“Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself.”
~ Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter
I know, I know, you’re probably saying: “No kidding. Tell me something I don’t know.” But no, I mean he was literally a bastard, as a new book by historian Howard Ray White proves well enough to convince Clyde Wilson. That’s one more thing Lincoln has in common with Alexander Hamilton.
Pastor Kirk Youngblood of Parker Bible Church in Parker, Colorado, refuses to bow to COVIDCon and close his church, ban singing, require masks, etc. He lists Scriptural reasons for his stance; many of them, such as the inability to partake of a “virtual” Lord’s Supper or to baptize new believers, are ones we’ve previously discussed here on LRC. But he also offers this new insight:
The church is not the church unless it is meeting together in person. No virtual or online format is a suitable substitute for the church being the church. The Greek term for “church” in the New Testament is “ekklesia” and it literally means “an assembly of called out ones.” Obviously, a non-assembling assembly is a contradiction in terms. For the church to be the church (biblically) it must assemble together. In fact, Scripture commands believers to do this. Hebrews 10:24-25 says, “…let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day [the day of Christ’s return] drawing near.” A key element in the ability for Christians to “stimulate one another to love and good deeds” and to encourage one another is by assembling together. According to Scripture, this is not to be forsaken.
Amen! Thanks to Mark Carroll for alerting me to this dear brother and his integrity!
It is time for a nation-wide general strike as outlined in this video. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” was originally coined by theologian John Knox. “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” was a motto suggested, but not used, for the Seal of the United States of America, by Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson liked it so much he eventually appropriated it for his own seal. Do not comply any further with draconian tyranny by the government authorities and their agents, or egregious private tyrants exercising like behaviors. Resistance Is Imperative.
I have long believed that some adventurous and audacious scholar could well make the case that the two persons (not political office holders) who did the most substantial, long-lasting damage to the United States of America were the evangelical clergymen Lyman Beecher and Charles G. Finney.
Evidently someone did begin to undertake the first endeavor. As historian Brion McClanahan alludes to in his podcast above, Milton Rugoff authored The Beechers: An American Family in the 19th Century, which was reviewed by Clyde Wilson in Chronicles magazine in 1982, “The Enemy Up Close.” This was a component of what Wilson later brilliantly labeled “the Yankee Problem in America.” Here are related volumes on this theme.
Beecher, co-founder of the temperance movement, supporter of the Second Great Awakening, help spread the rabid anti-Catholic contagion throughout America with his book, A Plea For The West. His brood of thirteen children included Charles Beecher, Catharine Beecher, Edward Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (and her noxious husband Calvin Stowe), the motley crew responsible for compulsory government schooling, prohibition, anti-Catholicism, women’s suffrage, abolitionism, and the War Against Southern Independence.
Finney was the key proponent of the Second Great Awakening and hence of the postmillennial pietistic Protestant intervention into public affairs in compulsory government schooling, prohibition, anti-Catholicism, women suffrage, abolitionism, “blue laws” and other anti-sex legislation such as censorship of birth control information and pornography, the War for Coercive National Unification, and the spawning of the welfare state.
In the last decades of Murray Rothbard’s life, he developed an important interpretative framework in understanding American history. This was prodded on by his careful study of the emerging “new political history“ which was reinterpreting the dynamics of the ebb and flow of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious groups. This bold synthesis became the central focus of some of his greatest scholarly endeavors, particularly when it came to understanding progressivism as a secularized version of this postmillennial religious zeal.
And so to every sailor, soldier, airman, and marine who is
involved in this mission, let me say you’re doing God’s work.
~ President George Bush, December 1992
In his scintillating article on the Somalian incursion, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, one of the few left-liberals who remains staunchly anti-foreign intervention, quotes the above words from our recent president.(Lewis H. Lapham, “God’s Gunboats,” Harpers Magazine, February) Lapham notes that Bush issued his “prelate’s benediction” to the troops even though lacking “both the miter and the shepherd’s staff.” He also notes — in a timely reminder to those conservatives who have not yet re-examined their devotion to the preceding president — that on that very same December day Ronnie Reagan, speaking at Oxford University, urged the United Nations to develop “an army of conscience” to confront the “evil (that) still stalks the planet” even after the death of the Soviet Union. Since it is difficult to imagine evil stamped out from the world very quickly, this presumably implies a permanent standing world army to vanquish and keep down evil and sin in whatever quarter of the globe they might raise their ugly heads. In short, a permanent global Crusade.
