDF version of Mechanisms of Harm. When you download it, you’ll have access to the color version of the book, and over 900 links to source materials cited throughout:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rqF15uh-ioNaz9W1BFm6wj0ydR24hgW_/view?usp=drive_link

If you would prefer a paperback copy or Kindle version of Mechanisms of Harm, both are available for purchase through Amazon books. Of course I would be pleased to have you purchase a copy, but my goal in writing the book was to get the information I’ve gained through hundreds of hours of research, to as many people as possible. The free PDF is a way to do that. Please take a few minutes to look through Mechanisms of Harm and then share it with family, friends, coworkers, and across social media. Let me know in the comments what you think!

Thanks very much,

Lori

Note: This post originally contained a modified version of the C.S. Lewis quote. I was unaware that is was someone else’s interpretation of what Lewis wrote originally, and have updated the post to the correct direct quote.

[P]eople historically known as “revolutionaries” or “communists” are best understood NOT by the ideological doctrine they espouse, but by the emotions they harbor—namely, resentment, a sense of grievance, and a desire to destroy institutions and people.

John Leake, Courageous Discourse Substack

July 29, 2024

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit…Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Matthew 7:20 KJV

The U.S. Constitution has only been in effect for 237 years, but is the oldest written constitution still in use. Prior to its ratification, the history of the world was that of governance by monarchs, dictators, tyrants, and tribal lords, with the will of the people not being much of a consideration. The constitutional republic established in the U.S. in 1787 truly is “the great American experiment,” and has led to the most opportunities for the greatest number of people, in the history of the world.

Those who profess to cherish freedom and the intrinsic value of each individual need to realize something:  in today’s social and political climate, going along to get along will not preserve these values. Freedom, family, religion, beauty, history, cultural traditions, and truth are all under attack right before our eyes. The future that will be experienced by our children and grandchildren hinges upon our response to these assaults.

Author G. Michael Hopf wrote in his post-apocalyptic novel Those Who Remain, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” In explaining that the previous quote is “an oversimplification of generational theory,” Hopf writes:

In the quote itself, 'men', is really a reference to 'mankind'. With that said, let's breakdown what a strong man is.  A strong man is someone who isn't only physically up for the challenge...A strong man is also virtuous, regimented, focused, driven and self-less. Their goal is to care for those around them and strive to build a sustainable and value driven society built upon common beliefs. They are purpose driven people.

A weak man, is someone who tends to be selfish and even narcissistic. Their only concern is their own pleasure or desires. They are literally the polar opposite of a strong man, and their values are driven by a need for 'self' above all else. They tend to value being entitled to what a wealthy society has provided without ever daring to contribute to it. In fact, a weak man will often complain that the current system has failed them even though they live in relative comfort. Think of the person who goes to Starbucks, and on their iPhone complain about capitalism on Instagram or Facebook. These people have forgotten history and have no knowledge on how their surroundings have come to be, in fact, they will declare the system should be dismantled. That declaration leads to an ushering of 'hard times.' (emphasis added)

Hopf’s description of the entitled whiners and social justice activists who are making so much noise in public life and creating havoc these days is quite apt. Missing from his description is the majority of people – those who either don’t agree, but stay silent, or the ones who hear the rhetoric and are sincerely driven to feelings of guilt and shame about their ancestry and even their very existence. It’s easy to manipulate decent people who are horrified at being called phobic, white privileged/adjacent, selfish, narrow minded, planet destroying, systemically racist colonizers.

I’m reminded of the 2016 movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Why? Because two extremely powerful and brilliant superheroes are turned against each other by a mutual villain who plays them against each other to take down Superman. Watching the show, I felt that both Batman and Superman should have been smarter. They should have recognized that Lex Luthor was whipping them into a frenzy for his own purposes, to the detriment of both superheroes and  humanity in general. We should all be smarter about considering the motives of those who would restructure our lives.

In the real world, resentful agitators talk equity, inclusion, fairness, prosperity for all by reducing the rich, success through removal of merit based education and hiring, open borders, global health, restructuring of the traditional family, lived experience, and many other concepts. A lot of what the neo-Marxists say sounds reasonable to the reasonable person. But as John Leake said in the quote at the beginning of this article, revolutionaries are not best understood by what they say, but by the emotions they harbor – “resentment, a sense of grievance, and a desire to destroy institutions and people.”

During the past year we’ve seen increasingly brazen and foul displays of what happens when the majority is directed by those who would destroy everything. From the Satanic dance number at the Grammys, to the eerie and garish Biden White House Christmas presentation, to the controversial segment of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, we see a few examples of where “Going along to get along” takes us. It’s time to realize that we’ve been had.

What we’re observing today is Marxism all over again – the same Marxism that drove Russia and then China into the darkness of communism.

Without getting into motive and other issues, it is highly interesting to note these excerpts from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the plenary session of the 18^th Valdai Discussion Club on October 22, 2021:

We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, ‘reverse discrimination’ against the majority in the interest of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal…

The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs…

Putin continues:

The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed and proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour. I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by their character.’ This is the true value. However, things are turning out differently there…

Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracized. ‘Parent number one’ and ‘parent number two,’ ‘birthing parent,” instead of ‘mother,’ and ‘human milk’ replacing ‘breastmilk’ because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s the so-called Society Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times. (end quote)

When the President of Russia compares today’s Woke culture to the failed Marxism of the Bolsheviks, it would be wise to give that some thought. People remember Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto for a variation on the theme “Workers of the world unite!” What they are not so familiar with are the words that come right before, “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” (Emphasis added)

Marx was anti-life and anti-human. All his talk of the “proletariat,” the workers, was written at his desk. Marx never labored significantly in a field or a factory, was physically filthy – refusing to bathe, was unfaithful to his wife, and did not work or provide for his own children. His four sons died before Marx and his wife, and Marx’s two daughters ended their lives in a suicide pact with their husbands after Marx’s death. But Marx was good at stirring up grievances, and resentments, and calling for the overthrow of all existing social conditions.

The neo-Marxism we see today is an amended or extended version of the original Marxism, incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism. Still, the emphasis behind neo-Marxism is “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Everything – religion, the arts, the family, culture, traditions, social norms, governments and national sovereignty – everything.

Film producer Mikki Willis was on a documentary tour promoting Bernie Sanders’ Presidential campaign in 2016 when he was struck by the number of Che Guevara shirts, Mao Zedong hats, and communist sickle and hammer stickers he saw on the laptops and water bottles of young volunteers. Willis relates:

I asked one kid, “Are you trying to be edgy? What is that on your laptop there?” He pulled me behind the curtain and said, “We’re all democratic socialists, but what we really want is communism.” I laughed and said, “You’re joking, right?” He said, “No, but I can tell by the way you’re reacting that you think it’s the old communism. No, it’s a different kind of communism. It’s one that’ never been attempted and it’s benevolent.”

I drill in and ask, “How does it work? What is good about it? Why is it different? It basically led to the state owning and controlling everything.” He says, “We’re going to redistribute the wealth.” I reply, “Ok, where does that money go? How does it get redistributed through the government? You’re giving the government more and more of your tax money, and more and more power. Do you understand this is not new communism? This is what has always happened.”

