“And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is gray is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny.” —Albert Camus, “Socialism of the Gallows”
You live in upstate New York in a small town that’s next to a small, expensive liberal arts college. Some of its students, faculty, and staff live here, too. As you walk or drive around, you still see “Black Lives Matter” lawn signs tilting in the spring-soddened front yards, and limp blue and yellow Ukrainian flags hanging from laundry lines, budding trees, and porches strewn with winter’s remaining splinters of firewood. It’s looking like the circus has come and gone and left its litter behind.
These so-called “virtue signals”—signs of people gesturing protest but taking no effective action—remain in storefronts and restaurants, too, and are so rampant that the number of a places where you will continue to do business has shrunk considerably. What you’re running up against is this: If out front of these establishments you see any of these signs, you walk on by.
You walk on by because you refuse to drop one penny into the hands of anyone contributing to this slow-motion destruction of the highest ideals of American life: economic liberty, individual agency, social cooperation. These signs may seem insignificant, the ranting of the uninformed. Uninformed, yes. Insignificant, no. Because no democracy can survive without an informed populace. And we’re being fed lies upon lies in ever increasing incremental measures. This is how it works, in small steps here and there across the nation. Until one dark day everything everywhere has changed and changed completely. Individual nails pounded into the coffin to bury democracy once and for all. An entire nation founded the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness sleeping the big sleep. Dead.
This is what you understand this to be. This is where you see these steps are heading. You don’t believe you’re being hyperbolic. You’re quite sure this is not some fevered dream or dystopian fiction emanating from the deepest and darkest reaches of your imagination. To you, this is not a drill. To you, it’s chillingly real and it’s serious and, out of an abundance of care and concern for this country that you love, you want no part of it.
Elon Musk Tweeted: “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters.” Say what you will about Musk, he called that one. It’s a virus far more destructive to our nation’s health and well-being than COVID-19 ever was—because COVID-19 never was. In many ways, it began in earnest with the psyop behind the fake pandemic that put billions of people—many of them unsuspecting victims, but also many who were thrilled to jump on the “we can do this” bandwagon and drag others on with them lest they burn in conspiracy theory hell—into the deepest trance in human history to get them to line up en masse for the toxic jabs to supposedly stop the non-existent virus from spreading, while blinding them to the campaign’s actual control and depopulation agenda. Now, many of those same casualties of the cabal are parading through a carnival of woke causes designed to enrage, distract, and divide us. You want to snap your fingers to wake them all up from their trance, but you might as well scream into a gale and expect your voice to be heard on Mars.
Over the last few years, a town next door to yours has been invaded by people having fled to the countryside from New York City. One evening during the peak of the protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, your partner returned to her apartment to find dozens of people out on the one street that runs through town with chalk in their hands, filling the sidewalks with their graffiti. Someone had scrawled “Defund the Police,” like a playground’s cheeky message about how somebody loves somebody else. The fact that someone had written this—and believed it a good thing, a helpful thing—speaks to the very successful and highly effective level of insidious indoctrination by the globalists determined to unhinge their hypnotized prey to wreck this country from within by its own citizenry.
The protest had been organized by a 30-something white woman, formerly from Brooklyn. Before the fake pandemic, she and her husband had opened up a new and popular restaurant in town. Your partner and you had gone to that restaurant quite often. You liked the atmosphere and the food and the people who worked there. Now, after the “Defund the Police” fiasco, you both cut the restaurant out of your lives. Organizing a protest calling for the police to be defunded is just plain stupid. And not to put too fine a point on it, but you want to defund stupidity, not the police.
To be sure, anger over the police killing of George Floyd was the only correct response. So should it be for the police killing of anyone of any race who is unarmed and not a threat. But you are quite sure that scribbling “Defund the Police” on a small-town sidewalk is not going to stop that from happening to anyone, anywhere. And calling out that Black lives alone matter sows racial division and discord designed and fomented by the globalist cabal that has our civilization in its crosshairs. You wonder: If Black lives alone matter, then what about Asian lives? Hispanic lives? American Indian lives? Alaska Native lives? Native Hawaiian lives? Pacific Islander lives? White lives? Multiracial lives? Don’t all human lives have intrinsic value? If not, which ones do not? Which ones do? And who gets to decide? In a nation that’s aggressively pursuing equality and inclusion, how can the lives of one race matter more than another?
