Brownstone Institute
Why Did Covid Enforcement Target Religion?
Religious leaders like Artur Pawlowski who question COVID-19 health restrictions are a “threat to public safety.” Or so the criticism goes.
After giving a sermon in February 2022 in Coutts, Alberta, in which he urged trucker convoy protestors to “hold the line” in their efforts to safeguard freedoms, Pastor Pawlowski was arrested, denied bail, and imprisoned for 40 days until the decision was unanimously overturned by the Alberta Court of Appeal in July.
According to the 2021 World Watch List compiled by the advocacy group Open Doors, there were two important persecution trends in 2020: the number of Christians killed increased by 60 percent, and governments used COVID-19 restrictions as an excuse for religious persecution.
Facial recognition systems, for example, were installed in state-approved churches in China, allowing churchgoers to be tracked and punished, and India’s nationalist Janata Party encouraged the persecution of Christians by sanctioning Hindu extremism. In Canada, a country that used to be a safe haven for the persecuted, pastors are being ticketed and imprisoned for holding religious services, and religion, itself, is slandered in the COVID narrative, associated with poor research, misinformation, and right-wing politics.
Our treatment of religious persons seems to be non-fictionalizing Orwell’s totalitarian state, Oceania, in which atheism is compulsory and religious belief is a crime (one of the crimes to which the hero of “1984,” Winston Smith, confesses).
In Orwell’s superstate, atheism is not only essential to “the Party’s” absolute power, but it is compelling. According to Orwell’s dystopian fantasy, human life is meaningless because individuals will always die; but by joining the Party, they become part of something more enduring than themselves. Totalitarianism—I use that word intentionally—offers a way to rescue themselves from the threat of absolute nonexistence.
In any totalitarian state (including the one we are inching towards), citizens are divided and polarized. There are the believers and the non-believers, the members and the outliers, the chosen ones and the sinners. The followers believe above all else in the ability of the state to achieve a kind of utopia. They follow the state’s commands, not because of their evidentiary reasonableness but because their commitment to the project requires unquestioning allegiance. The sinners are heretics who stand in the way of safety and purity. What appeal have reason and freedom and autonomy when stacked against effortless and guaranteed immortality?
Today, many people are turning away from personal religion toward state-led science, which is presented as being more sophisticated and more aligned with truth. But totalitarianism is not an alternative to religion; it is secularized religion, as Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt wrote, and its appeal is spreading across the globe at a head-spinning rate.
Totalitarianism replaces personal religion with the idea that we can find meaning not in God but in ourselves, in a group of human beings. “The State takes the place of God,” wrote Carl Jung, “the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship.” The slogan of Oceania’s Party, “freedom is slavery,” could easily be the slogan of Canada’s ruling party today. (And dare I mention the sign above the gate at Auschwitz “Arbeit Macht Frei” [“Work Makes One Free”]?)
In the totalitarian state, the methods of religious enthusiasm and evangelism are deployed to convince the masses that the dream of a perfectly pure, progressive state—a heaven on earth—justifies any limitation of personal freedom. And so, the punishment of dissidents—via mandates, surveillance, imprisonment, and possibly even extermination of individuals or groups—is considered acceptable or even noble.
To ensure continued allegiance to a totalitarian regime, citizens are kept in a continual fear cycle, worn down by the ever-present threat of loss of income, education, food, gas, housing, and mobility, and the fear of being and dying alone. These fears are solidified by visible propaganda—hospitalization and death count graphs, masking signs at the entrances of businesses, social media vaccine ‘stickers’ and other virtual badges of honour, and the continual recital of mantras like “we’re all in this together” and “everything we do is to protect your health and safety.”
The advice of our leaders is presented as the only way to remain safe. But let us not forget that blind allegiance to those who abuse us is a survival strategy for the abused, not a rational life plan. The harsh lesson of Stockholm Syndrome is that abusers can become saviours in the eyes of the abused; they become a safe haven, a way out, the only perceivable way out.
Religious persons today are a threat, but not to public safety as the narrative instructs us. They are a threat to the idea that the state is to be worshipped above all else, to the religion that’s trying to take their place, to the idea that it’s possible to find a compelling and complete sense of meaning outside of the state.
They are persecuted not for what they believe, but for what they don’t believe.
As Artur Pawlowski’s son Nathaniel said about the police who were waiting outside their house to arrest his father:
“This has nothing to do with law, …. He embarrassed them on a global scale. He’s exposed their corruption. People are waking up. He has a powerful voice. They’re scared of that voice, so they want to keep him in prison now as punishment.”
Should we care about the persecution of Christians if we aren’t religious ourselves?
