The Pandemic Has Proven Democracy Is an Illusion.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• As Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pulled out all the stops to quash the trucker protest against vaccine mandates, it became clear that democracy has been an illusion
• For many years, the technocratic elite, with their global authoritarianism goals, have infiltrated governments around the world and pushed for surveillance and national security tools intended to suppress dissent
• A key part of that dissent-crushing system is the surveillance apparatus that has been erected. While sold as a tool to hunt down dangerous criminals, its primary purpose is to stifle dissent among peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Financial warfare — banning people from using financial services — is another
• Dissent is also stifled by applying criminal terms to those who disagree with the narrative. Case in point: “Anti-vaxxers” and anyone who disagrees with pandemic measures are now labeled domestic terrorists or domestic extremists. Using terms of criminality allows those in power to justify the use of unconstitutional repression and punishment
• The U.S. must repeal both the Patriot Act and the new biopreparedness initiative, or else all privacy and freedom will be destroyed

As Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pulled out all the stops to quash the trucker protest against vaccine mandates, without ever having actually listened to their complaints, a truth emerged, clear as day. Democracy has been an illusion. That’s the conclusion drawn by Canadian journalist Matthew Ehret in a February 18, 2022, Strategic Culture article.¹

“Who would have thought that Canada would ever be a spark plug for a freedom movement against tyranny?” Ehret asks.

“Countless thousands of patriots have driven across the country to bunker down in Ottawa in peace and high festive spirits which I had to see with my own eyes to believe demanding something so simple and un-tainted by ideology: freedom to work, provide for families and a respect for basic rights as laid out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms …

Mainstream media and political hacks have been working overtime to paint the Freedom convoy that converged on Ottawa on January 29 as an ‘insurrectionist movement’ full of ‘white supremacists,’ ‘Russian stooges,’ and ‘Nazis’ out to ‘overthrow the government.’

Even the Bank of England’s former governor (and World Economic Forum Trustee) Mark Carney chimed in on February 7 stating that ‘this is sedition’ and that ‘those who are still helping to extend this occupation must be identified and punished to the full force of the law’ …

Faced with an organic civil rights movement of blue-collar truckers, farmers and tens of thousands of supporters who have convened on Canada’s capital to demand a restoration of their basic freedoms, the current Liberal government has failed to show even an ounce of humanity or capacity to negotiate.

This shouldn’t be a surprise for those who have seen the hypocrisy of neo-liberal ‘rules-based’ order ideologues in action over the past few years who are quick to celebrate the ‘liberty’ of citizens of Ukraine, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang when the outcome benefits the geopolitical aims of detached technocrats hungry for global hegemony.

The moment genuine self-organized labor movements arise demanding basic rights be recognized, then the masks come off and the rage of tyrants show their true faces.”

Tyrants Are Showing Their True Colors

As reported by Ehret, the Deep State of Canada is now using the Emergency Measures Act to do precisely what Carney called for, namely identify and punish anyone who dares stand up for freedom.

The Act grants extraordinary powers to the banking industry to search people’s social media accounts and private bank records, and to seize the bank accounts of anyone suspected of supporting the Freedom Convoy, either in spirit or through online donations, including cryptocurrencies.

Victims will have no recourse, as the banks have been given full legal protection from lawsuits by those whose lives they destroy. Business owners in Canada who support freedom can also have their insurance policies canceled, and truckers can lose their drivers’ licenses, either temporarily or permanently.

Still, the protesters did not give up. If anything, the threats appeared to have had the opposite effect. According to Ehret, the protestors were “renewing their commitments to remain in place,” which they did until Trudeau sent in police² to arrest protestors and tow their trucks.

While Trudeau remained dictatorial until the truckers had been cleared from the Parliament area, the political establishment, on the other hand, showed signs of cracking. Two Liberal Party members, MP Joel Lightbound and MP Yves Robillard broke with party ranks, calling for an end to the unpopular and unnecessary COVID measures.³ Then, finally, in a surprise turnabout, Trudeau buckled February 23, 2022, and said he would revoke the Emergencies Act he’d invoked earlier.⁴

On a global scale, the silence of leaders of democracies and republics around the world is as informative as Trudeau’s power grab. By now, we would have expected leaders of the U.S., the U.K., France and any number of others, to have stepped up to the microphone to denounce the Canadian government’s actions.

