COVID-19
‘River of Freedom’ documentary exposes the brutal COVID tyranny of New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
From LifeSiteNews
By David James
What emerges from the film is a political class without conscience. It turns out the Ardern government’s COVID advisory group knew early on about the vaccine side effects and advised the cabinet against the mandates. But the government went ahead anyway.
The documentary River of Freedom is a filmic record of the protests in New Zealand against the COVID lockdown policies and the mandating of vaccines. It has made its mark locally. Despite being ignored by the mainstream media, and only playing on a few screens, it reached number 10 in the box office.
The film documents the objections against then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s mandatory “No Jab, No Job” vaccination regime. It shows how the New Zealand politicians, when confronted by the protestors, hid in the building; all 120 parliamentarians refused to communicate with them. Two ex-members of parliament did visit and were later served with trespass notices.
The protestors seemed neither organized nor threatening; most of them talked repeatedly about the need to love one other. The mood was rather one of confusion and trauma as people who had mostly trusted their government saw their politicians turn into bureaucratic tyrants.
Many of them had lost their jobs and suffered the accompanying distress. There were photos of the vaccinated, often young, who had either died or been seriously injured. There was an especially sad story from a woman who had to undergo four rounds of chemotherapy after getting jabbed because of the extreme inflammation.
It is another chapter in the bleak history of what will come to be seen as the greatest medical crime in history. Yet strangely it is clear that both sides thought they were in the right.
The film starts with a truck convoy similar to the famous Canadian event. They arrived in the capital city Wellington as a diverse group, coming from many different walks of life. Their claims were simple. People should have the right to make choices about what goes into their body and should not be forced by the state. They should have the right to air their views and be involved in public discussion without being censored, demonized, abused, and ignored, including by the mainstream press.
This would once have been a statement of the extremely obvious. As one unjabbed policeman, who lost his job, pointed out, whenever he detained someone, he was required to inform them of the New Zealand Bill of Rights. Yet those rights were completely ignored by the NZ government.
The politicians, meanwhile, displayed a smug certainty that only managerialist functionaries can achieve. They had their deliverables (get everyone vaccinated) and, my goodness, they were going to deliver them. It is another demonstration that imposing a management discipline inevitably impedes peoples’ conscience, the ability to reflect on one’s own actions.
Manipulative techniques, especially spin, were on full display. There was absurd marketing messaging to persuade the citizenry to, in effect, take a risk with their health. There were extreme efforts to depict the protestors as extremists. Ardern ridiculously described them as “pure evil,” adding that the vaxxed had every right to see the unvaxxed as a threat.
In parliament Michael Wood, the minister for Workplace Relations and Safety said, after pretending to have some understanding of the protestors’ fears, that underneath it all was “a river of filth, a river of violence and menace, a river of anti-semitism, and … a river of Islamophobia”. What the latter two claims were about is anyone’s guess. Oh, and I nearly forgot. There was also a “river of genuine fascism”.
The legal sophistry was provided by the Attorney General David Parker, who burbled on about “collective rights” versus individual rights. He opined that in communist and fascist countries collective rights are taken too far – a better description would be that rights are largely removed from people – and then warned against “an extreme version of individual liberties trumping community rights”.
Apart from slipping between “rights” and “liberties,” which have different definitions, it is hard to see how what the protestors wanted was in any way “extreme.” It is indisputable that freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest or detention, the right to be free from discrimination, and the right to work are foundational in New Zealand. Yet free speech was attacked as “spreading disinformation,” discrimination against the unvaccinated was vicious, and the right to work was removed for anyone who did not comply.
The right to freedom of religion was also compromised. An unjabbed Catholic man said he was locked out of his church, and a Hare Krishna practitioner said could not go to his temple.
The film shows the protestors engaging in many “extreme” activities such as singing songs, having sausage sizzles, and talking about love a lot. When the politicians refused to meet them – with the exception of New Zealand First leader Winston Peters – they doubled down by having more sausage sizzles, singing more songs, and passionately speaking of the need for people to treat each other well.
Enraged, the politicians unleashed the police who looked very much like the “river of violence and menace” that Wood mentioned. Except it was the state sending it, not the protestors. Even then, the reaction was mostly peaceful despite a number of the protestors being hurt.
New Zealand did not experience the highly suspicious involvement of its military, as occurred in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. And the country turned out to have a functioning judiciary, which definitely was not the case in Australia, where judges discovered new meanings for the word “cowardice” (they were exempted from the jab).