When self-professed atheist blogger Tim Urban was interviewed by Bari Weiss on something about which he changed his mind in 2021, he said:
“I’ve spent most of my life thinking ‘the more atheists, the better.’ Looking back, this now feels like a ‘be careful what you wish for’ hope. It’s easy for non-religious people to look down on religion, but we take for granted the extent to which a good society is good because of the moral structure it provides.”
Protecting religious leaders like Artur Pawlowski is not just about protecting religion per se; it is about protecting the foundations of a free society in which individuals can find their own sources of meaning apart from the state.
Freedom of religion (and conscience and thought and belief) bears a core relationship to the ways we envision and create life in all of its essential dimensions: family, education, spirituality, relationships, and the dignity and independence of persons from their role as citizens. We are persons first and citizens second. We can make ourselves fit for citizenship, but we shouldn’t allow the demands of citizenship to dictate who we are as persons.
Religion is a core charter right (Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 2a), but the Canada we are creating is one in which religious persons must make an irreconcilable moral choice: be a good citizen and betray yourself, or be true to yourself and face the political consequences.
I leave you with these words, which are solidly Canadian, possibly inspirational, and worth quoting at length:
“… the history of this country is one in which we are constantly challenging ourselves and each other to extend our personal definitions of who is a Canadian. This is a good and important thing. It is good for us, good for our country, and important to the world. … We understand that people are defined both by the things that unite and distinguish us from one another: languages, cultures, faiths. Even, importantly, gender and sexual orientation. However, we also know that all of these contribute to a person’s identity, but don’t define it. These things all find their highest, most concrete expression in the individual human beings who embody them. This, too, is a good thing. It gives people room to live and breathe.”
“It gives people room to live and breathe.”
These aren’t my words. They are the words of our own Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose 2015 self seems irreconcilable with the person who said just a few months ago that the burning of churches is “understandable” and that evangelical Christians are the worst part of society.
Religious Canadians are losing this room “to live and breathe.” In fact, they are being suffocated. The question is, how will we respond? Will we act as free persons or as unknowing slaves? And what is the true cost of our conversion to state worship?
Reposted from Epoch Times
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For me, it’s not difficult to see what the world’s real rulers are trying to achieve. They’re trying to obtain more power and control for themselves. In fact, they’ve largely already achieved this goal. The terrifying thought is they are far from done.
We know they are not finished because their most conspicuous initiative at the moment is their quest to slay the petulances of “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
The correct definition of misinformation/disinformation is any speech that challenges what authority figures say is the truth.
The world’s real rulers don’t want their pronouncements challenged, as this would pose a grave risk to their continued rule and their ability to implement myriad programs that will effectively defeat, once and for all, human freedom.
As long as persuasive dissent doesn’t go viral, the Powers that Be know they will achieve their objectives, which are authoritarian world government much closer to the communist utopia envisioned by thinkers and tyrants like Marx, Mao, and Lenin.
But real communism is not the real goal either, as communism was supposed to make every person equal. The modern form of communism, not unlike all previous forms of communism, ensures the world’s elite organizations will remain ultra-powerful while the proletariat will beg for crumbs.
Who are the World’s Elite Organizations?
They are every important organization – those with great influence (and police-state powers) – including all governmental agencies and departments as well as international government organizations like the UN, WHO, and European Union.
They are also all the major “crony” corporations that benefit from close ties to government and non-governmental organizations.
Plus, foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which have more money than many nations and certainly more ideological commitment to deploy their resources to implement their agendas.
A simple method to define the establishment organizations would be to simply identify the world’s key authorized narratives and then ask yourself what organizations zealously support these initiatives (aka “The Current Thing”).
In the last four years, any organization that vociferously supported all the Covid protocols would be examples of “captured” organizations that enthusiastically supported the Current Thing.
But these same organizations also support all the other ascendant political movements, such as the fight against (allegedly) man-made Climate Change, numerous wars or “interventions” to advance “democracy,” central bank digital currency, and ever more mRNA “vaccines.”
Furthermore, it’s obvious these same organizations support initiatives designed to discredit long-accepted cultural norms in favor of more “progressive” thinking that normalizes gender reversal, race grievances, LGBT+ initiatives, or any reform that advances “diversity, inclusion, or equity.”
The promotion of policies that make mass illegal immigration much easier to achieve has also become a crucial program of our planet’s establishment rulers.
I believe the above summary provides an accurate assessment of the state of the world today.
I also note that it’s an undeniable truth that every program of these establishment organizations has made the world a darker place, with future developments planned by our leaders guaranteed to decrease the qualify of life for children or young adults who may live another 50 to 80 years.
For example, at the moment, unelected delegates who serve on the World Health Organization continue to deliberate in secret as they finalize a new health treaty and make changes to “international regulations” that will affect virtually every citizen on the planet in decades to come.
The salient point about the WHO is that this agency was provably and disastrously wrong on every policy and piece of guidance it issued involving the response to Covid-19.
