Tag Archive for: tyranny

CHAPTER 4: The Who and the What of Behavior from ‘Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is’

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite themselves. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses psychological, informational, asymmetric warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. The primary target of the globalist predators is America’s children.


Children are easily controlled because they live in a world of feelings, subjective reality. They have not developed the critical-thinking skills required to survive in the adult world of objective reality.

In a society of ordered liberty, stealing is a crime regardless of who the thief is. Stealing is the WHAT of the crime, the thief is the WHO. Blind justice evaluates behavior according to WHAT is being done, not WHO is doing it, ensuring that no one is above the law. When blindfolds come off and tribal norms of identity politics take over, freedom is the casualty. Blind justice is foundational in a constitutional republic specifically because it evaluates the WHAT of behavior, not the WHO being charged with a crime.

This is an extremely important distinction for two reasons. First, it is a dramatic departure from the binary sociopolitical infrastructure of rulers and ruled. Binary sociopolitical systems support a two-tiered system of justice, one for the rulers and one for the ruled. In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the goal is one system of justice for all.

Second, distinguishing between the WHAT and the WHO separates childish feelings, which focus on the WHO, from adult, rational thinking that focuses on the WHAT. Children view authority figures through the unquestioning, trustful eyes of dependence.

If a society can be pressured to remain in eternal childhood, its citizens do not psychologically develop past the WHO of behavior. They remain stalled in the emotional world of childhood, accepting what they are told, because they never developed the critical-thinking skills needed to question the WHAT of information. A regressed society is the unaware, compliant population made famous by the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

In October 2016, WikiLeaks released emails that included a March 13, 2016, email written by Democrat strategist Bill Ivey of Global Corporate Strategies to Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. Ivey was worried that Hillary’s personality could not compete with political rival Donald Trump’s mastery of TV. Ivey worried that Trump could win and disrupt Democrat plans “to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry”! In Ivey’s own words:

And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking—and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.

Identity politics, another name for “progressive” politics, is tribal. Like children, tribalism evaluates behavior according to WHO, not WHAT is being done. If you are a member of their group, your behavior is defended, no matter how antisocial or criminal. Consider the matter of political medicine—a prime example of identity politics focusing on the WHO, not the WHAT of behavior.

On June 11, 2021, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and head of the COVID-19 response in America, made the outrageous claim that any attack on him was an attack on science. Really? Anthony Fauci is a man who, factually, is notscience. Science is science. To believe that a man is science is to accept subjective reality as objective reality.

As the lies and malfeasance of Anthony Fauci’s political medicine at the NIAID were revealed, globalism’s digital environment and its integrated communications landscape, including search engines (Google) and social media such as Facebook and Twitter with their own “fact checkers,” went into action to support subjective reality. The globalists protected Fauci by manipulating the search engines, censoring social media content and closing down oppositional accounts, and declaring any views opposing CDC protocols to be misinformation that required censoring.

Political medicine is the vehicle for globalism and its megalomaniacal ambition to rule the world. In a stunning article published by The Gateway Pundit[i] on October 24, 2022, Jim Hoft interviewed whistleblower Dr. Andrew G. Huff. Dr. Huff, former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, reported directly to Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth, a US-based nonprofit, non-governmental organization. Daszak is a British doctor who sent monies approved by Anthony Fauci to fund the Wuhan research labs in Wuhan, China. Dr. Huff came forward with proof in his September 12, 2022, Report[ii]to the US Congress in which he states that “the COVID virus that killed millions and resulted in mass starvation and global economic recession was created in a Wuhan laboratory.”

Dr. Huff’s evidence, submitted under penalty of perjury, completely disproved Fauci’s insistence that the coronavirus jumped from bats to humans and therefore was a natural occurrence. During his interview with Jim Hoft,

Dr. Andrew Huff explains how EcoHealth used funding by Dr. Tony Fauci and the NIAID to fund the gain of function research that developed the COVID-19 virus in a Wuhan lab.

Dr. Andrew Huff has the receipts and sent his evidence recently to leaders in Congress.

Dr. Huff told The Gateway Pundit the government then tried to cover this up. They still are covering this up.