I knew enough about this to at least say that. But this was a shock for me. Long story short, I came off the Bernie tour broken hearted. It was my political awakening and I wanted nothing to do with politics ever again. That’s when I started to do my research and study what was really going on with this thing called democratic socialism. All roads trace back to China and influence from other Soviet Marxist ideologies that have already been attempted and have been atrocious around the world. (emphasis added)

The drive to destroy all the institutions and traditions of the West is driven by Marxist principles and the nihilism that comes with them. For example, it’s evident in the infamous phrase from the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicting our future in 2030: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy,” a phrase prompting so much outrage and ridicule that the WEF disabled the link to the video and claimed the concept “started life as a screenshot, culled from the internet by an anonymous anti-semitic account…” except it wasn’t. It came directly from the WEF’s “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” Disingenuously, former WEF Managing Director Adrian Monck claimed it was an example of “how disinformation is created and why it’s essential not to perpetuate its spread.”

The WEF is bent on a Great Reset of the world, stating, “A true recovery from COVID-19 will not be about putting things back together the way they were: we need to ‘build back better’, to 'reset'…” Specifically, the WEF wants a “great reset of capitalism.” Indeed. And just who are these wise, wonderful, self-disinterested leaders who will direct the entire globe to “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions?” Why, the beneficent, unelected leaders of the WEF and all of their associates, of course.

Neo-Marxism is evident in the race-dividing teachings of Ibram X Kendi, in his book How to Be an Antiracist, when he states, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” He might as well shout, “Down with the bourgeoisie, up with the proletariat!” Neo-Marxism is behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project that rewrites all of American history strictly through the lens of slavery and oppression.

We see this devaluing of the individual, and of human life in the World Health Organization’s push for the One Health initiative. One Health considers the well-being of plants and animals as equal with human beings, and identifies normal human activity as the driver of “disease threats.” This view of humans as blights on the planet ties in with radical global initiatives such as Net Zero and 1.5°C, in which elites’ plans for limiting inexpensive, effective fuel, and controlling the food supply will reduce quality of life and impose poverty on millions more.

The response to the Covid-19 pandemic, enforced worldwide, was the most extreme example of the devaluing of the individual in modern history. All of a sudden everyone was part of the collective, with no say in their own health – right down to being mandated to take an experimental vaccine into their bodies. People were deprived of the right to work, socialize, gather for weddings and funerals, attend school, comfort dying loved ones, gather with families, attend church, travel, or engage in any of the normal activities of life. The Covid-19 pandemic embodied what every tyrant in prior history has wished for – a means of gaining power and control over the entire world. It was indeed an attempt to “forcibly overthrow all existing social conditions.”

The anti-life tenets of Marxism are evident in the push for abortion, in the desecration of children through trafficking and “trans rights,” in the disrespect of religious values and beliefs, in the devaluing and even destruction of merit-based achievements, in the redefining of language, in the diminishing civil discourse, and in the studied loss of knowledge and culture.

The disrespectful spectacle at the Paris Olympics was explained by its organizers, post-performance, as a celebration of community and tolerance, stating “There was clearly never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group.” The organizers insisted that they weren’t  referring to the Last Supper at all, but to “Dionysus, the Greek God of celebration,” and said, “If people have taken any offense, we’re of course really sorry.” Spoken in the gaslighting format of emotional abusers, they basically said, “It’s your fault that you were offended. You’re too sensitive.”

As professor and clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet states, “[S]uch a ceremony shows what a society identifies with, such a ceremony represents the essence of the societal model that organises it. What is problematic, in other words, is not that a society is tolerant towards exotic and in some cases perverse types of sexuality and morality; what is problematic is that [what] this kind of morality represents is essence. That is why the displayed bad taste is not something to simply turn a blind eye to and shrug off; it is indeed something significant.”

Jonathan S. Tobin, editor-in-chief of Jewish News Syndicate adds, “The inclusion of that segment must be seen as part of a broader cultural debate about something very serious. Only at a time when the political left is waging war on the canon of Western civilization and seeking its replacement with an intersectional, secular neo-Marxist orthodoxy would it be not merely possible, but considered mandatory among our cultural elites, to pour scorn on traditional faith.”

Meanwhile, First Lady Jill Biden of the questionable White House Christmas had only words of praise for the opening ceremonies, which she called “spectacular.” An apparently fake X post had U.S. Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris stating, “What an impressive show by all of these beautiful and diverse people at the Opening Ceremony of The Olympics!” Perhaps Kamala did not post praise for the “beautiful and diverse” blue naked man, dancers, and drag queens, but she recently appeared on “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” in an episode taped before Pres. Biden dropped out of the 2024 election. Kamala, whose father was a Marxist, espouses equity and the Marxism-based phrase, “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” making it likely she would be drawn to a ceremony unburdened by respect for religion and traditional values.

Biden and Harris aside, many were not so positive about the Olympic ceremony. The Roman Catholic bishops of France expressed dismay at the “scene of derision and mockery of Christianity,” and Pope Francis expressed he was “saddened” by the “offence done to many Christians and believers of other religions.”

Tobin also commented, “As is always true for those who promote the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), only some people deserve to be included in the new secular religion. Christians are obviously not welcome, and that should trouble everyone, whether or not they share this faith.”

The Turkish Presidency posted on X, in referring to the Last Supper parody that, “[H]uman dignity was being trampled on under the guise of freedom of expression and tolerance, that religious and moral values are being mocked, and…this offends Muslims as much as the Christian world.”

Investigative reporter Debbie Lerman notes that the mockery of Judeo-Christian values in Paris “was a sinister message from our creepy globalist overlords. We control the narrative. Nothing you believe or hold sacred is relevant at all. Religion, science, art, history, sporting competitions – we will crush it all…”

We, of course, do not have to let them. It’s not too late to push back against the purveyors of tried and true bad ideas, but we need to speak up instead of staying quiet. It’s also essential to remember that the forces behind the attacks on Western ideals and traditions find it useful to divide us and keep us stirred up against each other. But we can choose to act with clarity of thought and decisive action while still treating those with whom we disagree with grace and dignity. Now is a good time for all of us to remember the statement often attributed to Ghandi, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

The Paris Olympics opening ceremony was perhaps the most visible display thus far of what happens when the aggrieved few are given the megaphone. In their rush to appear open and fair-minded, many in society are attempting to forcibly accommodate and mainstream that which should remain an individual’s lifestyle choice.

For example, in a misplaced effort to be inclusive, the Massachusetts Senate just wiped the words “paternity, child born out of wedlock, his, man, woman, mother, and father,” from state law, stating that the Massachusetts Parentage Act “dismantles archaic legal barriers to basic parenting responsibilities for modern families.” Rep. Hannah Kane stated, “Recognition of legal parentage should not be contingent upon outdated norms or narrow definitions.” Governor Maura Healey signed the bill into law on August 9, 2024.

Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, commenting on the Massachusetts Parentage Act wrote, “It’s always been about corrupting our language, destroying the family, then taking away our rights & freedoms.” This assault on language is being pursued at the highest levels as seen in the CDC’s list of preferred terms. Disguised as “equity,” the constant shifting of language breaks down a shared culture, dividing generations, stifling discussions, and providing fodder for charges of “microaggression” at every turn.