Some sacked New Zealand police and defence force personnel challenged the vaccine mandate in the High Court and won. It is the point at which the documentary ends.
The Covid disaster showed that, when put under pressure, most Western countries do not have an effective judicial branch of government, an independent rule of law. So New Zealand’s High Court victory was not trivial. At least some of country’s institutions were willing to protect democracy.
What emerges from the film is a political class without conscience. It turns out the government’s COVID advisory group knew early on about the vaccine side effects and advised the cabinet against the mandates. But the government went ahead anyway.
Why? Managers are required to produce measurable outcomes, and the outcome was to get everyone jabbed. Anything else, such as listening to peoples’ objections, considering possible risks, abiding by the principles of democracy, or even remembering what it is to be human, were ignored. That icy callousness of the politicians makes quite a contrast with the heartfelt outbursts of the protestors.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Is Our Five-Year Nightmare Finally Over?

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s confirmation as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the US is the ultimate repudiation of the Covid policy response.
The scheme of lockdown-until-vaccination was the biggest effort of government and industry on a global scale on historical record. It was all designed to transfer wealth to winning industries (pharma, online retail, streaming services, online education), divide and conquer the population, and consolidate power in the administrative state.
By 2021, RFK, Jr., had emerged as the world’s most vocal, erudite, and knowledgeable critic of the scheme. In two brilliant books – The Real Anthony Fauci and The Wuhan Cover-Up – he documented the entire enterprise and dated the evolution of the pandemic industry from its postwar inception to the present. There was simply no way to read these books and think about the corporatist cabal in the same way.
The circumstances that led to his appointment at HHS are themselves implausible and remarkable. Perceiving President Biden to be a weak candidate – one who had forced masks and shots on the population and brutally censored tech and media – he decided to make a run for president, presuming that there would be an open primary. There wasn’t one, so he was forced into an independent run.
That effort was chewed up by the usual political dynamic that befalls every third-party effort – too many ballot-access barriers plus the usual logic of Duverger’s law. That left the campaign in a difficult spot. At the same time, two huge political shifts had become clear. The Democratic Party had become a vessel and a front mainly for the administrative state with a veneer of woke ideology, while the Republican Party was being taken over by refugees from the Democrats, in effect creating a new Trump party out of the remnants of the other two.
The rest is legendary. Trump linked up with Elon Musk to do to the federal government what he did when he took over Twitter, taking the company private, gutting the place of embedded federal assets, and firing 4 out of 5 workers. In the midst of this, and faced with a terrifying flurry of legal attacks, Trump dodged an assassin’s bullet. That triggered terrible memories of RFK, Jr.’s father and uncle, and thus sparked discussions about coming together.
Within a matter of weeks, we had a new coalition that brought together old antagonists, as many people and groups seemingly in the same instant realized their conjoined interests in cleaning up the corporatist cartel. With the newly freed platform of X to reach the public, MAGA/MAHA/DOGE was born.
Trump won and chose RFK, Jr., to lead the most powerful public health agency in the world. The barrier was Senate confirmation, but that was achieved through some incredible triangulation that made it extremely difficult to vote no.
In the big picture, you can measure the size of this titanic shift in American politics by the way the votes in the Senate lined up. All Republicans but one voted for the most prominent scion of the Democratic Party to head the health empire while all Democrats voted no. That alone is striking, and a testament to the power of the pharma lobby, which, during the hearings, was exposed as the hidden hand behind the most passionate opponents of the confirmation.
Is our nightmare over? Not yet. Writing not even a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump, it is still unclear just how much authority he truly exercises over the sprawling executive branch. For that matter, no one can even agree on how large this branch is: between 2.2 million and 3 million employees and somewhere between 400 and 450 agencies. The financial bleed in this realm is unthinkable and far worse than even the biggest cynic can imagine.
Five former secretaries of the Treasury took to the pages of the New York Times with a shocking claim. “The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.” This has included a career employee called “fiscal assistant secretary—a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.”
There is no reason even to read between the lines. What this means is that no person voted into office by the people and no one appointed by such a person has access to the federal books since 1946. This is startling beyond belief. No owner of any company would ever tolerate being barred from the accounting offices and payment systems. And no company can offer any public stock without independent audits and open books.
And yet almost 80 years have gone by during which time neither has been true for this gigantic enterprise called the federal government. That means that $193 trillion has been spent by an institution that has never faced granulated oversight from the people and never met the normal demands that every enterprise faces every day.