So many questions. But here’s what you believe is going on: This is all a part of the psychopathic regime’s crusade of cultural nihilism, which in its fiendish eyes must take place because Western civilization—particularly American civilization—must completely collapse so a new world order of the Great Resetcan be swept in. With devious tactics like this, we are all being baited to turn on each other instead of on those who are cleverly orchestrating this orgy of vitriol and violence. Not to mention the fact that untold numbers of people of every race all around the world—including children—are being killed and maimed by the regime’s COVID-19 jabs. Imagine if we all locked arms and raged against this beast and proclaimed: “All Lives Matter.” But, no. This is not what the regime wants us to stand for; they just won’t have it and will stop at nothing to make sure it doesn’t happen.
This isn’t about old timers versus newcomers, age versus youth, tradition versus modernization. It’s about knowledge versus ignorance, freedom versus servitude, discernment versus gullibility. At the end of the day, it’s about human freedom versus the oppressive and malevolent machinations of the State. It’s an old war that’s repeated itself over and over again, but because of the State’s current vast and relentless techno-driven grip, its reach is wider, more insidious, and more powerful than ever before. Your one-man boycott is no match against this Leviathan with thousands of tentacles invading every quarter of our lives. But like Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent but active resistance against the British Empire taught you years ago, you just won’t allow yourself to be complicit in any of its madness as much as it’s possible for you.
During the peak of Coronamania this new restaurant had boasted on Facebook that proof of the COVID-19 jab, like some token of honor rather than the mark of the beast that it really is, was required to get in the door. This is another reason you’ll never go back. You also remember the many other restaurants you used to go to within a few miles of your home whose owners taped to their doors hastily written notices that said they required proof that customers got the clot shots. Even though that segregation has ended for now, you’ll never go back to these places, either. Doing so would, by your lights, pardon an inexcusable and pathological combination of bottom-feeding idiocy and malice you’ll never forget. Your short-term memory may be fading but your long-term memory is photographic.
In some places, the ravages of Coronamania are still being played out by willing hands. Just the other day, you walked past a Chinese food restaurant in another nearby town and thought you’d drop in to get some dumplings to go. As you approached the door you saw a handwritten sign that demanded people wear a mask if they are unvaccinated. You stopped in your tracks. Not because you’ve not gotten the jab and didn’t have a mask, but because of this ignorant and sinister policy. No dumplings to go for you today. No dumplings of any sort from there ever again. As you walked away you wondered what sort of food would come from a kitchen infested with such rabid fear?
You are also never going back to concert venues that had required patrons to be fully jabbed. Nor will you listen any longer to the musicians you once admired who pushed the jabs and condemned everyone who rightfully refused to turn themselves into human guinea pigs with the distinct possibility of being injured or killed as a result. You’re thinking of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen—musicians you loved for decades until they revealed themselves to be sing-along sock puppets for the Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Government, Big Media cartel.
You’ve not hurled their treasured LPs and CDs into a roaring bonfire in your backyard. Not yet, anyway. But you won’t be buying anything new these spineless sell-outs produce, and you won’t be going to see them perform anywhere ever again—if they’re even around much longer, having gotten jabbed and boosted at every street corner like junkies craving another needle full of smack. And it’s not because you don’t like their music any longer. You still do; it’s that good. Rather, it’s their dishonesty, their failure to stand up to what they used to call “the man” and fight for the liberties they once championed. Now, they’ve surrendered. Worse, they’ve become traitors. Turncoats. So, those days are over, too.
You’re no longer going to movie theaters because going to the movies just isn’t fun anymore, never mind the fact that most of the actors are Scamdemic hucksters, as well. You’re socializing less because you’ve lost several friends to deep and what appears to be terminal Coronamania. And you’ve said good-bye to publications you used to revere and that have all been captured and zombified—The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers. You’ve also said good-bye to a local radio station you used to listen to in your car because listening to the entranced mockingbird-media disk jockeys blathering the party line might make you lose your patience and cause an accident.
