“Dear Allan,
Argentina has been completely locked down for 38 weeks, the longest and most egregious immoral, illegitimate, and illegal evil tyranny in the world that I know of.
As far as I know, the mask mandate is permanent and without exemption. Everyone is masked from the toddlers to the elderly nearly bedridden. And the ‘Karen’s’ of South America are ready to take you to the ground, especially ‘gringos,’ if you don’t mask up.
I have reluctantly put on a bandana.
Allan, what words of advice can you give me?
-Anonymous”
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Places Become Prosperous Because They Adopt Freedom
Prosperous places on earth are prosperous because the people there adopted freedom.
The United States, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and many other places globally are prosperous. There are varying degrees of prosperity. Many factors have played a role. Universally, the ability for a people to gather together and implement a system with lots of room for individual freedom leads to prosperity.
I love Slovakia. I love Bratislava. The people there, unfortunately, agreed to the 6 million person population being PCR tested one weekend this fall en masse. Just like they accepted the 100,000 strong Jewish population being sent away in cattle cars en masse.
The two are not unrelated, though certainly many people would like to pretend that they have nothing in common. If you will do a small, mindless thing, you can be reliably counted on to do a big, mindless thing.
Taking A PCR Test Says A Lot About You
PCR testing is an unreliable diagnostic tool for Covid-19 and the world is being governed by this incredibly unreliable diagnostic tool. That is enough reason to have nothing to do with a PCR test.
The November 27, 2020 Corman-Drosten Review Report from 22 renown thinkers on the topic demonstrates “In light of our re-examination of the test protocol to identify SARS-CoV-2 described in the Corman-Drosten paper we have identified concerning errors and inherent fallacies which render the SARS-CoV-2 PCR test useless.”
It calls for the retraction of the heavily-cited January 23, 2020 paper that justifies the use of and establishes the protocol for RT-PCR testing to identify SARS-COV-2.
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These doctors and researchers are saying little new. This has long been known and established in the science on the topic. They are boldly calling for a retraction of junk science and putting their names on the line.
In the face of information like this, long established, Slovak public health officials mindlessly called for mass PCR testing and many Slovaks mindlessly followed.
Select politicians in the US are hoping to see their states become a lot like Slovakia in that regard: “The more failed a state becomes, the better” seems to be their mantra in 2020.
Brave People Resist
Brave people resisted. In every time and place, there are always brave people ready to resist.
It does not escape me that the brave individualists and health freedom advocates opposing one-size-fits-all solutions, people who are the opposite of Nazis, are being smeared in the media and popular culture as Nazis.
There may be no place I’d rather live after the United States than Slovakia, for traditional values are strong. Common sense abounds (on many topics). It’s an amazing culture.
I love Mexican culture. I love Filipino culture. Traditional values are strong in those places.
Traditional values can also align closely with following authority.
It is a small segment of the world population that can discern Godly authority from secular authority and to determine what secular authority is legitimate.
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Proper Explanations Can Convince Some People Of Anything
Given the proper explanations, Slovaks will wear the face masks, which means they will also take the vaccine. It also means they will deport the next group of people seen as Jews. And they will agree to pay the next Hitler 500 reichsmarks for the relocation of each of their Jewish fellow-citizens.
Not every Slovak. But a lot of Slovaks.
Do I dislike that culture? No, I love it. No place is perfect. Every place has their shortcomings.
There are many places in the world that would do the same. Eighty years ago, as World War II came to a start, American citizens were rounded up en masse and placed in concentration camps. I’d like to think America is different. It isn’t that different. It has a little more freedom than most places, a little more prosperity, and A LOT more people who will take a stand. That final thing is effectively the only thing that will keep Americans a little safer in bad times. The rest is practically meaningless. There is a slightly larger pro-freedom fringe culture in the United States than anywhere else I know.
That minor, heavily attacked segment of the population — the remnant, some may call it — is the only thing between the US and an ugly slippery slope.