But they haven’t, and that tells you everything you need to know about where they stand on the issues of democracy and freedom. Worse, some have vocalized support for Trudeau’s dictatorial actions.

In a February 10, 2022, tweet, Juliette Kayyem, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security under U.S. President Obama and a frequent CNN commentator, suggested the Canadian regime ought to slash the truckers’ tires, empty their gas tanks, arrest the drivers, move the trucks, cancel their insurance, suspend their drivers’ licenses and prohibit their recertification in the future. In her own words, “I will not run out of ways to make this hurt.”⁵

The Illusion of Liberal Democracy Has Collapsed

As noted by Ehret, while we don’t yet know how it will end, one thing we can be sure of is that “the illusion of liberal democracy … has collapsed.”⁶ That doesn’t mean the globalist cabal will pack up their briefcases and retire. No, they’re going to fight to stay in power until the bitter end.

But the hill they’re standing on is getting steeper and slipperier by the day. Everyone can see that they’re saying one thing and doing the complete opposite. You can’t lay claim to being a defender of democracy, freedom and equal rights for all while simultaneously declaring peaceful citizens the enemy of the state. It’s just not credible. As noted by historically left-leaning journalist Glenn Greenwald:⁷

“When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored.

Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government’s use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging …

That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable. But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited.

That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression.

Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

The implicit guarantor of this comforting framework is democracy. Western countries, according to this mythology, can never be as repressive as their enemies because Western governments are at least elected democratically. This assurance, superficially appealing though it may be, completely collapses with the slightest critical scrutiny.”

The Dangers of Majority Despotism

As explained by Greenwald, the premise of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights is that “majoritarian despotism is dangerous in the extreme.” “Despotism” means government in which a single entity rules with absolute power. Usually, this entity is an individual, but despotism can also arise out of majority rule.

It’s interesting to note that while the Founding Fathers probably had no term for what we now know as the psychology of “mass formation,” they were clearly aware of the dangers posed by an irrational majority.

As noted by Greenwald, “the Bill of Rights consists of little more than limitations imposed on the tyrannical measures majorities might seek to democratically enact.”

For example, even if a majority of people agree that certain ideas and views should be criminalized, the Bill of Rights prohibits it. The Bill of Rights also prohibits the abolishment of religious freedom, even if a majority were to support it. Likewise, “life and liberty cannot be deprived without due process even if 9 out of 10 citizens favor doing so.”

The Founding Fathers were clever enough to realize that majority rule can easily become just as destructively despotic as any dictatorship. Hence, they ensured that individual freedoms were enshrined in such a way that even if you’re the last person in the country who wants to practice religion, you have the right to do so. The majority cannot take that away from you.

Waking Up to Reality as It Is

Greenwald goes on to explain how the signs of tyranny in the West have been evident for well over a decade. We just weren’t paying attention. Only now, as we stare tyranny in the face first-hand, are we starting to really see it for what it is:

“The decade-long repression of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, standing alone, demonstrates how grave neoliberal attacks on dissent have become. Many are aware of key parts of this repression … but have forgotten or, due to media malfeasance, never knew several of the most extreme aspects.

While the Obama DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder failed to find evidence of criminality after convening a years-long Grand Jury investigation, the then-Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), succeeded in pressuring financial services companies such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Bank of America to terminate WikiLeaks’ accounts and thus banish them from the financial system, choking off their ability to receive funds from supporters or pay their bills.

Lieberman and his neocon allies also pressured Amazon to remove WikiLeaks from its hosting services, causing the whistleblower group to be temporarily offline.

All of that succeeded in crippling WikiLeaks’ ability to operate despite being charged with no crime: indeed, as the DOJ admitted, it could not prove that the group committed any crimes, yet this extra-legal punishment was nonetheless meted out.

Those tactics pioneered against WikiLeaks — excluding dissenters from the financial system and coercing tech companies to deny them internet access without a whiff of due process — have now become standard weapons. Trudeau’s government seizes and freezes bank accounts with no judicial process.

The ‘charity’ fundraising site GoFundMe first blocked the millions of dollars raised for the truckers and announced it would redirect those funds to other charities, then refunded the donations when people pointed out, rightly, that their original plan amounted to a form of stealing. When an alternative fundraising site, GiveSendGo, raised millions more for the truckers, Canadian courts blocked its distribution.”