The author who uses the pen name El Gato Malo suggests that, “People are not angry about ‘you be you’ they are angry about ‘you do what I say and give me stuff because of who I am…Cultural coercion only begets culture war. This is not about inclusion, it’s about enraging people by attacking that which they hold dear and seeking to erase the words and institutions they cherish.”

Which is where we all come in. Those of us who believe in the “live and let live” mantra may not have been prepared for a group of neo-Marxists who don’t believe in that at all. We may not have recognized that everything from the Covid-19 response, to the burgeoning of DEI, to the redefining of language, to the spectacle at the Olympics, is part of the same push to impose a Great Reset on the world. But now that we know, we can stop going along to get along, and start speaking up and pushing back.

El Gato Malo writes, “Perhaps we can all stop wrestling on the conservative/liberal axis and remember that most of us are predominantly ‘pro-civilization’…There remains a big tent of reasonable people around the ‘you be you, I’ll be me let’s accept each other (or at least leave one another be) and leave the kids out of it’ axis….Keep sight of that instead of being dragged into the assumption that ‘the other side is everywhere and evil’…The acts of a few extremists and outliers are so coloring our sense of our society that we’re failing to find the vast comity and commonality that truly does reside at its center.

It can feel overwhelming and discouraging to recognize that there’s a concerted effort to reduce the world to a place where all that we cherish is degraded, and freedom is replaced with centralized control by out of touch power-hungry elites.

A lot of sincere people have unwittingly bought into the neo-Marxist agenda being pushed by those who prey on our desire to be fair and open-minded, but we can reverse these anti-life trends. Let’s start today by seeing things for what they really are, speaking up, and being strong people who work together to restore and preserve a world that offers its best to all of us, and to future generations.

It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.

O’Brien, Officer of the Inner Party                                                                                          

1984, by George Orwell, Berkley/Penguin p. 225        

We’re letting you know that we’ve permanently removed [your] content…An external report flagged the content for illegal or policy violations. As a result, our legal content and policy standards team removed the content for the following reason: unwanted content.

Google Groups email sent to me

June 27, 2024

On the morning of the June 27, 2024 Presidential Debate between Trump and Biden, I noticed an announcement on a Substack post that Robert F. Kennedy Jr was going to join the debate, even though CNN had excluded him based on technicalities. Powered by Elon Musk’s X, the Real Debate would be broadcast at the same time, with Kennedy giving his answers after Biden and Trump.

Despite CNN’s claim that he didn’t qualify for the Presidential debate, and the Democrat Party’s continual barriers to RFK’s name appearing on state ballots, he is running for President of the United States and has significant popular support. To every normal American, it’s obvious there is a benefit to hearing from all viable candidates running for President, regardless of one’s political leanings. In that spirit, I sent out a few texts and a notice in a Google Group, with a link to The Real Debate website.

Some commentary on the debate went back and forth in the Group. Thirty minutes after my first post, I received the following email from Google Groups stating that they had “permanently removed” my content because “an external report flagged the content for illegal content or policy violations.” My post was removed “for the following reason: unwanted content,” and I was informed, “You may have the option to pursue your claims in court.”

I clicked on the link, to see what was deleted, which opened to the screen below notifying that the content was unavailable:

For the first time, I was censored by Big Brother for sharing an idea, without even being informed what my thoughtcrime was. I’m not on social media, so have only been informed by others of the rampant censorship surrounding posts about January 6, election integrity, and the official Covid response, among other taboo topics.

Five years ago, if you had been told you needed to watch what you said on social media and in public in the USA, no one would have believed it. It would have seemed a tongue in cheek reference to Orwell’s 1984, or an absurd comparison to totalitarian states where freedom of speech is not a thing.

So which group are you in? The group that thinks freedom of speech is alive and well in the U.S., and that our Constitutional rights are firmly protected? Or are you in the group that has watched the erosion of every civil liberty and human right over the past five years as an increasingly totalitarian machine censors discussions about topics deemed “unwanted” by… Someone?

After being censored, I learned that in addition to monitoring private groups for “unwanted” speech, Google labeled emails and social media posts about The Real Debate as “dangerous,” and discouraged clicking on any links contained within, as shown below:

Who initiated the “external report” that prompted Google to surveil a private conversation and remove “unwanted content?”

Google isn’t about to answer that question, but the case Murthy v Missouri, provides a possible answer.  As can be read in the June 26, 2024 ruling from the Supreme Court, during the pandemic social media companies were harangued by various White House officials and the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office. The platforms were pressured to remove posts, and even delete whole accounts, that were deemed “unhelpful” by the government. Section 230 of the United States Code provides immunity to online platform services for content generated by their users. The White House threatened removal of that protection if the social media platforms didn’t comply with Big Brother’s wishes. Obviously, removal of Section 230 protection would potentially expose the platforms to financially crippling liability lawsuits.

Through the Twitter Files, various court cases, Freedom of Information Act documents, and Congressional hearings, it has come to light that there are many organizations monitoring your online posts, your searches, and as evidenced by my own experience, even your private email correspondence. Are you good with that?

In October 2011, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia testified in a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing. Scalia explained that what sets America apart from all other nations, is not the Bill of Rights, noting that “Every Banana Republic, and every president for life (dictator) has a Bill of Rights.” Justice Scalia said what sets the U.S. apart from all other countries is a Constitution that prevents the centralization of power in one person or in one party. Without that, a Bill of Rights is nothing more than a “parchment guarantee,” meaning, no better than the paper it was written on. (This particular line of thought starts at about the 18-minute mark in the video.)

The Constitution has carried us this far, but there has been a gradual and insidious merging of government power. Something the Founding Fathers did not foresee was the rise of the Bureaucratic State. We live in a time when unelected heads of Federal and state agencies wield enormous power and money, often for decades, while elected officials come and go.

Somehow, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the whole Constitutional system of checks and balances on power was largely disregarded. All of a sudden, a network of 3-letter agencies was calling the shots. The overreaching Executive branch called for a nationwide lockdown, and later for vaccine mandates. CISA decided if your job was essential or not. The CDC decided whether or not landlords could evict tenants. The FDA inserted itself between doctors and their patients, telling doctors not to use certain already approved meds to treat Covid, and pharmacists not to fill certain prescriptions. OSHA required you to wear a mask on public transportation and airplanes. NIH agencies and health departments shut down churches, schools, businesses, and civic, cultural, and sports clubs. They issued directives on how many people could gather in your home, and whether or not you could be with loved ones in hospitals and care centers. The NSC directed a Covid response that was militant, and unconcerned with individual rights. It went on and on and on, as we were bullied, browbeaten, and manipulated by Executive branch bureaucrats and other unelected officials inserting themselves into every aspect of our lives. The Judiciary and Legislative branches largely stood by or even supported what was happening.

Unfortunately, most people complied. With regard to information sharing, the established Legacy media mainly functioned as a mouthpiece of the government. Dissenting voices moved to social media and alternative news platforms. This was unacceptable to a voracious government that must control the official narrative, and access to information. We can’t have any of that nasty “misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation” going around. That might harm you. Big Brother will let you know what you need to know.