The real evil — this crusading spirit itself — first swept over America in the late 1820s in the form of what is technically called “post-millennial pietism” (PMP).
In the dominant “evangelical” form that PMP assumed in the “Yankee” communities of the North (New Englanders and their transplanted kin in upstate New York, northern Ohio, northern Indiana, etc.), this meant that every man had the bounden and overriding duty to maximize the salvation of his fellowmen, by stamping out sin and the temptations thereto. In short, he was bound to work his darndest to establish a Christian Commonwealth, a Kingdom of God on Earth. It very quickly became clear that sin was not going to be stamped out very quickly by purely voluntary means, and so the PMPers rapidly turned to government to do the stamping out and the creating and the uplifting. In short, as one historian perceptively put it, for the PMPers, “government became God’s major instrument of salvation.”
This turn to government was facilitated by the “pietist” part of the PMP doctrine, for this meant that the old Puritan emphasis on creed and God’s Law, much less the Catholic or Lutheran emphasis on liturgy or the sacramental Church, was swept aside. Christianity became totally focused in a vaguely pietist, “born again,” mood on the part of each basically creedless and Church-less individual soul. Shorn of Church or creed, the individual PMPer was necessarily forced to lean upon government as his staff and shield.
Slowly but surely over the decades since 1830, this mainstream Yankee Protestantism became secularized into an only vaguely Christian but passionately held Social Gospel. After all,with this sort of mindset, it was easy for God to gradually drop from sight, and for government to assume a quasi-divine role. It was left to the monster Woodrow Wilson, a PMPer to his very bones and a Ph.D. as well, to take this domestic creed and extend it to foreign policy. It was essentially a “today the U.S., tomorrow the world” credo. Once the PMPers took over the U.S. government and imposed a Kingdom of God at home, their religious duty got raised to the planetary level. As the historian James Timberlake put it, once the Kingdom of God was being established in the United States, it became “America’s mission to spread these ideals and institutions abroad so that the Kingdom could be established throughout the world. American Protestants were accordingly not content merely to work for the kingdom of God in America, but felt compelled to assist in the reformation of the rest of the world.” (James Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900–1920, New York, Atheneum, 1970, pp. 37–38)
Since Woodrow Wilson, every American president has followed faithfully in the footsteps of the Wilsonian creed. The content of the Kingdom of God to be imposed on other nations may have changed slightly (from alcohol prohibition and coerced global “democracy” in Wilson’s day to smoking prohibition, free condoms, and global democracy in our own) but the form and the spirit remain all too much the same. . .”
Here Rothbard provides the Rosetta Stone to understanding the origins of the welfare state in America: the role of postmillennial Protestant pietistic intellectuals and activists born in the crucial decade surrounding the events of the Civil War who, because of the seductive influence of the evolutionary naturalism of Darwinism, came of age increasingly secularized, but who did not forsake their faith in statism and elitist social control.
Two of LRC’s readers kindly forwarded magnificent essays from Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab.com. Monnie sent one from a few months ago that urges Christians not to accommodate or associate with the current evil; Mr. Torba proposes instead that we set up our own economy and businesses and deal only with one another. And he’s put his money where his mouth is by founding Gab. If Facebook and Twitter disgust you as much as they should, Gab’s your destination.
And the icing on the cake: Mr. Torba’s signature block at the end of his columns contains the line, “Jesus is King.” If your faith or courage need some bucking up, I urge you to read these tremendous offerings from this brother in the Lord!
My Make Americans Free Again group already has a “buddy system” in Signal that we call the Bat Signal (reminiscent of Batman’s spotlight in the sky). It’s for one purpose and one purpose only – if the health department shows up to close down your business, if you’re about to get arrested for not wearing a muzzle, etc., signal for help and whoever can respond will show up for support. And of course, we’d use it for any forced shots as well. It does take a bit of discipline for the group to not use that particular Signal group for normal discourse, so we police it and make sure it’s only for emergencies.
