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Freedom Convoy leaders’ trial concludes for 2023 but will resume in 2024

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5 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The trial, which began on September 5, 2023, was supposed to have lasted just over two weeks.

The trial against Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber has concluded for 2023 but will be back again early next year.  

Last Thursday, day 33, was the last day of the trial for 2023. The court is expected to resume on January 4, 2024. 

During day 33 of the trial, the Democracy Fund (TDF), which is crowdfunding Lich’s legal costs, noted that the court will resume in 2024 with a “voir dire,” or trial within a trial, to be “held over how comments made by the judge presiding over the Ottawa injunction order of February 2022 should be treated.” 

“In the days following, there should be a decision on the defense motion to dismiss the Carter application,” noted TDF.  

The trial, which began on September 5, 2023, was supposed to have lasted only a few weeks.  

Last year, lawyers for both sides agreed that 16 days would be a reasonable amount of time to have a fair case. The Crown however took a long time in going through its witness list, which slowed the pace of the trial to a crawl. 

On Day 33 of the trial, legal counsel for Barber reiterated to the court that it’s not a “crime” that the leaders did not tell people to leave Ottawa, as the Crown claims it was.  

Thus far, per TDF, the Crown has asserted “that the absence of violence or peaceful nature of the protest didn’t make it lawful, emphasizing that the onus was on the Crown to prove the protest’s unlawfulness.”  

The Crown in court has been holding steadfast to the notion in trying to prove that Lich and Barber had somehow influenced the protesters’ actions through their words as part of a co-conspiracy. This claim has been rejected by the defense as weak.  

To back the claims up, the Crown has been hoping to use what is called a “Carter application” to help them make their case. The Crown’s so-called “Carter Application” asks that the judge to consider “Barber’s statements and actions to establish the guilt of Lich, and vice versa,” TDF stated.  

TDF has said that a Carter application is very “complicated” and requires that the Crown prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that there was a “conspiracy or plan in place and that Lich was a party to it based on direct evidence,” and as such, the defense is asking the judge to dismiss the application.  

The reality is that Lich and Barber worked with police on many occasions so that the protests were within the law.   

On day 32 of Lich Barber’s trial, the defense counsel for the leaders exposed gaps in the Crown’s main argument that the protests were unlawful even though there was no violence during the demonstrations. 

Lich and Barber are facing multiple charges from the 2022 protests, including mischief, counseling mischief, counseling intimidation and obstructing police for taking part in and organizing the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy. As reported by LifeSiteNews at the time, despite the non-violent nature of the protest and the charges, Lich was jailed for weeks before she was granted bail.  

In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast-to-coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government enacted the Emergencies Act on February 14.  

During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, one protester, an elderly lady, was trampled by a police horse, and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister.  

Lich and Barber’s trial has thus far taken more time than originally planned. LifeSiteNews has been covering the trial extensive.  

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COVID-19

Leaked documents: German gov’t lied about shots preventing COVID, knew lockdowns did more harm than good

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Berlin, Germany – 24 March 2020: The sign in front of the Robert Koch-Institut in Berlin.

From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

Germany’s top health agency privately admitted that the idea of a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ is ‘not correct’ but supported it because it ‘serves as an appeal to all those who have not been vaccinated,’ leaked documents revealed.

Leaked documents from a top German health agency show that politicians knew the experimental COVID shots did not prevent the transmission of the virus but advocated for jab mandates anyway.

On July 23, independent journalist Aya Velázquez published the un-redacted miutes of the German Robert Koch Institut (RKI, comparable to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) from its meetings regarding the COVID crisis between 2020 and 2023. Velázquez said she received the un-redacted documents from a whistleblower who used to work for the RKI. Parts of the so-called “RKI files” had already been published in March this year, after the RKI was forced to publish them due to a lawsuit. However, many key parts of the files had been redacted.

Velázquez wrote that the now fully un-redacted files show “that the RKI unfortunately spoke out in favor of both facility-based and general compulsory vaccination despite the knowledge of the lack of protection from transmission and serious side effects.”

The minutes from an RKI meeting on November 5, 2021, demonstrate that the idea of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” that was propagated by politicians and mainstream media members was made up and not based on any facts.

“The media are talking about a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the minutes state. “From a factual point of view this is not correct, the entire population is contributing. Should this be taken up in communication?”

The document noted that this phrase, although factually incorrect, “serves as an appeal to all those who have not been vaccinated to get vaccinated.”

It furthermore states that the minister of health “says it at press conference, presumably deliberately, cannot be corrected.”

During the fall and winter months of 2021 and early 2022, German politicians repeatedly used the term “pandemic of the unvaccinated” to blame those who refused the experimental COVID jabs for “the pandemic” and all COVID-related measures. The government also used this line of reasoning to ban the unjabbed from participating in many parts of society, including having certain jobs, attending restaurants, shopping at stores, and many other areas.

Epoch Times Deutsch said that during this time, the unvaxxed faced “a level of exclusionary pressure that is unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

During the press conference held by the team around the journalist Aya Velázquez, Professor Stefan Homburg said an entry in the documents from March 19, 2021, showed that the RKI already knew that the AstraZeneca COVID shot had caused several cases of sinus vein thrombosis, barely 11 weeks into the “vaccination” campaign.

Homburg is an emeritus professor of economics who was the head of the public finance department of the Leibniz University in Hannover and who became one of the most well-known and formidable critics of the COVID tyranny in Germany.