Another way to identify the members of the Establishment ruling class is to simply identify those who were spectacularly wrong on every key issue of our times. These are the people and organizations who are seeking even more power and control.
Who Will Prevail in the End?
The good news is our side – those who still believe in human liberty – vastly outnumbers the group that is clearly aligned against us.
Above I listed many of the world’s captured organizations. These organizations are staffed by probably a couple hundred thousand key leaders who are committed to supporting the nefarious and freedom -eradicating components of “The Current Thing.”
As I’ll show below, the numbers who identify with “our side” surely exceed tens of millions of citizens.
The bad news is the the enemies of freedom – the worshippers of Big Brother – control all of the institutions and organizations in the world that actually matter.
Whoever sought to capture all of these organizations – from the CDC, the military, the Federal Reserve, the WEF, and the mainstream press – didn’t embark on these projects just to entertain themselves. They did this for a reason. This reason? They wanted to use these organizations to advance/achieve their goals.
To be more specific, they must have known that if they captured all of these organizations it would be almost impossible for any private citizens to stop their plans.
Our Side Actually has a Major Numeric Advantage
Still, the committed generals and staff officers who are seeking even more global control of the masses are…greatly outnumbered by people who are repulsed by their programs.
I’m currently working on a business idea that might supplement the dissident class of independent writers or “citizen journalists” found in the alternative media and on Substack.
In working on this project, I’m very interested in gauging the size of the market for content that resonates with the world’s population that still values freedom. This would be the group of citizens who is skeptical of the authorized narratives and values (genuine) “watchdog” journalism.
My estimate is there must be tens of millions of people who think like I do, people who would like to stop all the goals of the WEF, Davos, and WHO crowd.
The Tucker Carlson Metric
Perhaps the simplest way to estimate the size of this market is to examine the audience of one of the world’s best-known “contrarian journalists,” Tucker Carlson.
Before Carlson was fired by Fox News, his nightly news show routinely drew four million viewers per night, which made it the top-rated news program in North America. Over the course of a month, the show might have attracted 10 million viewers.
As we all know, Carlson was fired for producing content that was extremely popular with millions of adults. But Carlson didn’t disappear or stop producing “taboo” commentary and news segments, he simply moved to Twitter (now X) and kept doing the exact same thing.
Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin garnered more than 150 million views and his various streaming podcasts routinely double or triple the number of people he was reaching on Fox News.
Since Tucker covers many of the same “taboo” subjects I do, one can conservatively estimate that at least 10 million of Carlson’s regular viewers strongly oppose everything the world’s so-called leaders want to make a reality. And that’s just Carlson’s audience.
Substack has more than 35 million subscribers, probably 20 percent of whom are searching for content they know they won’t find in, say, the New York Times or CBS News. That would be a “market” of 7 million freedom-supporting citizens.
Tucker was recently the guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast show. Rogan probably has an audience just as large and loyal as Carlson. Indeed, in their wide-ranging and fascinating conversation, Rogan made the point that shows like his and Tucker’s should now be considered “mainstream”…because they reach far more viewers than, say, the newscasts of the big TV networks (which actually aren’t so big anymore).
As far as I can tell, all the “alternative media” outlets are growing rapidly while all the traditional news outlets are Dead Men Walking.
Again, this is an extremely encouraging sign for anyone who believes that skeptical and independent speech is important to help ensure a world where real freedom might continue to exist.
But I Haven’t Mentioned the Biggest Group of Citizens
While “our side” greatly outnumbers the figure of key employees occupying all the captured organizations, the real population group that matters is the immense group that is sitting out this existential battle for freedom.
The citizens who will probably determine the outcome of this battle are the people who have not discovered the Substack contrarians or who never watch Joe Rogan…or who think Tucker Carlson is a dangerous extremist who should have been fired by Fox (and should now be fired by Elon Musk and X). This group numbers in the billions.
(This would be the group that doesn’t want to think anymore about the Covid response or think about the possibility that scary-looking, worm-like clots might be in their veins and arteries right now.)
This group just wants to get through each day with adequate supplies of bread…and if they’re given a few mildly entertaining circuses to distract them from the challenges of their daily lives, that’s enough.
For this segment of the population, any big debate on “freedom” is either boring, not germane to their lives, or they love and appreciate Big Brother and are convinced he is protecting them.
What this means to you and me is that the denouement of this historic battle will be determined by a relatively small percentage of the world’s population.
On one side, we have the 200,000 or so leaders of thousands of important captured organizations. On the other side, we have 10 to 20 million citizens who’ve found each other in the alternative media. In the middle, we have a couple billion people who are oblivious to what’s really at stake.
Whatever way this massive middle group swings in the future, so goes the world.