There are groups around the country (not every state, but we’re working on it) and we have lawsuits filed in federal court in several states. Our group in Kentucky had the first preliminary hearing a couple of weeks ago, and we’re waiting for the judge to rule, hopefully in our favor, so we can get discovery and expose the covid scam for what it is.
And Gerard Stannard reports:
There is such a system. It’s called Peoples’ Rights. Check it out at www.peoplesrights.org.
Ammon Bundy started the group as a decentralized neighborhood rights defense group. It has around 40,000 members with some in most states last I checked. I joined in June of last year.
In my home state of Washington I have personally responded to urgent requests for help when someone’s rights were being violated. Anything from denial of service for no mask to state actions for businesses defying mandates. Mostly it involves ordinary folks showing up in numbers to record and act as a presence to say we won’t put up with the tyranny. A youtube channel of a friend of mine, Questionable Authority, has captured some of these.
The state coordinator for Washington is Kelli Stewart and her Telegram channel is t.me/WahingtonPR. She has really championed the rights of small business owners and medical kidnapping victims, which there have been many. She has posted several incidents on Ammon Bundy’s channel.
Kudos to all who are actively protecting our freedom! May God richly bless and defend you.
I hope millions upon millions of such emails restrain Our Rulers, but I think instead that this is another of those way-stations on the road to shooting our way out of this Marxist dystopia.
In case I’m wrong or you disagree, head to the link and give it a whirl.
“Israel has become the first nation to approve COVID booster shots for parts of its population. “Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced on Thursday a world-first vaccination drive to inoculate people over 60 with a third COVID vaccine dose.” A Jew who wants to harm Jews? Go figure. “Call your parents and grandparents now and make sure they get the third shot,” said the prime minister. I note also that Israel is going to reinstate outdoor mask mandates and require that all visitors from Germany, the USA, and 15 other nations must quarantine upon arrival. I guess I won’t be going to Israel any time soon.
After “the Broward County school board unanimously voted to require students, teachers, and staff—even those who are vaccinated—to wear facial coverings inside schools when classes begin,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed an order “empowering the state’s Board of Education to withhold funding from districts that enforce a mask mandate.” DeSantis has the crazy idea that parents should “decide whether their children should wear a mask to school.” The county then reversed its mask mandate.
I nearly leapt to my feet in exultation! At last!!!! Some brave reporter in the mainstream was going to rip the lid off COVIDCon!
But I should have known better. My joy turned to incredulity as I read paragraphs of utter brazenness from the Associated Press:
Here’s some of what happened while the world was distracted by the coronavirus: Hungary banned the public depiction of homosexuality. … Poland’s conservative government has chipped away at the rights of women and gay people.
Not once did the piece condemn the enslaving of whole countries to medical dictatorship, with businesses and churches summarily closed and masked serfs cowering in their homes. No, it was instead lamenting that Marxism has not completely triumphed everywhere.
Reckon with the insolence of the Associated Press, whose propaganda has tirelessly hyped the plandemic for the last 18 months, daring to lament the rise of “authoritarianism.”
David Mueller sent me the second nauseating example. Seems the Wicked Witch of Michigan, who almost single-handedly destroyed the state’s mom-and-pop shops last year, tweeted, “In honor of MI Small Business Summer & Buy Michigan Week, I’m interested in hearing about your favorite Michigan small businesses. Share yours below.”
Is there no limit to her shamelessness?
Kudos to the Libertarian Party of Michigan, which responded, “Every business which defied your authoritarianism over the last 16 months gets our nomination.”
When the revolution comes, no scaffold will be high enough to expunge such effrontery.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal: “A 100-year old man will be tried in Germany on charges of aiding and abetting mass murder while working as a concentration-camp guard, making him one of the oldest defendants in a case brought against alleged Nazi-era perpetrators. The centenarian was charged with complicity in the murder of more than 3,500 inmates at the Sachsenhausen camp on the outskirts of Berlin.” I’m sure he will say in his defense that he was just following orders. And I am equally sure that his defense will be rejected. So why are people so quick to give U.S. soldiers a free pass when they were complicit in the murder of millions of people in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? Why are they allowed to say that they were just following orders?
Monnie suggests, “We need to organize a buddy system, wherein if someone gets a visit from a vax team, he or she can issue a distress call, and several others will be summoned to his or her residence.”