White House officials and the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office threatened and coerced social media platforms to remove information deemed “unhelpful,” even if it was factually true. Dangling Section 230 over their heads, the White House demanded action. The social media platforms learned to obey. Individuals with “strikes” against them learned to self-censor. 

In the Murthy v Missouri ruling on July 26, 2024 the Supreme Court reversed (6-3) the preliminary injunction imposed by a lower court, that would have been in place until the case is resolved. The preliminary injunction prevented the government from contacting social media companies about the content on their platforms. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion stated that the plaintiffs “do not point to any specific instance of content moderation that caused them identifiable harm.” The Court invoked a legal term, “standing,” to say that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to retain the injunction. Basically the Supreme Court said, “Well, yeah, the White House did pressure social media companies to remove content, but the platforms might have taken that action anyway, so go ahead and ‘abridge the freedom of speech, and of the press’ for now, White House.”

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito stated that there was more than sufficient evidence to establish standing, which evidence he then cited for some 30 pages. It’s not hard to understand, and is worth your time to read. Justice Alito wrote:

This evidence was more than sufficient to establish Hines’s standing to sue…and consequently, we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents. The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think…. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision… will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by.  That is not a message this Court should send. (p. 38) (emphasis added)

Justice Alito also wrote, “This case involves what the District Court termed ‘a far reaching and widespread censorship campaign’ conducted by high-ranking federal officials against Americans who expressed certain disfavored views about COVID-19 on social media…If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.” (p. 36)

So let’s see. On June 26, 2024 the Supreme Court said the Government could keep pressuring social media companies, until Murthy v Missouri and other cases that are laboriously and expensively working their way through the courts are fully heard and settled.

The next day, Google Groups removed my post about the upcoming Presidential Debate, in which I jokingly asked if anyone wanted to bet on whether or not Biden would be fed answers through some type of electronic/neural device. That evening we saw an age-riddled, confused, doddery, tired old man try to hold his own in a Presidential debate. But the White House had been saying for days that all those videos of Pres. Biden stumbling and stammering were just “cheap fakes.” The day after the debate, at a White House press event, Biden’s press secretary claimed his poor performance was due to a cold.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

                                                                        1984, by George Orwell (p.71)

Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government, and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts.

                                                                        Justice Samuel Alito

                                                                        Dissenting opinion Murthy v Missouri

                                                                        June 26, 2024

Justice Alito wrote in his Murthy v Missouri dissenting opinion, the “White House threats did not come with expiration dates…Facebook did not feel free to chart its own course…rather, the platform had promised to continue reporting to the White House and remain responsive to its concerns for as long as the officials requested.” (p. 35)

It could very well be that my words, typed into a private email exchange, were gathered by AI, and not some lurking agent. But either way, they were gathered. It would appear that these “Officials,” who generate “external reports,” still have “concerns.”

This article was updated 07-02-24

Note: Thank you to Brownstone Institute for reprinting this article on June 3, 2024. It’s available under the title Tidal Waves Don’t Discriminate in print and audio here.

***

From a Russell Brand video posted May 28, 2024:

Quote from former CDC Director Robert Redfield: “[The Covid vaccines] really aren’t that critical for those that are under 50 or younger, but those vaccines saved a lot of lives…To be honest, some people got significant side effects from the vaccine. I have a number of people that are quite ill and they never had Covid, but they are ill from the vaccine, and we just have to acknowledge that.

Russell Brand’s response: “How long can you maintain the sort of slow drag that it was all worth it?... I have a question, why are there so many excess deaths all around the world?…Attempting to continue to claim that the pandemic was a success, that it was well handled, that the medications were effective, that there hasn’t been an extraordinary swindle practiced on the people of the world - seems more and more difficult to do with a straight face.”

Limited hangouts:

To present a “limited hangout” is to put part of the information out there, in order to divert from other facts or activities you don’t want someone to notice. It is a sleight of hand, a way of getting ahead of damning truths that are too big to keep covered up, like the 1,637,441 Vaccine Adverse Event Reports (VAERS) connected to the Covid-19 injections in the U.S. (It’s estimated that VAERS is largely underreported and represents only around 1% of actual adverse events.)

We apparently have reached a moment of communal introspection with regard to Covid-19 and our pandemic response, leading to increasing limited hangouts. The New York Times in a May 4, 2024 article informs us that some people have been injured by the Covid vaccines and implies, rightly so, that we should help them. The Brookings Institution report of 2024 commends us for saving thousands of lives by “slowing the spread” of Covid through changing our behaviors (aka social distancing and masking) until we could get the Safe and Effective™ vaccines. Everyone from former FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock to former CNN reporter Chris Cuomo now acknowledges that maybe some things could have been handled better. But they all assure us, “We did the best we could with the information we had at the time.”

An insightful individual who writes under the pseudonym of A Midwestern Doctor accurately describes the New York Times vaccine injury article as a piece, “sculpted to redeem the medical system’s reputation while admitting the absolute minimal amount of guilt necessary to accomplish that objective.”

Widening the Overton window

It’s good to see the Overton window concerning the pandemic response opening up a bit in the mainstream media and government agencies. But it’s important to be very clear that their concessions are largely a limited hangout, designed to deflect from their own failures. In addition these limited hangouts are an attempt to distract from the continuing goal of controlling everyone through repeated use of “emergencies” that require us to give up our freedom in order to be “safe.” Or at least to be “good citizens,” which was a powerful guilt-inducing motivator during the pandemic to gain compliance from people who weren’t actually afraid of the virus.

Why can’t we just move on?

With the expansion of acceptable dialogue, some admissions that mistakes were made, and the Covid pandemic seeming to be fully in our rearview mirror some ask exasperatedly, “Why do you want to keep talking about the pandemic anyway? Why can’t you just move on?”

I’ll tell you why. There are many powerful people and organizations who are weaponizing “pandemic preparedness” for ulterior motives having nothing to do with health. In fact, the perpetrators of pandemic harms have doubled down, even as they engage in limited hangouts. It appears they believe, probably correctly, that if they say something enough times such as, “The vaccines saved a lot of lives,” people will believe it.

The push for digital ID’s

Buried in the Times article that finally acknowledges the possibility of some vaccine injuries, is the idea that we need a national medical data base in order to better track, and therefore compensate for such injuries. This would be a data base where all citizens’ medical records are tracked electronically and managed by the federal government. Not only would this complete the government takeover of our medical system that has been underway for years, but it would also be the end of personal privacy. The phrase “national medical data base” is a euphemism for “vaccine passports” - required medical proof in order to participate in the public square.

FDA still wants money for hazardous gain-of-function research

Another reason why we can’t just forget about the pandemic is because of people like Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf. In a May 8, 2024 U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee Hearing, Califf  requested a total of $3.69 billion for the FDA budget, including an additional $168 million partly to pay for “countermeasures” to prevent a “wider outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza.” Califf states, “If we institute the countermeasures now, and reduce the spread of the virus…we’re much less likely to see a mutation that jumps to humans - for which we’re ill-prepared.”