And I don’t mean, people willing to avoid authority or to slip a bandana over their face in a game of “go along to get along.” I don’t mean the conflict avoidant who talk a big pro-liberty game. I don’t mean people who wear face masks with pithy anti-government messages. That is not at all what I mean. I mean people who will look authority in the eye and say “No!” and may even say “You are wrong and need to back down!”
That small group of Americans, maybe 1 in 10,000 strong is the only thing truly different about the United States.
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Now Is Not A Time To Be A Hermit
Now is not the time to be a hermit. Now is the time to surround yourself with as many liberty-minded people as possible, no matter where you live.
If you are living in an unfamiliar country, I can’t overestimate the harm you do to yourself by not having many (at least 15 or 20) who you are sure will come to your aid when needed.
You must find that remnant.
The Nature of Living in Traditional Society During a Time of Fear
Argentina offered you some benefits once upon a time. You will see some of those benefits disappear. This is the nature of living in a traditional society in an era of exacerbated fear.
It is a predictable aspect of traditional societies.
My advice is to get back to the US, or to some other beacon of human liberty you know and to surround yourself with as many likeminded people as possible.
Unless you have good reason to the contrary, stay away from San Francisco, Chicago, LA, New York and the rest. Though, there are verifiably thousands of people living in those cities completely unmasked, which may makes them a far better place than your current location.
Many people will not tell you this. It’s trendy in some circles to flee the US. Defecting is not all it’s cracked up to be. If they haven’t lived in the second world they don’t have good advice for you. Don’t let anyone who hasn’t lived outside of the US convince you to move outside of the US.
This is such an important point. It’s not all it’s cut out to be. You know that living in Argentina. There are trade-offs and those trade-offs aren’t for everyone. Now is not a time to be in a more traditional second world culture. Some of them can be really scary at a time like this.
Worse than having some idiotic tyrant yelling at you in English is having some idiotic tyrant yelling at you in incomprehensible Spanish.
If You Stay Put: Find Likeminded People
If you won’t leave, you need to find likeminded people. You must. This moment requires it. There must be ten people in Argentina not wearing a face mask right now and there are actually probably thousands and maybe millions out of the population of 45 million.
It has to become your mission to find them, for your sanity and for your safety. Don’t let anyone like that out of your sight without exchanging phone numbers.
You need to find smart and trustworthy people who will be able to tell you when it’s time to get out of Dodge.
It is foolhardy to stay in any place where you cannot assure yourself collaborators like that. Time and again, people who have lived through awful societal decline have recounted how shockingly quickly it all happened.
A Gift Of 2020
A gift of 2020 is that every free man suddenly has extreme, but not emergent, impetus to reorder his life for whatever ill may come: this includes practicing standing up to bad orders and bad actors, practicing speaking up, and practicing finding as many like-minded people as possible.
A common libertarian fallacy is that relocation makes all the difference. It doesn’t. It was not your relocation that made you free. It was always all about you.
Relocation helps in a big way if it helps you to get beyond a mental block and to live life more free. Moving an ocean away can help you distance yourself from ruts, routines, and bad influences and to be reborn in a fresh start.
I want to speak to an additional, important point about the benefit of relocation: the baseline.
The Baseline
The place you choose to live may come with some degree of temporal taxation: how much time you must dedicate to 1.) getting by in life and ideally 2.) having a fully functioning social circle around you.
If you have to spend your day worrying about whether or not you can carry a gun to protect yourself or worrying about whether or not there is election fraud taking place, your existence starts at a very different baseline than if you don’t need to worry about those things.
Some people can legitimately live a more free and prepared life in New York City or Portland, Oregon. Generally, those places provide a poor baseline for living more free.
This baseline is important and notable, but are not always enough to overcome the disadvantages of moving.
All other things being equal, moving is not a solution on its own. Ultimately it comes down to individual perspective and behavior.
Go To Church
Many libertarians are atheist or mushy about religion. If you take that position, I’d like you to please strongly revisit your reasons for that.