Dr. Andrew Huff is a key player in exposing the truth of Dr. Fauci, EcoHealth, Dr. Daszak, and their funding of deadly gain of function projects.

Political medicine is not and never was about public health. Globalism’s tribal identity politics shields political medicine and its practitioners from the public scrutiny that would expose WHAT practitioners did, and from the court system that should bring them all to justice. Drs. Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak belong in prison.

The globalist War on America is an information war that uses the digital environment to manipulate and socially engineer the public to become “unaware and compliant,” to quote Bill Ivey in his email to John Podesta, above.

From kindergarten through college, young Americans are encouraged to remain perpetual children. In primary school they are disingenuously told they are all butterflies (subjective reality). Butterflies are a universal metaphor for growth, transformation, and effortless adult competence. The false butterfly narrative denies individual differences, abilities, and achievements. It discards meritocracy, eliminates competition, discourages individual achievement, and encourages collectivism. Awarding titles and trophies without merit is crippling. By the time they reach college, these butterflies are so fragile they require safe spaces and Play-Doh to hide from opposing ideas. A childish, dependent population is precisely what the globalists need in order to destroy our constitutional republic and replace it with socialism.

America is at a crossroads, and whoever prevails in globalism’s ruthless war on reality will determine our future. The battle for reality is a battle that must be won. We must demand psychological growth and a commitment to objective reality in our nascent Reality Revolution. We must commit ourselves to adulthood and encourage critical-thinking skills in our children in order to defeat the malevolent globalist plan to keep Americans paralyzed in eternal childhood.

Only fully actualized, rational adults, insistent upon transparency and accurate facts, have the power to oppose this attack on America. We must reject subjective reality, identity politics, and tribalism. We must reject perpetual victimhood and powerlessness and embrace the responsibilities of adulthood in order to protect our freedom. We must choose adulthood.

[i] The Gateway Pundit

[ii] September 12, 2022, Report

Linda Goudsmit’s book “Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is” upcoming release in March 2024.

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

Biden Regime Looking To Ban Gas Stoves

Banning gas stoves. And fireplaces next. Bottom line is good ventilation is all that’s required.  Every good thing is in their crosshairs. Gas stoves have been in use since the late 1800s.

This is just more destruction to our economy and our way of life by the totalitarian primitives.

They claim it’s for the children, These are the same folks mandating deadly RNA vaccines for kids, genital mutilation and chemical castrations for children.

Banning Gas Stoves over Health Concerns

A federal agency may look to ban gas stoves over concern about the release of pollutants that can cause health and respiratory problems, according to a new report. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is set to open public comment on the dangers of gas stoves sometime this winter. The commission could set standards on emissions from the gas stoves, or even look to ban the manufacture or import of the appliances, commissioner.

Keep reading.

US Safety Agency to Consider Ban on Gas Stoves Amid Health Fears

Natural gas stoves, which are used in about 40% of homes in the US, emit air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter at levels the EPA and World Health Organization have said are unsafe and linked to respiratory illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and other health conditions, according to reports by groups such as the Institute for Policy Integrity and the American Chemical Society.

Read more.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLE: Elite University Department Bans Use Of Word ‘Field,’ Claiming It’s Too Racist

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Parents Upset As Schools Force Kids Nationwide To Undergo Mandatory Quarantines After Nearly Two Years Of COVID Precautions

Some parents from Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania told the Daily Caller that their children are forced to undergo mandatory quarantines with no virtual learning options, despite evidence that schools pose few transmission risks. Many parents expressed fatigue over the nearly two years of COVID-19 precautions in schools.

Brighton Area Schools, a district in suburban Detroit, is requiring students under the age of 12 to quarantine for 14 days if they are exposed to a COVID-positive student, according to a letter from the district’s superintendent obtained by the Daily Caller. Jennifer Smith, a mother with three children in the district, told the Daily Caller that there are no virtual learning options for children placed in mandatory quarantine.

On Nov. 1, Brighton Area Schools announced that they waived mandatory quarantines for most middle and high school students, though not for students in sixth grade or below. According to the district’s correspondence, deciding whether to waive quarantines for younger students will be contingent on “the availability of vaccines for the 5-11 year old population.”

Brighton Area Schools allow parents to choose whether their child wears a face mask or not, according to district policy, though mandatory quarantines for healthy children are still in place.