Greenwald also highlights how American politicians have pressured Big Tech monopolies and the financial system to act as a joint censorship arm of government. Blocking people and companies from being able to use servers and financial transaction services have been key strategies to silence critical voices.

Why Assange Was Targeted

According to Greenwald, Assange’s capture was precipitated by his denouncement of the Spanish government’s violence against citizens of Catalonia in 2017 and 2019. Catalonia wanted autonomy from the Madrid-based Spanish government, and the government responded with shocking force.

“Spain treated the activists not as domestic protesters exercising their civic rights but as terrorists, seditionists and insurrectionists,” Greenwald writes. “Violence was used to sweep up Catalans in mass arrests, and their leaders were charged with terrorism and sedition and given lengthy prison sentences.”

Assange did not actually express support for Catalonian independence. He objected to the Spanish government’s violent assault on civil liberties. This was why Ecuador rescinded Assange’s asylum and handed him over to British authorities in April 2020. Since then, Assange has been held in a high-security prison in Belmarsh, even though he’s never been convicted of a crime.

“All of this reflects, and stems from, a clear and growing Western intolerance for dissent,” Greenwald writes.⁸ “This last decade of history is crucial to understand the dissent-eliminating framework that has been constructed and implemented in the West. This framework has culminated, thus far, with the stunning multi-pronged attacks on Canadian truckers by the Trudeau government.

But it has been a long time in the making, and it is inevitable that it will find still-more extreme expressions. It is, after all, based in the central recognition that there is mass, widespread anger and even hatred toward the neoliberal ruling class throughout the West.”

Surveillance Apparatus Was Created to Crush Dissent

In response to the growing anger against the ruling class, the technocratic cabal has “opted for force, a system that crushes all forms of dissent as soon as they emerge in anything resembling an effective, meaningful or potent form,” Greenwald notes.

A key part of that dissent-crushing system is the surveillance apparatus that has been erected all around us.⁹ While sold as a tool to hunt down dangerous criminals, we’ve come to realize that rarely is the system ever used to go after true criminals. Instead, it’s used to identify people who disagree with a given narrative. Its primary purpose is to stifle dissent among citizens.

As noted by the ACLU,¹⁰ while most Americans think the Patriot Act’s surveillance powers are there to facilitate the identification and roundup of terrorists, it “actually turns regular citizens into suspects.” Dissent is also stifled by applying criminal terms to those who disagree with the narrative. Case in point: “Anti-vaxxers” and anyone who disagrees with pandemic measures are now labeled domestic terrorists or domestic extremists. As noted by Greenwald:

“Applying terms of criminality renders justifiable any subsequent acts of repression: we are trained to accept that core liberties are forfeited upon the commission of crimes. What is most notable, though, is that this alleged criminality is not adjudicated through judicial proceedings — with all the accompanying protections of judges, juries, rules of evidence and requirements of due process — but simply by decree …

Few things are more dangerous than a political leader who convinces themselves that they are so benevolent and well-intentioned that anything they do is inherently justified in light of their noble character and their enlightened ends …

Within the logical world where one is convinced that they really are fighting a white nationalist, fascistic, insurrectionary global movement to overthrow liberal democracy, then all the weapons we were long taught to view as despotic suddenly become ennobled [ … ]

And it is through this self-glorifying tale which Western neoliberals are telling themselves that they have become exactly what they shrilly insist they are battling.”

We Must Repeal the Patriot Act and Pandemic Powers

In September 2021, the White House announced a $65 billion biopreparedness initiative as part of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan.¹¹ As I’ve explained in many previous articles, Build Back Better is part and parcel of The Great Reset, which in turn is a technocrat-led attempt to implement global authoritarianism. As reported by Biospace:¹²

“The first goal is to transform medical defense, including an improvement and expansion of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics against known threats, and lay the groundwork for unknown pathogens … Secondly, the plan calls for ensuring ‘situational awareness’ regarding infectious disease threats. This includes early warning and real-time monitoring of these viral threats.”

In a nutshell, what this biopreparedness initiative entails is more invasive biosurveillance — meaning, the monitoring of your internal biology. Right now, claims that government wants to monitor people down to their body chemistry will earn you the title of paranoid conspiracy theorist, yet the writing is on the wall. That’s where we’re headed, even if we’re not there yet.

I believe the U.S. must repeal both the Patriot Act and the biopreparedness initiative, or else all privacy and freedom will be destroyed.

EDITORS NOTE: This MERCOLA column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.