Maybe you had a bad experience with a priest or a nun. Maybe your mom put a lot of “holy” guilt on you and that psychotic nonsense was the most potent taste of religion you got. Thank goodness you freed yourself from that. Maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster is funny to you, because maybe you like to ridicule serious ideas in order to obtain a cheap laugh for whatever reason. I’ve met hundreds of anti-religionist libertarians that fall into these dynamics, and you probably have too.
Libertarianism, human rights, free markets as we know them emerge from Christianity. There is a Christian congregation of unmasked souls somewhere in that country, and you might be surprised to find hundreds of such congregations if you look. If you are a heady intellectual, there are plenty of flavors of Christianity from the most literal to the most figurative. If you need to call the Bible “a made up story” to walk in the door and tolerate an hour in the pew, please do that, because there are lots of made up stories that have offered me slices of truth. If you have to call prayer “meditation” or “a reading of affirmations,” please do that, because there are lots of times I’ve seen words spoken that have had great meaning and impact.
You’re in a place without a lot of allies. I’m thinking a church is where you are going to quickly find people who are 95% like you.
Go be with people who think like you. Don’t judge them for their differences. Embrace them for their desire to be the best they can be. You will find all kinds of people in a congregation, but in the right congregation you will mostly find people who go to church Sunday mornings because they are trying to be the best they can be.
Please Don’t Give In
The stakes are very low right now. The people who will tackle you over a mask will tackle you over much more severe topics. They will tackle you over the vaccines, over roundups, over mass imprisonment, over guns, over holding your own gold, and over whatever horrible intervention you can think of. You have a chance to train for the next stages. You need to figure out immediately how to stop wearing that mask or you need to get out of there now. I’m not kidding. In the blink of an eye this can get worse. If you can’t go maskless, you are not ready for worse.
No one should live anywhere that they can’t peacefully go through their day maskless. If you choose to do so even one more day, you choose to make yourself and those entrusted to you into sitting ducks.
Freedom Isn’t Free
This statement — freedom isn’t free — isn’t a reason for war. This statement is a reason that you must stand up for yourself and create freedom around you. It’s the only way you get freedom. If you are like most of us, you have coasted on the hard work of others without adding to freedom in the world.
In a foreign culture, it is incredibly hard to play that role of leader in a freedom cell. This is especially true of a foreign culture not well acclimated to having immigrants from around the globe. That shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, but is worth keeping in mind. Many immigrants have moved to the US, have become leaders, and have been embraced. America can be somewhat less parochial and closed off to outsiders in this regard.
The libertine style of libertarian and the loafer style of agorist exist because the freedom and prosperity developed by hard working, right-minded people of the past made our civilization possible.
Spending The Capital In The Trust Fund
From the Baby Boomers forward, no generation has cumulatively added to human freedom, they have only taken from the inheritance and spent it frivolously. That has happened in a literal sense and fiscally across the west as public and private debt mount, and it has happened in a far more important way: philosophically and spiritually.
We take for granted the notion that freedom is lasting and self-perpetuating, because freedom is all many of us have ever known.
If you compare 2019 to 2020, almost no one would have guessed in the blink of an eye at the Ides of March 2020, that corona communism would have been successfully implemented in the United States and vast parts of the world. It’s a communism far more significant than the USSR for the totality of the control that can be had by the technocratic elite in this day of such effective widely adopted technology is near limitless, for one. For a second reason, the USSR was never able to close the churches.
You don’t conquer a population by getting them to say “This sucks, I feel so oppressed and ready to rise up.” No, in fact it’s far more effective if you can get them to say “I’m managing this two-week temporary lockdown just fine, this all makes sense, and I’m ready for the new normal to save lives.” The latter is happening.
None of this can be taken for granted. You must earn every freedom around you that is vital to you and to know multiple ways to achieve that freedom.
Machismo, Machismo, Machismo
If you are going to stay in Argentina, start being the Argentinian cowboy who does not care who says what to them. It’s training. If events start coming together in the bad ways that they can, you are going to need to have thick skin.