Smith told the Daily Caller that her nine-year-old child began a 28-day “healthy child quarantine” on Oct. 19. She received an email on Nov. 9 from Hornung Elementary School informing parents that all classes would go virtual on Nov. 10 due to “an unexplained rise in COVID-19 cases among students” following Halloween. The closure was suggested by the Livingston County Health Department.

CLICK HERE FOR: Screenshot/Email from Brighton Area Schools

According to a testimony from a Livingston County Health Department official, school districts make their own rules regarding quarantine, testing, and masking policies, though the county health department offers data and advice.

The Michigan mother said that her son went from Oct. 19 to Nov. 10 with no virtual school option, and was only offered virtual classes when the entire elementary school shut down. Smith said that she is “extremely upset” as she had “no choice” but to take off work and “go without pay.”

Brighton Area School District did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

Parents nationwide told the Daily Caller that they are concerned about learning losses, and some are concerned about the effects learning loss will have on students of color or lower socio-economic status.

Data from 2020 bear out the points that schools are not driving infections and school closures or learning losses are disproportionately hurting minority students. A study of 4.4 million students found that test scores of black, Hispanic, and poor children took the biggest hit when students were not in school. A large study from Oct. 2020 found that schools aren’t large vectors of infection.

Mandatory quarantines — and their effects — are not specific to Michigan. Mother Nicole Eidson told the Daily Caller that quarantines are also taking place in the Chandler Unified School District (CUSD) in Arizona.

According to CUSD’s COVID policy, quarantining students is “required by the Maricopa County Department of Public Health” when a student comes in “close contact” with a student who is COVID-positive. The district’s website states that quarantined students receive “Google classroom assignments and/or activities,” though Eidson noted that children do not receive any teacher instruction during quarantine.

“There may be schools or teachers that are still teaching the quarantined kids, but there are some that are not as well,” Eidson said.

Chandler Unified School District did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

Guidelines for K-12 quarantines in some states specifically target those who are unvaccinated. Washington State’s Department of Health guidelines for K-12 schools states that quarantines are only for those who are unvaccinated. This includes 5-11 year olds who are now eligible for a vaccine under the FDA’s emergency use authorization.

Florida, under guidance from Gov. Ron DeSantis, took a different approach. Students are no longer required to quarantine if they’re exposed to COVID-19 and are asymptomatic, according to NPR.

Some school districts are moving towards “Test to Stay” programs, wherein students who come in close contact with a COVID-positive peer can get consecutively tested to remain in school. Souderton Area School District in Pennsylvania is set to implement the program on Nov. 29, according to a local news outlet.

Superintendent Frank Gallagher said he is hopeful that the “Test to Stay” program will allow “exposed students to stay in school instead of quarantining at home.”

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is considering promoting similar “Test to Stay” programs, according to U.S. News.

COLUMN BY

CHRISSY CLARK

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Arizona School Board, Police Coordinated To Spy On, Arrest Concerned Parents

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

TYRANNY: Biden To Create a Vaccine Mandate For Interstate Travel Within United States

To stop freedom of movement between free states (red) and slave states (blue).

Get Ready For Vaccine Mandates If You Want To Drive Across State Lines

By: Net Breaking, October 2, 2021:

The Biden administration is constantly re-inventing ways to force the unvaccinated to take the Covid jab.

First, it was free burgers, donuts, and money.

Then, just three weeks ago, Biden forced vaccine mandates on businesses with over 100 employees.

Now, instead of respecting Americans’ freedom of choice, Biden plans to create a vaccine mandate for interstate travel within the United States.

What happened to Biden’s promise to never require federal vaccine mandates?

I guess it was just another empty promise from the failing Biden administration.

RELATED VIDEO: Jen Psaki Admits Big Vaccine Push Is An Effort to Bring Biden’s Poll Numbers Up.