Califf, among others, is attempting to generate fear of H5N1 avian flu that has been circulating for decades in various animal populations, and likely won’t become easily transmissible to humans unless someone in a lab tinkers with it. Let’s not forget that the nature of viruses, even lab-made ones, is to be either highly transmissible, or highly virulent, but not both. A virus can’t survive long and infect many others if it kills its host. With the medical advances we have today, we know how to treat the symptoms of illness, even in those infected with a new virus. However, the policy response to a pathogen can be horrific, as seen throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yet Robert Califf wants even more money for the FDA, partly so they can develop virus countermeasures, which is an Intelligence Community term having to do with biological warfare. In other words, Califf acknowledges that lab-made viruses are being studied around the world, and the viruses created in these labs require antidotal vaccines. Making a pathogen more transmissible, or more virulent, through experimentation is called gain-of-function research, and it is a controversial practice. Not all research in biological laboratories involves gain-of-function, and perhaps some of the research has public health benefit, but there is often lax oversight and poor adherence to containment protocols.

Lab leaks have led to multiple disease outbreaks in the past century

Epidemiologist Donald A. Henderson, credited with the eradication of smallpox through a targeted vaccination campaign, coauthored a paper in 2014 expressing concerns about gain-of-function research on the H5N1 virus:

Scientists recently have announced that they genetically modified H5N1 in the laboratory and that this mutated strain spread through the air between ferrets that were physically separated from each other. This is ominous news. Since ferret influenza virus infection closely mirrors human infection and is similarly transmissible, these scientists appear to have created a bird flu strain with characteristics that indicate it would be readily transmissible by air between humans. In fact, the lead scientist on one of the experiments explicitly stated this.

The question is this: Should we purposefully engineer avian flu strains to become highly transmissible in humans? In our view, no. We believe the benefits of this work do not outweigh the risks. Here’s why. There are no guarantees that such a deadly strain of avian flu would not escape accidentally from the laboratory. (emphasis added)

There is substantive evidence that various diseases in the past century including the 1976 swine flu outbreak, the surge of Lyme Disease in the U.S., and the Covid-19 pandemic can be traced to lab experiments that escaped and infected the general population.

The best thing the Appropriations Committee can do for the health of the U.S. and all citizens of the world is put a moratorium on gain of function research. While they’re at it, the Senate should consider restructuring that needs to happen at the FDA, and throughout the entire National Institutes of Health (NIH). They could start by removing Califf from his position, as his investments in pharmaceutical companies and stints working for them, have surely compromised his ability to properly regulate the products from which he profits. In addition, the Senate should outlaw the current corrupt system in which over half of the NIH’s operating budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies the NIH is charged with regulating.

Bill Gates’ and the World Health Organization

Another reason we cannot just “move past” the Covid-19 pandemic is because in addition to people like compromised Director Robert Califf, we have Bill Gates, the largest donor to the World Health Organization (WHO) just behind the United States and Germany. Gates, with his outsized influence on the WHO, has the stated goal to deliver a vaccine in 100-days against the next virus. He’s heavily invested in mRNA vaccines, and has found the returns on investments in vaccines to be highly profitable.

Gates, who has engaged consistently in pandemic wargame simulations for over two decades, espouses a preparedness plan that involves year-round pandemic teams in every community around the world. These teams would immediately enforce contact tracing and quarantine upon the appearance of any communicable disease, until the vaccine can be deployed. In a 2022 TED Talk, Gates even provided a visual of his dream, coming soon to a city near you:

The WHO is pushing for a worldwide Pandemic Treaty, and changes to the International Health Regulations. These changes, if approved by member countries, will allow the WHO unprecedented influence on community responses to epidemic and pandemic threats, as identified by the Director General. The current Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is not a medical doctor, is known to be weak on human rights, and has an uncomfortably close relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.  Tedros is among the many unelected persons, including government bureaucrats and public health officials, who wreaked havoc during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pandemic Preparedness as a Weapon:

The reason why we must still attempt to unpack the facts, is because so many are willing to use “pandemic preparedness” as a weapon, and so few have acknowledged the absolute failure of our Covid-19 pandemic response. For example, the previously referenced Brookings Paper from March 2024, titled The Impact of Vaccines and Behavior on US Cumulative Deaths from Covid-19, attempts to lend validity to the unscientific human disaster of “social distancing.” Social distancing was found to have zero impact on the spread of disease. Former FDA Director Scott Gottlieb even stated that the 6-foot distancing rule was “arbitrary,” and Dr. Anthony Fauci said the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared.” Those admissions bring small comfort to schools, care centers, hospitals, churches, businesses, performing arts and other organizations, and individuals whose day-to-day lives were harmed, sometimes permanently, by the 6-foot rule.

Johns Hopkins: Lockdowns have had little to no effect on Covid-19 mortality

A 2022 analysis conducted by professors at Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, considered 18,950 studies on the effectiveness of lockdowns, paring down to 24 that met the screening procedures for their meta-analysis. For purposes of the analysis, lockdown was defined as “at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI)…that directly restrict(s) people’s possibilities, such as policies that limit internal movement, close schools and businesses, and ban international travel.” The 24 qualified studies were divided into three groups: lockdown stringency index studies, shelter-in-place-order (SIPO) studies, and specific NPI studies, and determined that “Lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.” The authors summarized:

While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

New Zealand: a lesson in lockdown failure

One need only look at the data from New Zealand in the following chart to know that social distancing and locking down entire populations does not prevent the spread of respiratory viruses.

Because it’s an island, New Zealand was able to keep out visitors and lock down residents. The lockdowns harmed the country in every way, but only delayed the arrival of Covid. In the above chart, the orange line shows mask compliance at almost 90% in September 2021. The black line shows daily new cases. Note the exponential rise of cases in February 2022, despite coerced/forced Covid-19 vaccination.

As pointed out by former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur, 99.3% of Covid deaths in New Zealand occurred after 60% of the population was fully vaccinated. In Australia, another hard lockdown country, that figure was 93%. In other words, harsh lockdowns can delay the spread of a respiratory virus, but not prevent it. Meanwhile, the lockdowns cause economic mayhem, social and emotional devastation, and inflict permanent disadvantages on the upcoming generation. Lockdowns are a violation of fundamental human rights and should never be tolerated again as a viable means of containing viral spread, not even if a perfect vaccine antidote can be manufactured in less than 100 days.

The above, and similar charts for other states and countries, was created by Ian Miller from official publicly available data. It’s mystifying that anyone can actually look at these charts and claim, “Yes, but Covid-19 would have been so much worse if we hadn’t masked, locked down, and taken the vaccine.” How can there be worse results than exponential growth in cases; increased illness, hospitalizations, and deaths in the vaccinated; increased Covid deaths after vaccination, and a marked rise in excess deaths – especially among the young?

Brookings advocates for more of the same in the “next pandemic”

Yet the Brookings Paper joins emotionally abusive governments in praising people for engaging in anti-human social distancing, because it was effective in “slowing the spread of a dangerous infectious respiratory disease for a long time.” Brookings does acknowledge that these “behavior changes” came at a “tremendous economic, social, and human cost.” The solution, according to Brookings? More of the same, but with more targeted interventions:

To avoid similar pain from mitigation in the next pandemic, we argue that we need to make investments now not only in vaccine development, but also in data infrastructure so that we can precisely target behavior-oriented mitigation efforts to minimize their economic and social impacts of the next pandemic.