Read About World War II
How did Madeleine Albright get from 3-year-old Jewish girl in Prague, destined for Auschwitz-lite to US Secretary of State? How did Ludwig Von Mises escape Austria, then Switzerland just in the nick of time, to become a poorly paid, barely recognized thinker starting off anew in a totally foreign land? It could have ended differently for both of them. Those are the stories you want to read. How did they pull it off? If you don’t already, you are going to need to start cultivating friends in positions of authority who will tell you what they are hearing and seeing. At least half of your time needs to be spent on this if you don’t already have contacts like this.
You are going to have to get yourself prepared to act on instinct. If you read the first 40 pages of Night by Elie Wiesel, it will tell you what not to do. That portion of the book presents the most disgusting, thick-headed, obedient complacency. The rest of the book presents possible consequences.
Know The Language
This is not an option. If you don’t know the language you are missing half of the advantage of living in a foreign country.
There’s no other way to be a responsible adult in a foreign land absent a convoy, body guards, personal assistants, and 24-7 translators and lawyers flanking you. Even that doesn’t entirely do the job accomplished by learning the language and learning to navigate the culture.
Language should not stop you from moving anywhere, but language should be an immediate priority once you touch down.
Carry a little notebook in your pocket, write down new words. Know how to tell people ”I don’t understand” and to “Please say it more simply.” Don’t let them speak to you in English.
Be ready to fail and be laughed at and misunderstood at least 1,000 times for each sentence you speak.
There’s no shortcut around this: you need to learn the language of any country you live in. You need to dedicate yourself to learning the language the first six months you live in a place. Every healthy person young and old has the ability to be dropped into the middle of a remote village today and to come out in two hours knowing basic vocabulary, in two weeks knowing basic sentences, and in two months with extensive ability to carry on a conversation. Everyone.
It’s not okay to live in a place and not know the language. It enfeebles you.
People In Failed States Love Official Looking Pieces Of Paper
One of the ways to know that you live in a failed state is the degree to which people bow down to pieces of paper as symbols of authority.
Just go to an office supply store or kiosk in a failed state (which are unimpressive with the exception of official looking stamps, ribbons, seals, and the like). These hold great sway in failed states.
Peggy Hall’s excellent methods of face mask exemptions involve placing official looking cards and laws and other pieces of paper in people’s faces. Bill Sardi not too long ago posted a link to a similar notion related to vaccine exemptions and safety. Both are excellent.
These two are realists on this topic and recognize that official-looking paper holds sway in the US. Effectively, they have declared it a failed state, or at least some parts of it.
With some glimmer of hope I hold onto a little idealism on this topic and hope that invoking an exemption does the job. I’ve written a book Face Masks in One Lesson on this very topic, meant to get you step-by-step through the process.
Read Your Local Face Mask Order
Fundamental to that book is the concept that one should take ten minutes to read the local face mask orders that apply to them. Knowing such details provides a lot of confidence on the topic.
In your situation, dear reader, you are going to need to find the local order. You need to do that today. You must not go to bed today without either having the law in your hand or boarding a plane to a place where you can easily obtain the law.
If you need help navigating governmental websites, get a Google Chrome browser and install the Google Translator app (requiring a total of 120 seconds of effort). That will give you very readable translations of full websites in real time.
I don’t particularly care for Google products, but I care for the idea of you in a foreign land unable to find the face mask order a lot less, so please hold your nose and download these Google products that will make this process easier for you.
Wielding Your Translated Face Mask Order
Once you find the local orders that apply to you, Google Translate it into English. Format it nicely in your word processor: boldface, bullets, official looking style and font and whatever else you can think of — maybe all caps on the very top. Perhaps boldface the medical exemptions portion. Print it up in English and in Spanish.
If a police officer ever approaches you, stick the English version in his hand. Let him figure it out. If he protests, let him protest a little. Eventually offer the Spanish version.
Then you must be ready with your doctor’s note if it comes to that. It must have stamps and seals and whatever you can get your doctor to place on it.