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

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Feckless Fauci Foments Fear to Keep the Sheep in Line

“When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.” –  Euripides

“Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest.” – Benjamin Franklin

“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics…derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.” – Benjamin Franklin

“Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people are not intellectually competent. More than anything the United States needs effective citizens competent to do their own thinking.” – William Mather Lewis – President, George Washington University 1923-1927

“So, when you ask me whether I listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice, my answer is: only with skepticism and caution.” – Peter Navarro


We’re all in this together!  Every news channel told us that, including Fox.  Nope, we sure as hell weren’t in this together.  States like Michigan, Oregon, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, California and others are still purposely keeping people from opening their businesses and making a living.  In this together?  Not by a long shot.  First, businesses were fraudulently shut down by the lies of Dr. Fauci and gang, and now they’re being demolished by communist subversives in states run by democrats.

Marxist protestors have free rein, but many taxpayers who run businesses are literally eradicated never to rise again. It’s purposeful; it drags down the economic resurgence after Dr. Fauci’s false models were given to President Trump.  Those models came from China’s good friend, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) and were used to purposely destroy President Trump’s strong economy.  Here’s the entire Fauci timeline on Covid.

“Tedros is really an outstanding person,” Fauci said during the March 25 coronavirus task force briefing. “I’ve known him from the time that he was the minister of Health of Ethiopia.”  (Where he covered up the country’s cholera.) But President Trump knew the truth and tweeted, “The WHO really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric.”

Fauci is no friend of President Donald Trump.  Were Fauci, Birx and Redfield vetted before they were hired by the head of the Coronavirus Task Force, VP Mike Pence? Doubtful.

Fauci, Pelosi and WHO

Is it a coincidence that Dr. Fauci has a close relationship with Dr. Tedros Adhanom of WHO and that Dr. Adhanom is very tight with China?  Is it a coincidence that WHO Director Adhanom gave Dr. Fauci the models for Covid-19 stating 2.2 million Americans would die? And isn’t it interesting that Dr. Fauci ran to President Trump with the false WHO models and told him the nation needed to be shut down for two weeks which ended up being several months and murdering the economy.

There are too many coincidences with Fauci, WHO, the democrats and other powers to believe this wasn’t a diabolical plan by the Deep State to annihilate the magnificent Trump economy.  The communists in the Democrat Party don’t give a damn about anyone’s livelihood or businesses.  They care only about succeeding to eliminate Trump and regaining their control to turn America into a socialist dictatorship.  This pandemic was forecast a decade ago by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Five months before the “plandemic” hit, in October of 2019, The World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation met to discuss the fictional “Event 201,” which describes the Covid-19 pandemic as fed to us via media.  Their plan was to have global business and governments working together according to the representative from Johns Hopkins University.  They called it a new Coronavirus affecting the respiratory system.

Their forecast came true, their lies were spread and believed.  The sheep in America donned their masks, closed their businesses and stayed at home, for a virus that actually killed less than yearly seasonal flu.  Only now, 9 months after the warnings in December of 2019, are we beginning to see the truth, yet only a few have awakened and stopped drinking the kool-aid.

Latest Statistics

Thanks to One America News, a new study from UCLA and Stanford University finds for the average 50-64-year-old, the chances of dying of Covid are one in 19.1 million, and the chances of contracting Covid are much lower than previously thought.  People are vastly overestimating their chances of being infected and going to the hospital, especially here in America.

The average person in an average county has a one in 3,836 chance of contracting Covid and that’s without wearing a mask or doing any of the unscientific, high school science project of social distancing.  Even the odds of being hospitalized are vanishingly small even in the “at risk” category.  The chances of getting the virus and needing hospitalization are one in 852,000.  These figures were from May, when the deaths were 16 times higher than they were last week.

The risk of dying from a car crash is one in 114…so think of that comparison next time you don the face diaper or are required to social distance.

Combined with this latest data, the risks for keeping the country locked down falls apart and reveals the risk to the American public is much lower than so-called experts like Dr. Fauci had claimed.

Covid vs. Flu

Cases of Covid are falling, and we’re hearing that a new Center for Disease Control (CDC) report shows 94 percent of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. had contributing conditionsOnly six percent of people died of the virus who were allegedly healthy.  Thus, only 9,200 deaths have been allegedly caused by Covid alone, not the 176,000 previously “reported.” The other 166,800 deaths had comorbidities like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, emphysema etc.  Nursing homes and assisted living facilities accounted for 45 percent of Covid deaths.  Those in the northeast were hardest hit due to policy decisions by democrat politicians who discharged seniors with active Covid-19 infections from hospitals to long-term care facilities.  Eliminate those numbers, and Covid is far less dangerous than seasonal flu.