Homburg furthermore said that the RKI files showed that the RKI and the Paul Ehrlich Institut (PEI) deliberately gave false testimony in court, for instance, in regard to protecting German soldiers against transmission of the virus. “In this respect, they could now be charged in court for unsworn testimony with reference to these minutes,” said Homburg.

According to the available data, Homburg said that the overall situation can be described as a “deception of the public.”

He told the Epoch Times that “the authorities deliberately deceived the public for years at the behest of politicians.”

Journalist Bastian Barucker told the Epoch Times that the documents showed that when Health Minister Jens Spahn announced school closures in November 2021, the RKI “had long known that this was not correct.”

In parts of the RKI files that were already released in March, the minutes of a meeting from January 11, 2023, show that the RKI knew that lockdowns cause more harm than good. “The consequences of the lockdown are sometimes more severe than Covid itself,” the document stated.

At the conclusion of the press conference, Velázquez said, “The RKI protocols prove it: Our corona policy was not based on rational, scientific considerations.”

“Numerous political decisions, such as 2G [full participation in society only given to vaxxed or recovered individuals], the facility-based and planned general vaccination mandate, or the vaccination of children, were purely political decisions for which the RKI, as an authority bound by instructions, provided an alleged scientific legitimation,” the journalist said

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Brownstone Institute

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

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From the Brownstone Institute

By IAN MILLER

By late 2020, the media and public health establishment had two obsessions. One of their obsessions involved forcing the public to wear masks, even though the mountains of data and several studies had already confirmed that they don’t stop the transmission of respiratory viruses. The second obsession was forcing everyone to take Covid vaccines, regardless of their actual efficacy, risk of side effects, age or underlying health, or the vaccines’ rapidly waning efficacy.

Neither of those obsessions has abated, though even the most extreme, hardened Covid extremists have acknowledged that the vaccines were flawed, mandates were a mistake, and side effects should be acknowledged.

The media, unwilling to give up on the increased power, influence, and moral judgment it gained during the pandemic, has refused to accept that it effectively ended years ago.

So it’s no surprise that media outlets have noticed that, as we’ve seen every single summer since 2020, cases have increased, predominantly across the Western and Southern United States. Thankfully though, Los Angeles media, of course it had to be Los Angeles, has determined the culprit.

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

Turns out it’s not seasonality causing the increase, it’s outdated Covid vaccines and a lack of public masking, of course!

NBC Los Angeles “reported” that Covid cases in California and Los Angeles have “doubled” in the last month. This sounds horrifying and scary, doesn’t it? Yet it again, as is so often the case with Covid coverage, is misleading.

Let’s take a look at the current daily average of new cases in Los Angeles County:

Cases are so low they’re functionally indistinguishable from zero.

You can see why the media is scared, given how dramatic this surge appears to be compared to those in the previous four years. And thanks to NBC’s crack reporting and expert analysis, we know why this terrifying increase is happening. Spoiler alert: it’s all your fault that you haven’t controlled an uncontrollable respiratory virus with individual behavior that has no impact whatsoever on the spread of the coronavirus.

“People aren’t necessarily wearing masks; they’re not required to in certain places,” nurse practitioner Alice Benjamin, referenced as an expert by NBA LA said. “We’re traveling, we’re getting out for the summer. We also do have some reduced immunity. The vaccines will wane over time.”

Nowhere in the story is it mentioned that the massive jump in Covid cases in late 2021 and early 2022 happened immediately after LA County Public Health issued a press release celebrating the county for achieving 95+ percent masking rates at indoor businesses. No one seems willing or able to ask this nurse practitioner why she believes wearing masks would reduce this “surge,” if it failed so spectacularly in previous surges.

Endless Misinformation from ‘Experts’

She wasn’t done with the misinformation though. Benjamin warned that not enough Angelenos are getting the “updated” vaccine, which explains the summer increase.

“If you got it in October and later, that’s generally the updated vaccine,” Benjamin said. “If you got it prior to October, double check because if you did get the bivalent which has not been phased out, we recommend you do get an updated vaccine.”

And according to her, everyone should get it. Because the CDC said so.

“Per CDC recommendations, anyone 6 months or older should have at least one of the updated Covid vaccines,” Benjamin said.

Though, of course, no one on the crack NBC Los Angeles team thought to ask Benjamin why the “updated” October vaccine would help against the now common FLiRT variant when it emerged six months after the “updated” vaccine was released. Especially when the “study” process for booster doses is effectively nonexistent anyway. Pfizer and Moderna churn out a “targeted” dose that is supposed to protect against a variant that’s no longer circulating, never has to show any real-world benefit, and the regulatory agencies sign off on it, while the CDC recommends everyone get it.

Rinse, repeat.

Nor did anyone ask her what possible rationale there could be for forcing six-month-old babies to get vaccinated with a booster that has no studied efficacy against the currently circulating variant.

Her comments and the media reaction exemplify the problems with Covid discourse that started in 2020 and will apparently continue forever. A complete and purposeful ignorance of the facts, the data, and the evidence base. A willingness to advocate for the same sort of restrictions and interventions that have already failed. Ignorance of the booster process and endless appeals to public health authorities. Even though those authorities have made countless mistakes and refused to update their findings after being proven wrong.

The obvious question is: How does this type of absurdist discourse ever end? The answer, as we continue to see, is it doesn’t.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Ian Miller is the author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.” His work has been featured on national television broadcasts, national and international news publications and referenced in multiple best selling books covering the pandemic. He writes a Substack newsletter, also titled “Unmasked.”

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