Above and beyond all of this, you’re quietly leaving the cultural and spiritual world in which you were once a devotee. You have mixed emotions about this. You’re bereft (because something important to you has died), you’re angry (because it didn’t have to be this way), and you’re wistful (because you really enjoyed it all). Art openings, book readings, play productions, museums, meditation retreats, even local church services. You’re leaving them all because, at the heart of the matter, you feel betrayed by that world, a world that swallowed the globalist’s lies and turned on you and turned you out, inflicting scars so deep that it almost feels like you’re walking away from an emotionally, psychologically, and physically abusive relationship. A relationship in which you—and so many other sane, insightful, and persistent freedom fighters—were heckled, harassed, and bullied for standing up for common, essential human rights.
“You’re being played,” you want to kindly tell all of them—family members, former Covidian friends, restaurant owners, anyone who will listen. “Played by a ruling class that wants to divide and conquer us, rob us of our freedom, break our spirit, kill us.” But you don’t. Because you can’t. Because they won’t understand. And because you don’t know where you would even begin to read from the long scroll of the unfathomably deep and enormous lies that we’ve been told for years that these days, according to one of your favorite raconteurs, James Howard Kuntsler, are all about “inciting war, recklessly running up debt, persecuting its own citizens and stealing their liberties, subjecting them to medical malfeasance, destroying their goods production and food-growing capabilities, and subjecting the public to incessant mind-fuckery in a campaign to falsify and disfigure reality.”
The dots are all connected and those who partake of this trail of toxic crumbs might well be leading us straight to a total and permanent dictatorship. We are witnessing the ruling regime’s finest hour, and our darkest. They are exploiting us by having spun an illusion of empathy and benevolence—get the jab to keep granny safe, social distance so we can get life back to normal, wear a mask to protect others, support the Black Lives Matter movement to end racism, hate Russia and its “unprovoked attack” and support poor Ukraine because….why?—while atomizing all of us, and then reconfiguring all of us as if with magnets into warring factions to do their bidding to destroy our democratic and sacrosanct freedoms, demolish the family unit, turn friends against friends, and crush small businesses, the backbone of the American economy. You see how they are undermining our cherished, innate bonds of love, kinship, and friendship, thus contributing to the devolution of civilized society and the common good. And all of it intentional, all of it by design. “Despotism…” Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his book, Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes, 1835 and 1840), “is never more secure of continuance than when it can keep men asunder; and all its influence is commonly exerted for that purpose.”
Those words were written a few years shy of 200 years ago. We’ve come a long way. We’ve gone nowhere.
You look at the map of your life. You read: “You are here” on the road less traveled. On this map there is another road. And you see that there are people living two parallel lives: the one you’re in and the other one that feels alien to you and to which you feel utterly disconnected. That life looks out of register, sounds off-key, feels wrong, has nothing to say or offer to you. You still have a handful of friends living in that parallel existence and to them and their friendship you remain committed. Your bonds, though tested, are strong. But you can’t abide by, or make sense of, anything else in that other life because it is either irrelevant or farcical. So little makes sense until you come back around to the conclusion that creating confusion is one of the ruling elite’s tactics. Confused people are anxious people and anxious people are more easily manipulated than people with clear heads and their feet on the ground.
You sometimes wax nostalgic for your life before the Scamdemic. It had been a good run. But it seems like a lovely, distant dream, partly because the change was so quick, unexpected, and devastating. You feel as if one day in March 2020 you were hit hard on the head from behind and you turned with stars in your eyes to find the person who did it had vanished into the crowd. It could have been anyone who’d taken that swing because they all looked away as if to say, “Wasn’t me.” Talk about an unprovoked attack.
You ask yourself if your boycotts are contributing to the cultural divisions you claim to be against. But then you remind yourself we are living in an occupied country in a “5th Generation War” in which each one of us is an involuntary and unwitting combatant in the throes of an all-out battle for our collective mind. You are part of the resistance in this war. Your boycotts are one small way in your effort to win. You think if you do this maybe others will do it, too. You’re not going around smashing the windows, breaking down the doors, or turning over any of the tables in any of these restaurants, grocery stores, concert venues, art galleries, bookstores—any place whose management has given itself over to the plague of deception and lies, which is the real pestilence troubling the world. You’re just not going to show up. You’re just going to hold your head high and walk on by.