And the tests…false positives and false negatives were reported. More than 600,000 military-connected Americans affiliated with the Tricare health plan were told in error that they had been diagnosed with COVD-19.

Hospitals received more funds for positives, so the numbers were definitely skewed.  Even Dr. Birx said they were 25 percent less, and a hospital employee told me it was more like 50 percent less than reported.  Hospitals needed more money; they were losing income on normal surgeries stalled during the shutdown.

The CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010. We don’t social distance, don face diapers or freak out during flu season.  Are you getting the picture, this was a planned pandemic to scare the American people into compliance, and the sheeple fell for it!

Now Dr. Fauci is spewing, “The U.S. has an ‘unacceptably high’ level of COVID-19 cases going into fall.”  Huh?  Sounds like horse hockey to me.  Fauci is again using fear to frighten the American people into voting by mail and affecting the outcome of the election.  Dr. Fauci doesn’t want you voting in person.

Covid-19 a Tool to Beat Trump

It’s not surprising that the Chinese state media claimed Coronavirus is a tool to beat Donald Trump.  China Global Television Network (CGTN) issued a nearly six-minute video entitled “Can COVID-19 beat populism?” in which the Chinese Communist Party-run network leverages the coronavirus as “another straw on the camel’s back to expose Trump’s hollow politics.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s love of Hillary Clinton, Speaker Pelosi and the democrats who said they’d kill the economy to be rid of Trump is obvious.  The Wuhan virus was the catalyst Pelosi was looking for, and now the economies of democratic run states are still being locked down and purposely destroyed.  Communism means control of production for everyone except friends of the party, and that’s what they’re doing.

Fauci Files

In late July, 2020, John Solomon of Just the News reported on Fauci’s career being dotted with ethics and safety controversies inside the NIH. There was alleged sexual harassment, a whistleblower was fired for reporting safety concerns and reinstated, drug trials in Africa were plagued by safety reporting lapses, and a pregnant mother with AIDS, who hoped to save her unborn child, was given drugs that killed her and her baby.

Fauci’s agency repeatedly broke federal contract laws. Solomon reported that the NIAID, the federal agency headed by longtime public health expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been cited several times over the years for failing to comply with federal contract and expenditure laws, internal government audits reveal.

His NIAID fell under investigation some years back concerning their research in developing a new drug to combat AIDS. Their calloused approach, under Fauci’s leadership, used human guinea pigs as test subjects.  They were not volunteers.  Fauci chose foster children from New York, Illinois, and elsewhere.  The children were administered a non-tested drug without any promises of patient protection. Many of them were not even provided with patient advocates, as required by law, to monitor the children’s health as the drug surged through their veins. As a result of Fauci’s negligence, 10 of the children died.

Silencing a Cure

Fauci also joined big tech in silencing the use of Hydroxychloroquine/Azithromycin and Zinc.  Fifteen years prior to Covid, Fauci’s NIH had approved HCQ to cure coronaviruses; nobody needed to die.  For 15 years, Fauci has known that chloroquine and its even milder derivative hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) will not only treat a current case of coronavirus (therapeutic) but prevent future cases (prophylactic). So HCQ functions as both a cure and a vaccine. In other words, it’s a wonder drug for coronavirus.  Said Dr. Fauci’s NIH in 2005, “concentrations of 10 μM completely abolished SARS-CoV infection.”  Fauci’s researchers add, “chloroquine can effectively reduce the establishment of infection and spread of SARS-CoV.”

Dr. Harvey Risch, a noted Yale epidemiologist is an outspoken proponent of HCQ treatment for COVID-19. According to Dr. Risch who was interviewed by Mark Levin, Dr. Fauci is now responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and must be stopped!  He described how Dr. Fauci allowed at least 17,000 AIDS victims to die by not certifying an effective drug (AZT) for treatment back in the 1980s, and he now argues that Fauci has done the same thing with Covid.