Brookings advocates for both vaccine development and a centralized “data infrastructure,” so “we can precisely target behavior-oriented mitigation efforts” in the next pandemic. Refer back to Bill Gate’s paradise of swooping in by helicopter with medical S.W.AT. teams ready to take you and yours down in order to save the world.

One might consider the times a mask was worn below the chin, a trip was taken to get away from onerous Covid regulations, a fake vaccine card was obtained to facilitate normal life, or a dinner party exceeded the numbers allowed by government decree.  Then project what it might be like as the recipient of targeted “behavior-oriented mitigation efforts” in a world where those behaviors are digitally tracked and “corrected” in real time.

Bill Gates compares people to computers that need new software, and viruses to something that can be prevented from spreading by dowsing them with interventions, like putting out a fire. Both analogies are untethered from real science, and tone deaf to the complexities of the human body, normally functioning societies, and our interdependence with a microbial planet.

Believing the evidence of your own eyes

The Brookings Paper does a lot of talking and citing of selective data, but ignores the common sense facts before our eyes. We all observed that social distancing and masking did not prevent the spread of Covid. The data and our own experiences consistently showed that Covid-19 largely was not a serious disease except to the elderly and the medically frail – something that was already known in February 2020. We all noticed that most vaccinated people contracted Covid-19. We also have observed that many multiple-vaccinated people appear to be repeatedly ill with cold and flu symptoms, while many have developed autoimmune illnesses, neurological issues, infertility problems, cancers, and heart issues within the past three years.

Those with the megaphone still claim the pandemic response was a success

Yet still the official Covid narrative persists, as does the fearmongering. On May 16, 2024 The New York Times ran an opinion piece from John M. Barry, a scholar at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, titled As Bird Flu Looms, the Lessons of Past Pandemics Take on New Urgency. In his article, Barry claims that the public health measures taken to slow the spread of Covid are effective, but:

[E]ven the most extreme interventions cannot eliminate a pathogen that escapes initial containment if, like influenza or the virus that causes Covid-19, it is both airborne and transmitted by people showing no symptoms. Yet such interventions can achieve two important goals.

The first is preventing hospitals from being overrun. Achieving this outcome could require a cycle of imposing, lifting and reimposing public health measures to slow the spread of the virus. But the public should accept that because the goal is understandable, narrow and well defined.

The second objective is to slow transmission to buy time for identifying, manufacturing and distributing therapeutics and vaccines and for clinicians to learn how to manage care with the resources at hand.

The number of inaccuracies in just these three paragraphs from Barry’s opinion piece is astounding, qualifying more as outright propaganda than as a limited hangout.

We hear the word a lot, but a refresher from Britannica on Propaganda is in order:

“Propaganda is the more or less systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions...Propagandists…deliberately select facts, arguments, and displays of symbols and present them in ways they think will have the most effect…To maximize effect, they may omit or distort pertinent facts or simply lie, and they may try to divert the attention of the reactors (the people they are trying to sway) from everything but their own propaganda. Comparatively deliberate selectivity and manipulation also distinguish propaganda from education.”  (emphasis added)                                                                       

Propagandists such as Barry draw on their credentials, and use their writing and reasoning skills, to “distort pertinent facts or simply lie” to prop up the official Covid narrative, in this case. Gratefully there are resources for balanced discussion.  There are credible individuals discussing legitimate studies and data that refute the false statements in Barry’s opinion piece. Unfortunately, many people do not know where to find their work, or simply don’t want to know.

Power, Control, Money: The great motivators

It would indeed be wonderful to say that Covid-19 pandemic is behind us. Been there, done that. But unfortunately there is an entire industry comprised of billionaires, corporate, NGO, military, intelligence, and government interests that is driving the idea of scary pandemics, and preparing radical interventions to deal with them. What could possibly be their motive? Nothing new under the sun. It’s always power, money, and a desire for control driving any human experiment that leads to cruel oppression, misery, and deaths. We saw it writ large through the campaigns of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao. We saw it with Mussolini, Pol Pot, and Pinochet.

The desire for power at the expense of others is as old as the history of mankind, but for the first time, the campaign is being orchestrated on a global scale. What was revealed during the Covid pandemic was not new ways to handle frightening pandemic-causing pathogens. What was actually revealed was a global trial run of how to bring entire populations into subjugation through fear and medical tyranny under the false assurance of Safety.

The experiment wasn’t completely successful, largely because the Emergency Use Authorized (EUA) vaccines failed to prevent disease or transmission. It’s not hard to develop a product at “Warp Speed” when all safety regulations and accountability are removed from product development, approval, and distribution. The mRNA platform was not ready for human use, and still isn’t, but the EUA Covid injections were administered to billions of people under cover of a “global emergency.” The debacle of increasingly noticeable vaccine injuries is the direct result.

Plans to extend the mRNA platform to all vaccines:

Nonetheless, there are plans to convert traditional vaccines to the flawed mRNA platform, as well as to develop new profitable mRNA injections to treat pandemic-potential viruses in the future. Health and Human Services is currently in discussions with Pfizer and Moderna to produce mRNA flu vaccines to treat H5N1, which announcement led to a surge in biotech companies’ stocks this week, according to the Financial Times.

An academic who went through WWII in Nazi Germany was interviewed afterward and explained how the horrors of that time gradually grew upon them, over several years, almost without them noticing. He said:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security…

One had no time to think. There was so much going on…I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to…we were decent people – and kept so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated…that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.” (p. 166-168,  They Thought They Were Free, By Milton Mayer)

Government intent to silence dissent:

It’s very important to those in charge that we not think and not notice. This is why we hear so much today about the dangers of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, and how much the government wants to protect us from such harmful speech. In fact Homeland Security is so worried they published a Terrorism Threat Bulletin calling people who say things that might undermine public trust in government institutions “domestic threat actors.”

This bulletin was accompanied by government censorship efforts that led to removed posts and accounts throughout all social media platforms, as well as character defamation, loss of employment, and other forms of persecution – all as a consequence of exercising freedom of speech. It also led to a Disinformation Governance Board created by the Biden Administration, that was “paused” after three weeks of comparison to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984, and following concerns raised about the head of the Board.

The government’s concerns about correct information do not extend to itself, or its mouthpieces, of which The New York Times is one. Despite the limited hangout acknowledging some “rare but serious” Covid-19 vaccine injuries, The Times is quick to claim there’s no way to know for sure if these people really were injured by the injections. The Times states:

The government’s understaffed compensation fund has paid so little because it officially recognizes few side effects for Covid vaccines. And vaccine supporters, including federal officials, worry that even a whisper of possible side effects feeds into misinformation spread by a vitriolic anti-vaccine movement.

Ah, yes. Those nasty anti-vaxxers. The ones that Homeland Security calls domestic terrorists, along with parents who speak out at school board meetings, and people who have concerns about election integrity. Homeland Security says people who question, “sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions.” So don’t ask questions and just do as you’re told. Whatever happened to the widespread consensus of the truth in Pres. Ronald Reagan’s quip, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”?