One suspects the world’s real rulers know that their track record and planned agendas won’t stand up to close scrutiny. They know that their arguments are not as persuasive and could easily be debunked if our side’s arguments were to “go viral.”
To help keep this middle group indifferent or on their side, the Deep State concocted the concepts of disinformation and misinformation to smear or throttle the influence of those on our side.
The ever-growing Censorship Industrial Complex has performed its most important job with (disgusting) distinction. For now at least, the depressing truth is the masses don’t seem to care much about the issues that some of us think are tectonic.
This means recruiting the legions of people we need to recruit will be a strangely tough sale.
Our charge of persuading more of our neighbors to join our side has been made far more difficult by the false narrative that all of the important disinformation is coming from citizens like us, when, in fact, we don’t control any of the important information.
If and when the masses realize who’s been producing the real disinformation, freedom might pull an upset victory.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.
Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:
- Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
- EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
- “One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.
So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.
And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.
Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by Big Tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.
I wish it wasn’t true but here we are.
Before I go any further I need to make one thing clear: the notion that pandemics are driven by global warming is complete and total bullsh*t. The evidence is overwhelming that pandemics are created by the biowarfare industrial complex including the 13,000 psychopaths who work at over 400 US bioweapons labs (as described in great detail in The Wuhan Cover-Up).
Unfortunately “global warming” has become a cover for the proliferation of the biowarfare industrial economy.
Mann’s appearance at an event to raise money for people who are clearly guilty of genocide (and planning more carnage) made me realize that this really is World War III. They are straight-up telling us who they are and what they intend to do.
The different sides in this war are not nation-states. Instead, Team Tyranny is a bunch of different business interests pushing what has become a giant multi-trillion dollar grift. And Team Freedom is ordinary people throughout the world just trying to return to the classical economic and political liberalism that drove human progress from 1776 until 2020.
Here’s how I see the battle lines being drawn:
TEAM TYRANNY
Their base: Elites, billionaires, the ruling class, the biowarfare industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and bougie technocrats.
Institutions they control: WEF, WHO, UN, BMGF, World Bank, IMF, most universities, the mainstream media, and liberal governments throughout the developed world.
Economic philosophy: The billionaires should control all wealth on earth. The peasants should only be allowed to exist to serve the billionaires, grow food, and fix the machines when necessary. Robots and Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to replace most of the peasants.
Political philosophy: Centralized control of everything. Elites know best. The 90% should shut up, pay their taxes, take their vaccines, develop chronic disease, and die. High tech global totalitarianism is the best form of government. Billionaires are God.
Philosophy of medicine: Allopathic. Cut, poison, burn, kill. Corporations create all knowledge. Bodies are machines. Transhumanism is ideal. The billionaires will soon live forever in the digital cloud.
Their currency: For now, inflationary Federal Reserve policies. Soon, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will put the peasants in their place once and for all.
Policy vehicles to advance their agenda: One Health; WHO Pandemic Treaty; social credit scores; climate scores; vaccine mandates/passports; lockdowns and quarantine camps; elimination of small farms and livestock; corporate control of all food, land, water, transportation, and the weather; corporate control of social movements; and 15-minute cities for the peasants.
Military strategy: Gain-of-function viruses, propaganda, and vaccines.
TEAM FREEDOM
Our base: The medical freedom movement, Constitutionalists, small “l” libertarians, independent farmers, natural meat and milk producers, pirate parties, natural healers, homeopaths, chiropractors, integrative and functional medicine doctors, and osteopaths.
Aligned institutions: CHD, ICAN, Brownstone Institute, NVIC, SFHF, the RFK, Jr. campaign, the Republican party at the county level…
Economic philosophy: Small “c” capitalism. Competition. Entrepreneurship.
Political philosophy: Classical liberalism. The people, using their own ingenuity, will generally figure out the best way to do things. Decentralize everything including the internet. If the elites would just leave us alone the world would be a much more peaceful, creative, and prosperous place. Human freedom leads to human flourishing.
Philosophy of medicine: Nature is infinite in its wisdom. Listen to the body. Systems have the ability to heal and regenerate.
Our currency: Cash, gold, crypto, and barter. (I don’t love crypto but lots of smart people in our movement do.)
Policy ideas: Exit the WHO. Boycott WEF companies. Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, NCVIA Act, Patriot Act, and PREP Act. Add medical freedom to the Constitution. Prosecute the Faucistas at Nuremberg 2.0. Overhaul the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, USDA, FCC, DoD, and intelligence agencies. Make all publicly-funded scientific data available to the public. Ban insider trading by Congress. Support and protect organic food, farms, and farmers’ markets. Break up monopolies. Cut the size of the federal government in half (or more).
Our preferred tools to create change: Ideas, love for humanity, logic and reason, common sense, art and music, and popular uprising.
What would you add, subtract, or change in each of these lists?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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