There’s far more money for Fauci and the NIH, and his friend Bill Gates in Remdesivir by Gilead than with a cheap, 65-year-old safe drug like HCQ.  There’s also far more money to be made via vaccines that are not proven safe and are protected from lawsuits of those injured or killed by them.  China holds the patent on the drug through an agreement with Gilead’s drug patent sharing subsidiary branch called UNITAID that has an office near Wuhan, and you’ll never guess who are the main financial investors in UNITAID…none other than George Soros, Bill & Melinda Gates, and WHO.

Combined results from National Health Service (NHS) hospitals led by Oxford University and six others have confirmed findings and established that at least one other equally cheap and widely available steroid, hydrocortisone, also saves lives in late stage Covid.  With HCQ and now hydrocortisone, we don’t need a vaccine.

Fauci also claims the State of New York did it correctly despite being marred by many grave errors, but statistics don’t lie.

Fauci’s Grants

A disturbing pattern of cooperation between Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID and the Chinese military raises questions about technology transfers and the origins of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Colonel Lawrence Sellin’s recent article, Did Fauci’s NIH Institute Financially Assist China’s Military?, exposes the links between Fauci and the Wuhan Virology lab, patents, China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, and millions in grants from Fauci’s NIAID.

Sellin writes, “The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Texas has been designated one of the ten Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases newly funded by a NIAID grant totaling $82 million. UTMB has at least two permanent faculty members trained at China’s Military Medical Universities, has had connections to or former employees from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Yusen Zhou’s State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing, as well as other Chinese institutions.”

Our tax dollars fund the National Institutes of Health.

Fauci’s Destruction

Over 600 medical doctors wrote a letter to President Trump which stated that the devastation of the lockdown of our economy was a serious accident with massive casualties far worse than the virus itself.

“The health effects are greatly underestimated and underreported. This is a mistake of enormous magnitude,” says the letter from Simone Gold, M.D., a specialist in emergency care in Los Angeles, and the spokesperson for the physicians. Fauci is calling this a “media epidemic.” The number of suicide calls has increased by 600%.

“Ending the lockdown is not about Wall Street or ignoring people’s lives; it’s about saving lives.  We cannot allow this disease to turn the U.S. from a free, energetic society into a society of broken souls dependent on government spending. This is a huge mistake. The lives of millions of people are at risk because of the lockdown.”

That we are dealing with massive brainwashing by the media is confirmed by one of the world’s leading virologist and flu specialists, Professor John Oxford of Queen Mary University in London.  He says, “Personally, I would say that the best advice is to watch less news on television that is sensational and not good. I consider this Covid outbreak to be a winter flu epidemic. Last year we had eight thousand deaths (in the UK) in this category, of which 65% had heart disease and so on. I believe Covid will not exceed that number. We’re suffering from a media epidemic!”

Conclusion

Everything Dr. Fraud has said and done since January has been designed to increase deaths and hysteria, to collapse America, and to defeat Trump.

The NIH doc has been everywhere…on TV, interviews etc. urging Americans to lockdown, abandon jobs and their sick and dying family members, their businesses they built with blood, sweat and tears.  He drove our economy into the dirt, kept children out of school (a good thing today), and eliminated graduations, proms, weddings, vacations, funerals, and church gatherings.  If we didn’t do this, we were no better than serial murderers.  Americans were relentlessly demonized for daring to speak out or even question the Holy Writ of Fauci…the unconstitutional lockdowns, the MSM that empowered democratic governors in their totalitarian dictatorships.

The flagrant violation of our Constitutional rights, all these Kafka-esque rules that protected big businesses like Walmart and further empowered massive corporations like Amazon, while small business withered and died were purposeful. Democrat New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (aka Warren Wilhelm) was finally allowed to openly practice his antisemitism. Fauci allowed this…and he did it to destroy the one and only President we’ve had in decades who has fought for the American people.

Rise up!  Rip off the masks! Breathe fresh air!  Dump the government kool-aid…the cry is FREEDOM!

©Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Did Fauci Fund the Research That Led to Coronavirus Outbreak?

RELATED VIDEO: The science behind why face masks don’t work.

When Democrats Say ‘the People,’ They Mean ‘the Government’

In his inaugural address, Donald Trump announced that,

“today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another — but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American People. For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished — but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered — but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country…. That all changes — starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.”