Multi-billionaire Bill Gates in his grandfatherly sweater and glasses said in the previously referenced TED Talk that it’s, “Kind of weird” how the anti-vaxxers respond to him. He claims his Gavi foundation has saved tens of millions of lives through vaccines. Gates states, “It’s somewhat ironic to have someone turn around and say no, we’re using vaccines to kill people or to make money or…some strange things like, that I somehow want to track, you know, the location of individuals because I’m so deeply desirous to know where everybody is. Uh, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that information.” Cue the helicopters.

I understand people who want to believe that we did the best we could with the information that we had, and that our efforts to stop a virus made a difference. It’s comforting to believe that those in charge have our best interests at heart. It’s easier and less frightening to believe wise scientists, doctors, and government officials know just what we need to be “safe.”

It’s generally thought that we enlightened modern people could never be susceptible to a mass formation like that of Nazi Germany, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution; we would recognize what was going on and we wouldn’t fall for it. There seems to be a general belief that the freedoms guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution are inviolable, and therefore we do not need to fight to retain them.

A limited hangout may open the Overton window a bit, but it’s being made very clear to anyone who is paying attention, that the powers that be are loathe to give up the control they tasted during Covid-19, and next time they intend to completely squash dissent.

Combatting the tidal wave of corporate and government control:

From attorney Jeff Childer’s Substack on U.S. Memorial Day May 27, 2024 we gain some insight into the call to action for our times

Lincoln’s [Gettysburg Address] could just as well have been written for us the living in the equally extraordinary year 2024, Anno Domini. In particular, the second half of President Lincoln’s short speech seems aimed right at us, reminding us that the honored dead made their ultimate sacrifices for a reason.

Our heroic dead expect that we, the living, will keep fighting to the last man and woman. In Lincoln’s own words:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Ours is not a war fought with cannons and musket balls. Our generation’s war is a mental, emotional, and cultural war, a war waged in secret and in lies, a war with needles and mysterious snake oil payloads, a mendacious war waged against truth, thoughts and feelings.

Keep fighting! Fight for the dead. Fight for the living. Fight for those not yet born. Fight and never stop fighting, until we have achieved a new birth of freedom in America.

Tidal waves don’t discriminate between those who believe in them, and those who don’t. A wave of censorship and government controls is building, fueled by fears about another pandemic, or climate change, or whatever “emergency” can be exploited to justify government power grabs. The only thing that will stop the censorship and control from washing over everyone, is enlightened people who refuse to be swept up, and who work together to push back.

*****

For more on the pandemic response, please see my book Mechanisms of Harm, Medicine in the Time of Covid-19, available in print and Kindle versions.

The Kindle version of Mechanisms contains live links in the Table of Contents that take you directly to any point of interest in the book, and also provides over 900 endnotes that link to articles, documents, interviews, press releases, video clips, and medical studies. 

You may, or may not, believe that the Covid-19 pandemic merited the response we gave. Either way, consideration should be given to what we were forced to do, and what was lost over the past four years – all under the banner of fighting a virus.

I welcome your questions and feedback, and thank you for your time!

Lori

Following is a link to the Brownstone Institute article introducing the first chapter, which you can listen to or read:

https://brownstone.org/articles/wait-theres-a-pandemic/

Visuals and colors explode as the words, “Here’s to science. Here’s to the next fight. LetsOutdoCancer.com” appear. At the end, we see a darling little girl, presumably cured of cancer, leaving the hospital to applause from her attending medical personnel, with the words “Pfizer, Outdo Yesterday™” superimposed on the lower right of the screen.

It’s a lovely $14 million 60 or 90 second spot, depending on which cut you watch. And it’s all gaslighting.

Pfizer is Dr. Chillingworth. For those unfamiliar, Dr. Chillingworth is a cold, deformed, bitter man exacting revenge on the kind, revered, but hypocritical Reverend Dimmesdale in a 17^th Century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the novel The Scarlet Letter, Chillingworth feigns to be a healer, and eventually moves in with Rev. Dimmesdale pretending to better treat his heart condition, while subtly tormenting him and contributing to Dimmesdale’s failing health and eventual death. 

Of course Pfizer isn’t a shunned husband trying to determine the source of his wife’s infidelity and subsequent illegitimate child. And maybe the owners of Pfizer aren’t visibly cold, deformed, and bitter. I couldn’t say, not having personally met any of them. But Pfizer is without a doubt, a Dr. Chillingworth in all our lives – pretending to help us while contributing to our failing health. Perhaps you knew this before the Covid-19 pandemic, but I suspect most of us did not.

Pfizer’s cheery Super Bowl ad cannot change the fact that they never tested their BNT162b2 vaccine during clinical trials to see if it prevented transmission of Covid-19. Nor did Pfizer stop distribution when 90 days into the vaccination campaign, there had already been 1,123 vaccine-related deaths, and over 40,000 vaccine injuries.  

Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most published cardiologists in the world, was shocked when Pfizer did not withdraw its Covid vaccine in February 2021. Having served on multiple vaccine safety review boards for the FDA in the past, Dr. McCullough knew that even a possible causal relationship between the vaccines and injury reports was concern enough for the shots to be pulled. For example, in 1976 during a swine flu scare, a mass vaccine rollout was abruptly canceled after more than 500 vaccinated people contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome, and more than 30 died.

However, the alarming results from the 90-day safety review of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine were disregarded by both Pfizer and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Also ignored were knowledgeable doctors and scientists who contacted the European Medical Association in February 2021, calling for the vaccines to be withdrawn for further evaluation, due to “a wide range of side effects…reported following vaccination of previously healthy younger individuals.”

Pictured in Pfizer’s peppy commercial are Katalin Karikó, PhD, and Drew Weissman, MD, PhD, who were just awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology for their work on the mRNA platform that was used in the Pfizer and Moderna shots.

Rickard Sandberg, of the Nobel Assembly said that Karikó and Weissman’s research was added to others’ work on stabilized spike protein and mRNA delivery using lipid nanoparticles, which led to “two highly effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19” being developed and approved “in record time.”

Record time indeed, but “highly effective?” Not so much. When all the safety precautions are removed from product development, billions of dollars are involved, and the warning signs of adverse events are ignored, you get Operation Warp Speed.

Most people were unaware that when they were jabbed with the Covid-19 shots, they were participating in a worldwide clinical trial, taking into their bodies an improperly tested, experimental product. The Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca vaccines are all gene therapy products, not traditional vaccines. In 2018, the FDA defined gene therapy as “a technique that modifies a person’s genes to treat or cure disease.” 

Pfizer and Moderna shots send a message to cells via modified mRNA to create the toxic spike protein found in the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 disease. J&J and AstraZeneca DNA shots send a gene to the cells with instructions to create the spike protein. The theory was that the cells would create the spike in response to the message sent by the Covid gene therapy. The body would then recognize the enemy substance, develop an immune response, and be protected upon actually encountering the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the future. 

But Pfizer’s claims that the shots were 95% effective at preventing infection were deceptive, and Pfizer never even tested their shot to see if it prevented Covid-19 transmission. Yet the claim that we were protecting ourselves and others by taking the Covid vaccines has continually been wielded as justification for coercing and mandating people into getting injected. In fact, not only do the shots not prevent disease transmission or infection, but they make recipients more susceptible to Covid-19 infection, and less able to fight the disease.

