August, 2023. It had been a summer of painful healing, in many ways. For me and for the country.
Slowly, men and women returned to workplaces, to bars, to restaurants; eventually these seemed to be in full force again.
Some communities, though, never recovered. I went to a church service in a modest neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York; there were only six parishioners, all elderly, in the pews. The deacon explained that the community had never recovered from being habituated to worship on Zoom.
When it was time for the traditional “kiss of peace,” the community “passed the peace.” What was that, I wondered? This turned out to be a practice left over from guidance received from the State, during the pandemic.
The parishioners turned and waved their arms at one another, like people on shore waving at a distant ship bearing loved ones away.
I thought of all the elderly who live alone, and for whom the hugs and kisses of times past, at church on Sunday, would have been the only human touch of their week.
Now that was gone.
So much was gone.
Elsewhere, things seemed to have gone “back to normal.” A young relative and I went to dinner on a lovely summer night in Hudson, New York. We chose a Thai restaurant. It had a spacious, festive outdoor seating area, decorated with lights and planters and Buddhist prayer flags. There was a soundtrack of Grateful Dead music.
Diners had brought their dogs, so dogs of all shapes, sizes, and breeds sat peacefully at their families’ feet, smiling, bowls of water nearby.
Puffy clouds drifted overhead as the late afternoon turned into a blue evening, deepening with the beat of the music, and a sense of camaraderie descended over us all.
“See?” said my young relative. “Everything is back to normal.”
I bit my tongue, smiled, and said nothing.
I did not say, We nearly killed ourselves fighting to get this back for you and your generation. I did not say, Half of these people would have left me to eat in the street like an animal, six months ago, instead of here among them, if the mandates had told them to go along with that.
I nodded my head in silence.
In thirty-three states, my organization DailyClout helped to pass our “Five Freedoms” bill: No mask mandates; open schools now; no vaccine mandates; freedom of assembly; end emergency law.
That and other fights had helped to keep the US free, relative to other nations, by summer of 2023. This, that is, compared to the ruination in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where formerly robust democracies had become vassal states in many ways. In Australia, as you recall, protesting citizens had been fired on by rubber bullets, and in New Zealand, police had used sound cannons against protesters.1 When I did podcasts to those countries, the brave and resistant citizens looked drained and haunted. Canada was a charnel house; the protesting truckers had had their bank accounts frozen in 2022.2 Until October 2022, Canadians living in the US were not able to cross the border to see their families if they were unvaccinated.3
The so-recently free, open society, just north of us, was unrecognizable.
At the end of August 2023, after we had released seventy-nine reports detailing this greatest crime against humanity in recorded history, Pfizer’s manufacturing demand had collapsed. The company’s quarterly report attributed the drop in demand to noncompliance. The Moderna papers began to be released via court order; we found that Moderna too, like Pfizer, knew that they were destroying (and studying the destruction of) female mammals’ reproduction. It had always been a false choice—“Team Pfizer” and “Team Moderna”—and the results were now in.
As I noted earlier, in Sweden, live births were down 8.3 percent.4 Maternal deaths were up 40 percent, and two independent midwives as well as fetal-maternal medicine specialist Dr. James Thorp attributed the dangers now facing women in childbirth to the impaired placentas of many vaccinated women. The placentas were falling apart during childbirth, they all testified separately, terribly raising the risks to moms as well as babies. Multiple studies confirmed the story we had broken—that vaccinated women’s cycles were disrupted, and that there was mRNA and other vaccine material in vaccinated mothers’ breast milk. Breast feeding was down, from 34 percent of all new moms and babies to 14 percent. Dr. Thorp, along with the two independent midwives whom I mentioned, also warned that babies were now being born with fetal malformations, chromosomal malformations, and many other problems.5
The very sick passed away.
Excess deaths were up 11 percent in Britain in 2022.6 The United States’ excess deaths were up a stunning 1,273,971 since 2020. The United Kingdom, 216,749. Italy, 240,705.7
Edward Dowd reported on disabilities in the US workforce and made the case, using government and insurance data, that the numbers of people who described themselves as disabled had risen by 10 percent since the rollout of the mRNA vaccine. He found that millennials aged 25 to 44 had an 84 percent increase in excess mortality.8
And yet—and yet. In spite of all of this trauma, we began to heal, as if we were new tentative growth after a massive wildfire.
Then, in August 2023, a new “variant,” Eris—which is the name for the Greek goddess of discord and strife—was introduced to the world’s press.9 And a “booster” that allegedly protected against this new “variant” was also promoted in the press. This happened, though the FDA advisory panel had recommended in June of 2023 that upcoming mRNA boosters be approved in advance—even as this “variant” was yet unknown. In other words, the press campaign for the “new variant” came out after the product had been created, but before it was FDA-approved—and after a global drop in demand had been sustained by the mRNA vaccine manufacturers, for two quarters.10 “Overall, Moderna’s second-quarter sales crashed 93 percent to $344 million . . . Moderna noted lower demand for its COVID vaccine, the company’s only commercial product.”11
Why pass up revenue of billions?
Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia, reintroduced masks, social distancing and quarantines.12 Rutgers University brought back indoor masking for the Fall semester, and incoming students must abide by a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, according to the school website. The mandate says there will be no exceptions.13
So, after a deceptive lull, a chill wind rose up again against humanity.
As the stories in the media proliferated, preparing us all for more repression ahead, this time with all the core elements of the oppressor’s toolkit debunked in terms of “the science,” I thought of the 1965 experiment on “learned helplessness,” in which psychologist Martin Seligman shocked one group of dogs in a context in which they learned to escape, then gave the second group of dogs shocks in a context of no escape. This caused the second group of dogs to give up. The animals seemed to conclude that no action on their part would affect their environment. Humans learn to be helpless as well, if bad things happen to them that they cannot avert.14
As we braced for this new fight, one as stupid and pointless, if not more so, as the old fights, I considered how sick of it all I was.
We were now back in Salem, Massachusetts, visiting again. I took an afternoon and went on a long walk. I ended up at a casual outdoor music festival that was held in a handful of tents that extended alongside the storied harbor. It was a warm, bright afternoon. Historic ships were anchored near the dock.
Under a white canvas tent, a band played songs from my youth. A handful of listeners sat on folding chairs. A number of older people were there, and some were dancing.
There were almost no people in their twenties or thirties or forties. Who knows where they were? Maybe the habit of joining together for music and dancing, of participating “irl” (in real life), had been extinguished in them, just as the “kiss of peace” had been extinguished in the churchgoers in Brooklyn.
Was this practice too, this human behavior that creates meaning and community—that separates us from animals—dead, at least for some of us?
One grandmother sat on a folding chair, holding a six-month-old boy on her lap.
She danced a little, while seated, holding her grandson’s hands. She beat their hands together gently to the music.
The wind from the harbor mounted up and blew. The flaps of the canvas tent rattled.
A revered physician in the freedom movement, who had issued early warnings about what humanity faced via medical tyranny, had said, before he died in 2022, that he believed that these years would prove to be a test for humanity from God.
Were we indeed hurtling, as if in a storm, helplessly ourselves, and with no help from anywhere else, into an abyss of destruction?
Or was there still somehow a loving, unseen hand on the tiller?
There would be storms ahead.
The little boy’s eyes were wide open as he listened to the music.
The wind shook the canvas harder, like an angry intruder.
But the child listened, transfixed, to the drums; to the guitar.
He listened to the soaring human voice.