I have longed to institute such a system for drivers that pirates—sorry, cops stop to ticket. What if all other vehicles pulled over and surrounded the cop? I bet the rates of road-robbery would dramatically decline!
We can test this idea now, on the Vazis, and possibly improve and amend it for application to the Highway Patrol.
(I hesitate to detract from such a sterling recommendation by mentioning another, self-contradictory paragraph from the same article. But this one proves yet again, if only COVIDCon’s True Believers could open their minds a smidgeon, that masks et al are good only only for signaling submission, not for preventing illness:
The TSA has taken aggressive steps to protect airport security screeners and travelers, with acrylic barriers, face coverings, gloves and face shields. In spite of such precautions, the number of new cases [among the Thieves and Sexual Assailants], which had leveled off in June, is now surging.
Nearly one-quarter don’t want shot, new study finds, and church leaders face hurdles persuading them.
When Parson Goat closed your church last year, how many of you tried to warn your fellow parishioners of his treachery? And they laughed (at best) or denounced you as a heretic, according to the heartbreaking emails you sent me.
I wonder whether any of them will remember your wisdom as Goat inveighs against conspiracy theorists and misinformation. And will they still request that he preach their funerals?
Are they hoping their readers and viewers are unable to tell the difference between a DOJ “opinion” and a Supreme Court opinion? It certainly looks that way. … This is a case of one arm of the Biden administration telling another arm of the Biden administration what it wanted to hear. …
…the DOJ could not resist the urge to weigh in on the budding controversy of whether employers should be allowed to jump out of their lane and interfere in their employees’ personal medical decisions — something that has never before happened in U.S. history. …
The DOJ is simply putting us on notice that it will refuse to do its job of enforcing current U.S. law. It won’t be filing any lawsuits or criminal charges against employers or government agencies that violate both the U.S. Constitution and federal law by disrespecting the personal bodily autonomy of American citizens.
So we must defend ourselves. Meanwhile, never forget nor let any harassers forget that the DOJ has no standing in this matter.
Here’s how one gentleman plans to respond (thanks to Bill Martin for sending this my way):
If they try that, and make it official, my opening answer will be to invite the person who puts that suggestion into action to tell me exactly how far up their ass they’d like to stick that policy, and would they like my assistance in that endeavor?
Followed by the following blizzard of queries:
1) Who told you I did or did not get vaccinated?
2) Do you have a copy of my signed authorization to release that personal health information to any third party?
3) Lacking any such authorization, how would you possibly know my actual vaccination status?
4) Lacking that knowledge, how do you know which employees to even approach with this suggestion?
5) “Have I been vaccinated against COVID?” That’s none of your … business.
6) Now you’re asking me if I’m vaccinated against COVID? Again, that’s none of your … business. …
Many more questions with which to arm yourself at the link.
If “social media’s” goal is to ferret out and expunge lies, as it insists, it’s failing miserably at censorship. But it is a highly successful and proficient propagandist.
For example, “progressive Democrat and … liar Debby Burnett … is running against conservative Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s Third Congressional District.” Liar Burnett claimed on Twitter,
The entire floor + the ICU are at capacity w/ COVID patients — almost all unvaccinated.
Our district has one of the lowest vaccination rates because our rep Lauren Boebert spreads lies & misinformation about the vaccine.
The good folks at Red State debunked every word in her statement:
Lauren Boebert’s Democrat opponent is not a medical doctor and does not work on a Wuhan ward or ICU. She is a veterinarian who is a part-time physical therapist. She doesn’t work in a hospital in Colorado, so no matter what is happening in “her hospital,” it has nothing to do with Colorado. Colorado’s ICU situation is at or below normal. The vaccination rate in Third District is on par with the rest of the state, and one of the two highest vaccination rates in Colorado is in Third District.
Literally, nothing Burnett claimed is true. And yet, it is allowed to circulate as though it has some relationship to the facts on the ground.
Meanwhile, I’m sure Bill Martin, who alerted me to this story, is wondering how anyone can count patients infected with COVID since the CDC admitted the PCR test cannot measure such things. Indeed, I’ve been vastly amused the last few days that newspapers continue to report cases. Maybe they can switch to monitoring how much green cheese the Man on the Moon eats.