The usual habit in Washington has been to treat every elected leader and their appointments as temporary and transitory marionettes, people who come and go and disturb little to nothing about the normal operations of government. This new administration seems to have every intention to change that but the job is inconceivably challenging. As much public support as MAGA/MAHA/DOGE enjoy for now, and as many people from those groups are getting embedded in the power structure, they are outnumbered and outmaneuvered by millions of agents of the old order.
This transition will not be easy if it happens at all.
The inertia of the old order is mighty. Even on the issue of health and pandemics, there is already confusion. CBS News has reported that Fauci-loyalist and mRNA pusher Gerald Parker will head the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response or OPPR. The report cited only unnamed “health officials” and the appointment has been celebrated by Scott Gottlieb, the Pfizer board member who nudged Trump into backing lockdowns in 2020.
All the while, this appointment has not been confirmed by the White House. We do not know if OPPR, created by Congressional charter, will even be funded. The reporter will not reveal his sources – raising the question of why any appointment having to do with health should be surrounded by such cloak-and-dagger machinations.
If Dr. Parker becomes ensconced in this position and another health emergency is declared, this time for Bird flu, HHS and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will not be in any kind of decision-making position at all.
The larger problems have to do with a broader question: is the president really in charge of the executive branch? Can he hire and fire? Can he spend money or decline to spend money? Can he set policy for the agencies?
One might suppose that the whole answer to these questions can be found in Article 2, Section 1: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” And yet that sentence was written almost 100 years before Congress created this thing called the “civil service” that nowhere appears in the Constitution. This fourth branch has grown in size and power to swamp both the presidency and the legislature.
Courts are going to have to sort this out, and already an avalanche of lawsuits has hit the new administration for daring to presume control over agencies and their activities of which the president is and must necessarily be held accountable. Lower federal courts seem to be demanding that the president be that in name only, while the Supreme Court might have a different opinion.
The much-ballyhooed “constitutional crisis” consists of nothing other than an attempt to reassert the original constitutional design of government.
This is the background template in which RFK, Jr., takes power at HHS, and oversees all the sub-agencies. These agencies played a huge role in covering for the attack on liberty and rights over five years. His confirmation is a symbolic repudiation of the most egregious public policies on record. And yet, the repudiation is entirely implicit: there has been no commission, no admission of error, no one truly held responsible, and no real accountability.
The trajectory on which we find ourselves affords many reasons for champagne celebrations, but sober up quickly. There is a very long way to go and enormous barriers in place to get us to the point that we are really safe again from the marauding corporatist/statist complex and their plots and schemes to rob the public of rights and liberties. In the meantime, to invoke a common phrase, keep these new appointees in your thoughts and prayers.
COVID-19
NIH director who led agency during COVID abruptly resigns

Quick Hit:
Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, the No. 2 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who served as acting director during the COVID-19 pandemic, has abruptly resigned. His departure follows a broader shakeup at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under President Donald Trump’s administration.
Key Details:
- Tabak, 73, spent 25 years at the NIH, serving as the agency’s principal deputy director since 2010 and acting director during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- He was heavily scrutinized by Republicans for his role in pandemic-related decision-making and congressional probes into the origins of COVID-19.
- His resignation comes amid Trump’s restructuring of HHS, with potential firings and budget cuts within the agency.
Diving Deeper:
Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, the longtime No. 2 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has abruptly resigned from government service, effective February 11, 2025. Tabak, who served as acting director of the NIH during key periods—including the COVID-19 pandemic—announced his departure in an internal email to staff earlier this week. His resignation letter did not provide an explanation for his decision to step down.
The timing of Tabak’s exit coincides with a significant shakeup at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the NIH’s parent agency, under President Donald Trump’s leadership. Reports suggest that the administration is implementing budget cuts and potential mass firings within the agency, aligning with Trump’s broader efforts to overhaul Washington’s bureaucratic institutions.
Tabak was a key figure during the pandemic, frequently appearing alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci and former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins in congressional hearings. Republican lawmakers repeatedly grilled him over the agency’s handling of COVID-19 policies, including controversial guidance on lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and research funding linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He also played a role in shaping the early COVID-19 origin narrative. GOP-led investigations revealed that Tabak was part of a confidential call with Fauci, Collins, and other prominent scientists in early 2020—an event that critics argue helped suppress the lab-leak theory. House Republicans have accused Tabak and his colleagues of slow-walking the release of documents related to gain-of-function research.
Under normal circumstances, Tabak would have likely resumed his role as acting director until a new NIH leader was confirmed. However, the Biden-era holdover was bypassed in favor of Dr. Matthew Memoli, a former researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a known critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
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