It’s heartbreakingly clear that for you there’s no going back to all those lost friends, lost establishments, and lost musicians and celebrities, all whom betrayed you and are now blithely acting as if nothing massively nefarious happened the past three years—and that nothing massively nefarious is happening now. Nor is there any going forward without all of us coming grips with the assault were under, and doing something about it. So, one thing you’re doing is, day by day, step by step, you’re leaving that lost world simply by not participating in it. And so are many others, if only by switching brands of products they buy as they put their dollars where their values lay, notably in the recent boycott of Bud Light beer.
Even more so, it feels like a kind of exodus of awakened people, not just from one place to another, like the biblical exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land—although that is happening among freedom-seekers, including friends of yours, leaving blue states for red—but also from one frame of mind to another. From granting license or acceptance to the cabal’s campaign to delude and destroy us, to questioning everything that comes from the government and its bootlickers in the mainstream media, both of them doing whatever they can to violate the Constitution on the one hand and pretend to be protecting democracy on the other.
Not only that, but also leading us down a treacherous path in this proxy war with Russia via Ukraine along with some saber-rattling with China, neither of which can possibly end well. We might soon be taken down into the biggest of the big sleeps of all time. We’re being told these are defensive moves rather than outright aggression. You’re no geopolitical strategist. You’re also not blind. You see the trick as if you’re standing behind the magician on the stage and can observe what he’s doing to fool the bedazzled crowd out front. You’re amazed that the crowd can’t see what you can see because it’s so obvious.
Time was when much of the liberal cause, of which you used to be a part, was against war. Now it seems the entire endeavor is all in. What happened? This is not a rhetorical question. But you don’t have an answer. When you were in college and wore a button that read: “Question Authority.” You wish you still had it because you’d wear it now. This is not a virtue signal. It is an emblem proclaiming your approach to each and every moment of your life, a permanent state of distrust of those who somehow think they have every right to pump injurious and deadly toxins into your body, suck the life out of you, then manipulate you and every other living soul on earth by turning all of us into serfs, digitally shackled to a vast and unaccountable matrix of surveillance and domination. And to think that most of us are just trying make a go of having a happy and fulfilling life. As if that were too much to want for ourselves.
Renowned French author, Albert Camus, who is quoted above, was part of the French Resistance during the WWII Nazi occupation of parts of France, including Paris, where Camus lived throughout much of the war. In 1943, he began writing articles for the clandestine resistance newspaper, Combat. You admire him for taking on that dangerous task and for the eloquence with which he avowed his stance. In an essay, the third of four “Letters to a German Friend,” he wrote in April 1944: “Sometimes on a street corner, in the brief intervals of the long struggle that involves us all, I happen to think of all those places in Europe I know well. It is a magnificent land molded by suffering and history…. And so I know that everything in Europe, both landscape and spirit, calmly negates you without feeling any rash hatred, but with the calm strength of victory. The weapons the European spirit can use against you are the same as reside in this soil constantly reawakening in blossoms and harvests. The battle we are waging is sure of victory because it is as obstinate as spring.”
Lo, spring is come here now, as obstinate as ever. Sometimes you step outside and marvel at the natural world around you. You think that America, too, has been “molded by suffering and history.” Here in upstate New York, American Revolutionary War skirmishes had occurred within just a few miles around where your home now stands. Continental soldiers were killed and their blood drained into the earth, houses were torched and their ashes rose up into the sky. Within just more than an hour’s drive from your home, the Battles of Saratoga occurred in September and October 1777, a crucial turning point that gave a decisive victory to the Americans over the British in the revolutionary war.
Living here in the shadows of that terrible but necessary struggle, you can’t help but be keenly attuned to that long war’s losses and its victories. They haunt and inspire your inner life, and affirm daily your commitment to this nation’s founding principles. It’s almost as if the enduring, embattled voices in the winds that move over the fields and farms and waters and through the forests and in the still of the night have tutored you in the wages of freedom without you ever having learned about it in your textbooks and history classes at school. You know it, too, from your own life here and now in this epic war out to crush the deep and abiding urgencies of the human spirit.
The trees are budding, the flowers are blooming, the grass is growing—all on their own accord. It is as humanly enchanting as it is divinely destined. They know what to do because God designed them like that. Likewise for you, that world in which you and so many others once lived and enjoyed is so last winter, a world in which you now feel completely maladapted. So, you replant yourself in the perennial garden that God designed for us: a free world. And aspire to live the way in which God created us: as the salt of the earth and the light unto the world.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