This concise film documents the little known populist uprisings in the USSR in mid 1962 resulting in widespread societal disruptions and disenchantment with living conditions. Because of the absence of a market pricing system of profit and loss, centrally planned socialism cannot calculate and function as a viable, productive economic system. The Soviet government could not guarantee basic services to the people. These events occurred several months before the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 where Khrushchev lost prestige and was forced to remove the missiles installed there. Interesting to speculate how they may have contributed to Khrushchev’s eventual ouster as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and as chairman of the country’s Council of Ministers in 1964.
Tell American citizens, including those who have had the jabs, to wear masks forever while threatening more life-destroying lockdowns if they do not obey.
Ignore the natural immunity of a hundred million COVID-recovered American citizens as though it doesn’t exist.
Import millions of COVID- and tuberculosis-infected Third World peasants (aka undocumented Democrats) and bus them all over the electoral “swing states” at taxpayer expense (with government-funded Catholic Charities driving the buses).
“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” said the former mayor of Murdertown, USA (aka Chicago) when he was Obama’s chief of staff.
Walmart is now requiring the Covid “vaccine” for all corporate employees. Disney is now requiring it for all of its salaried and non-union hourly employees. Publix and Walmart are now requiring all employees, regardless of vaccination status, to wear masks. Cursed be these companies for believing anything that the CDC says about the coronavirus, the delta variant, masks, and the vaccine that is not a vaccine.
Many people are being forced to choose between feeding their families and getting injected with a potentially deadly experimental substance. This is a fundamental violation of not only human rights, but the religious rights that we are guaranteed in the United States of America.
And so the fine folks at Gab have posted documents for those in the military seeking a religious exemption from this horror, in a variety of configurations (Catholic, Protestant, and “Practical Side Supporting Document”). Ditto for anyone whose employer insists that he enroll in this wicked experiment. Thanks to Monnie for sending this valuable link.
On the other hand, here’s an argument that we ought to refuse solely because this atrocity violates our God-given rights. While begging for a “religious” exemption may save you in the short run, it doesn’t strike at tyranny’s roots. Instead, dissidents—by the millions—should insist that the government has no business mandating such evil and that we resist because we’re human beings. Pleading for permission from Our Rulers only reinforces our status as their serfs.
I remind all those confronting this dilemma that the vast majority of Americans object to compulsory Jabs, as they should, and also that we are armed. No one can compel you to submit to this lunacy so long as you determine to remain free. You might also want to band together with your colleagues who object—and who knows, maybe even some of the Jabbed will join you on principle!
St. George Coptic Church in Surrey, BC is just the latest of about 50 Christian churches in Canada to be maliciously burned down.
This article sums up the situation well, as well as documenting the open calls for further violence against Christians by prominent Canadians. Such rhetoric has become acceptable in Canadian society as Christianity shrinks to the margins.
It looks like a flashback to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was magnanimous enough to tepidly call the rash of church arsons “unacceptable” (as if it were the moral equivalent of not waiting your turn in line for a coffee at Tim Horton’s), but he also gassed the fire by describing this religious targeting of Christian Canadians for violence as “understandable”:
I understand the anger that’s out there … against institutions like the Catholic Church. It is real, and it is fully understandable given the shameful history that we’re all becoming more and more aware of.
Christians are being scapegoated by the government and socially marginalized by social and political revolutionaries, even as lawless and violent mobs do the state’s “understandable” dirty-work of violence and intimidation against peaceful people.
Canadian Christians, rapidly becoming “enemies of the state,” may want to consider emigrating now before it’s too late.
So says Pastor John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in California. He has been so right all along on all things related to the “pandemic.” How many other pastors would dare to publicly say that the greatest threat to this nation is the government? What a bunch of cowards. Now that the delta variant is on the rise, these cowards will probably ban singing and handshaking and start requiring social distancing and mask wearing again in their CDC churches.
Same thing in Orlando, Tom. I am even starting to see people again outside walking on sidewalks and trails with their masks on. My local Walmart never got below about 75% of people with masks on. This is sure to rise to 95% in the near future.
An anonymous correspondent for whose veracity I can vouch reports,
My daughter works as a traveling nurse and is currently at a hospital in S. Florida now. They created two covid floors and it’s total BS. She said they are putting any Tom, Dick and Harry there regardless of their illness and calling it covid. Of course that means more Federal $$$.