All those official-looking doodads impress bureaucrats in failed states. Bureaucrats and thieves are what law enforcement is reduced to in failed states.
Locals Need Not Leave Their Homeland, The Contrary May Be The Best Bet
None of this is to denounce a brave local. Thank you to that person for making the world a little more free. You may be looked at one day as a person who made your homeland into the most coveted and revered slice of land on this globe. Not long ago neither Switzerland nor Hong Kong were such well regarded places. No part of this is intended to be dismissive of the value of your homeland to you. Your homeland might not be the right place for an American or other foreigner at this juncture in world history.
You Are A Sitting Duck
I don’t know much about your life, but from what you’ve shared in this and another email, you are in a very vulnerable situation.
If you are to stay in Argentina, I advise you to surround yourself with a capable tribe. $20 goes a long way in Argentina these days. I advise you to develop relationships with politicians and police who are not knuckleheads (as some tend to be), and to make yourself into a person who they want to give a heads up to.
The success stories of the wartime migrants who survived World War II repeatedly show that they read the writing on the wall and relocated to as safe of a situation as possible and as quickly as possible. This story is told over and again.
The other option is to learn to be compliant and to hope someone else will stand up for you, ultimately turning back the mounting tide. Whatever reason they might have to put their neck on the line for a stranger is a risky bet to place.
German Pastor Martin Niemoller famously made a name for himself after World War II, spending the rest of his life explaining to audience-after-audience why that doesn’t work, and how badly he screwed up when he chose to place himself in that role. “First they came for the socialists…” is one of the tools he used to communicate that message.
Libertarians have studied all their lives for this moment. Now it’s time to act. Now it’s time to lead.
To do otherwise is mental masturbation.
My advice: get yourself somewhere that you can lead, prosper, and defend the freedom of you and your tribe. My sense is that you are not currently in that place.
Anyone unable to walk around unmasked is living in the wrong place and living unprepared.
You Must Not Call Anywhere Home Where You Are Unable To Walk 100% Unmasked
This doesn’t just go for you, dear reader, it goes for everyone who wants to live a more free life. If you can’t walk around 100% unmasked, you are living in the wrong place or are otherwise unprepared for the horrors of 2020 to turn into the far greater horrors of 2021. I don’t know the future. I just know, from many hundreds of conversations this year, that those who wear a mask are wearing a sign that announces many things about themselves to the world, one of those things being: I am entirely unprepared for the moment we are living in and for whatever may come next.
Being prepared is not just about MREs. It’s a state of mind.
If you live in Central Europe long enough and ask enough inquisitive questions to people who lived under the Nazi-allied First Slovak State and communist Czechoslovakia, which both offer the most awful stories, you come to realize what a gift it is to be able to reflexively recognize dehumanizing impositions on humanity for what they are and to never, ever normalize them.
During WWII, approximately 90,000 Slovak Jews never came home, because many of them chose to normalize rather than reject minor dehumanization, until step-by-step, everything was so palatable.
I cannot overestimate the importance of rejecting even the most minor dehumanization at this juncture in history.
This is one vital piece, in the only reliable method that I have ever found by which people survive a society that is in precipitous decline:
1.) Vigilance, alongside 2.) an insistence to act decisively, to 3.) keep wide boundaries between yourself and danger in the reckless moments of sudden decline.
If you live somewhere that you cannot go through the entire day unmasked, you are not ready for what comes next and are choosing to live your life subject to the whims of people least deserving of any input in your life.
There are some stories of people who beat the odds, but dozens of countries have mass graves from the last century filled with people who thought they would beat the odds while also affording themselves the luxury of ignoring the writing on the wall. History does not turn out well for people who choose to put themselves in that situation during unpredictable times.
The bestselling “Face Masks in One Lesson” is a newly released book from Allan Stevo that guides readers, step-by-step, through the process of never again wearing a mask: at the grocery store, at the veterinarian, at work, at school, on airplanes and many other places. It can be found on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and anywhere else you buy books online.