Time has proven that the Covid-19 shots are not effective, and they’re certainly not safe, a claim which never should have been made, as no long-term clinical trials were conducted before the shots were administered worldwide. Pfizer and the other pharmaceutical companies had not overcome the known problems with gene therapies, one of which was lack of control over where the injected gene therapy travels in the body. 

The uncontrolled spread of messenger RNA leads to the creation of toxic spike protein in the brain, other organs, and the circulatory system – places where spike protein would not be during the normal course of the disease – leading to all types of cardial and neurological issues. The lipid nanoparticle envelope that carries the mRNA to the cells is also known to be problematic, causing inflammation in the body. 

Karikó and Weissman both knew this about mRNA vaccines. Dr. Weissman co-authored a paper in 2018, “MRNA vaccines – a new era in vaccinology,” in which both advances in, and safety concerns about mRNA vaccines were outlined. The safety concerns included possible blood clots, systemic inflammation, lack of control over where the vaccine goes in the body and how long it stays there, autoimmune diseases, and the potential toxicity of lipid nanoparticles.

The FDA was also aware of the uncertainty of safety in gene therapy products. An FDA article from 2006 states:

Study subjects exposed to gene transfer technology may be at risk of delayed adverse events as a consequence of persistent biological activity of the genetic material or other components of the products used to carry the genetic material. The persistent biological activity may be necessary for the product to provide a continuing clinical benefit. However, persistent biological activity could have adverse effects upon normal cell function, placing subjects at risk for development of adverse events, some of which may be delayed by months or years. (emphasis added)

The Covid vaccines were only Emergency Use Authorized (EUA) by the FDA, and still have not been granted full approval. The EUA status conferred on the Covid-19 vaccines means the pharmaceutical companies are not liable for injuries resulting from the injections – and there are many. We are seeing “delayed adverse events” and “adverse effects upon normal cell function” all around us. “Persistent biological activity” is manifested by the fact that vaccine-induced spike protein is still circulating in some people up to six months after injection. 

We were told that the Covid shots would stay in the arm muscle , and that the body would discard the mRNA message within a few hours of delivery. Pfizer and the FDA were not forthcoming about the pros and cons of the Covid shots. Without this knowledge, the public could not give informed consent.

Pfizer’s track record in the drug-making industry is anything but squeaky clean. In 2009, the United States Department of Justice ordered it to pay $2.3 billion in civil and criminal penalties, due to adverse events resulting from Pfizer’s false claims regarding some of its products. In 2004 it was ordered to pay $430 million in civil and criminal penalties for violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA). An article at the time noted it was “Not a major setback for Pfizer,” due to the billions it was bringing in from the product in question.

These huge civil and criminal penalties seem akin to gnats biting an elephant – an annoyance, but not a hindrance to day-to-day business. The FDA is as responsible as Pfizer for the Covid shots, granting EUA despite the known dangers of experimental gene therapy technology.

Major life insurance companies report that starting in the fall of 2021 (when Covid vaccine mandates were implemented in the US), excess mortality increased over 40% in people ages 18-64. The large increase had never been seen before in the history of life insurance. Long-term disability claims have also increased unexpectedly in the younger age groups.

All around us many of our family, friends, and neighbors have been injured by Pfizer and the other drug companies’ Covid-19 gene therapy injections (see here, and here). Three years from the beginning of the massive Covid vaccination campaign, we have all become aware of the sudden “cause unknown” medical events affecting athletes, young people, and the previously healthy middle-aged. Blood clots, pulmonary embolisms, aneurysms, heart attacks, strokes, myocarditis, Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barre syndrome, autoimmune diseases, and a host of other cardiac and neurological illnesses are afflicting people of all ages. 

Because the problems are developing months and years after injection, most people are not making the connection between the Covid shots and the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, and their own illnesses. Maybe this failure to connect the dots has to do with the mantra that is repeated daily to this day, “safe and effective,” and maybe it’s partly the trauma of realizing that we have been deceived, manipulated, and violated by those whom we trusted in positions of authority.

But the FDA knows. Pfizer knows. So do Moderna, and J&J, and AstraZeneca. So do the CDC, various government and public health leaders, and the complicit mainstream media. As do many medical and scientific organizations, and their prestigious journals. Collective guilt is a difficult emotion to face, and perhaps an even harder fact to expose.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) expects new cancer cases in the US to rise beyond 2 million in 2024, a one-year milestone, with data showing an increase in younger people being diagnosed with cancer. The ACS attributes the rise in cancer to many factors including obesity, failure to get early screening, family history, race, situations unique to the LGBTQ population, and economic disparities. Sadly lacking is any introspection regarding the possible impact of new, inadequately tested gene therapy products injected into the world’s population starting in 2021. However, there are cancer doctors who trace the rise directly to the Covid-19 shots. 

Oncologist Dr. Angus Dalgleish has seen a marked increase in recurring cancers in his UK practice, temporally related to the Covid vaccine rollout. Dr. Ryan Cole, who owns a large pathology lab, began to see an unusual increase in breast cancer and recurring cancers in 2021. Oncologist Dr. William Makis, who has diagnosed 20,000 cancer patients in his career, says he has never seen anything before like the sudden development of aggressive and rapidly-growing cancers in young people. In his practice, Makis is seeing stage 4 breast cancers presenting in women in their 20s, stage 4 colon cancers presenting in men and women in their 20s and 30s, leukemias that kill in a matter of days or even hours after diagnosis, and lymphomas that kill in a matter of months.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find a cancer cure? 

Yes it would, but at this point in time we would do much better listening to our own bodies and returning to healthy practices, instead of looking to multi-billion dollar corrupt pharmaceutical companies and government bureaucracies to solve our medical problems. The Reverend Dimmesdale allowed Dr. Chillingworth into his home to better “cure” him. We don’t need to let Pfizer into our lives, or our bodies, anymore.

As for my part, I’m not going to dance and sing along with Pfizer. Contrary to Pfizer’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” message, I hope we can stop Pfizer and its “Outdo Yesterday” slogan. Because now I recognize gaslighting, and yesterday was bad enough. 

The article was first published by Brownstone Institute on February 19, 2024, and is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

What happened is I started writing an article titled “Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19.” As weeks turned into months of research and writing, the article became a book. In 36 sections, this compendium summarizes the insights and concerns shared by many so-called “Covid dissidents.”

If Covid were truly behind us, there might not be need for such a work. However, the pandemic response revealed an ugly push worldwide by corporate technocrats, governments, and globalists to curb human rights in the name of “safety.” Emboldened, they will try to force us all into a repeat of restrictions and mandates, as soon as they can stir up the next fear  – another variant or a new pathogen, climate change, compromised food supply, energy shortages, international unrest – any “emergency” will do.

My hope is that this compendium will lead to thoughtful consideration, fruitful conversations, and the pursuit of additional knowledge. I’m honored that Brownstone Institute will be publishing Mechanisms of Harm sometime in March 2024, in both print and digital versions. I’ll send out a notification when it becomes available.

In the meantime, I’m back to writing articles. Thank you for taking the time to read them! Your support and comments are much appreciated.

Lori