These were stirring words, but they were the sort of thing presidents have said for ages. Back in his first inaugural address in 1913, Woodrow Wilson decried the fact that “the great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.” In his first inaugural address in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower asserted that “we, the people, elect leaders not to rule but to serve.” And in his January 1996 state of the union address, Bill Clinton declared: “We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over… Our goal must be to enable all our people to make the most of their own lives — with stronger families, more educational opportunity, economic security, safer streets, a cleaner environment in a safer world.”

However, as Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster explains, Trump’s declaration that he was transferring power back to the people actually heralded a move away from big government, not toward it. Trump’s words didn’t herald a push to expand government power under the guise of working for the people. On the contrary, he was determined to expand the freedom Americans enjoyed and roll back government power. A new era had begun in American politics: for the first time in over a century, the rule of “the people” did not mean the rule of the government.

This equation has been taken for granted since the election of 1896, when a key issue was currency. The Republican platform committed the party to the gold standard, which prevented the production of so much currency as to lead to inflation. A minority of Republicans and a significant majority of Democrats, however, supported the free coinage of silver, which would lead to inflation and thereby make it easier for farmers to pay off their debts. That rapidly rising prices were rendering the life savings of Americans essentially worthless did not trouble the silver advocates, who cloaked their case for what was essentially the government’s assumption of the debts of private citizens in the language of support for the plight of the common man. Forgotten in all the controversy was that when the government does something, it is the taxpayers who pay for it.

President Grover Cleveland supported the gold standard, but toward the end of his second term, he was deeply unpopular, and the silver forces among the Democrats were restive. At the Democratic National Convention, a handsome and vigorous thirty-six-year-old congressman from Nebraska named William Jennings Bryan electrified the delegates with a speech in favor of the free coinage of silver that is one of the most celebrated pieces of oratory in American history. “You come to us,” Bryan declared, “and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

Rating America’s Presidents explains that Bryan sounded notes of class warfare that would become ever more common in American politics: “We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!” In conclusion, he thundered: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

In a frenzy of enthusiasm over this populist appeal, the Democrats nominated Bryan for president. This marked a sea change for the Democratic Party, as the party that had always favored a limited central government now began to advocate for a massive increase of federal control over the economy, under the cloak of a concern for the common man.

Bryan lost, and lost two more times, but his ideas took hold. By the time of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and a significant and growing portion of the American public, took it for granted that taking an industry or sector of the economy out of private hands and placing it under government control was tantamount to giving it to “the people.” It is such a compelling sleight of hand that Communist regimes also used it for decades.

But then came Trump, who actually meant “the people” when he said “the people.” And that’s one principal reason why the statists who hitherto championed themselves as guardians of the interests of “the people” hate him with such incandescent intensity.

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

PORTLAND: When Your Karma Runs Over Your Dogma

EDITORS NOTE: This column published by on The Vlad Tepes Blog is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Mask Nazis Have Blood On Their Hands

“The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”  —G. K. Chesterton

“Lies are the greatest murder. They kill the truth.”  – Socrates

“History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal.” – Mark Twain

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” –  George Orwell, 1984


The Coronavirus, which includes the common cold, will come and go, but the government found out how easily the American people were manipulated and how easily they controlled your life.  Remember what they took from us, every “non-essential” job, every sporting event, every school, every restaurant, and most importantly every church.  And we allowed it.

But it’s even worse.  Historically and by definition, quarantines had always been about sequestering the sick. Never before had anyone beat a virus by quarantining the healthy. We were not told that quarantining healthy people was a first-of-its-kind experiment. And the experiment failed.

In America, the homeless population is exploding as people are displaced from homes and apartments. This was fully predictable after more than two months of economic shutdown and underscores the sheer lack of concern for any other lives except those “saved” from Covid-19.  And we know the Covid death counts and those who have tested positive are lies promoted by those who love controlling the dumbed down American masses who haven’t been taught the Constitution and their God given rights in more than six decades.  The CDC has confessed to lying about the Covid death counts.

We know that hospitals make more money when people are diagnosed with Covid, so even if they had comorbidities of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc., or if they died in an accident, if they had tested positive, their death certificates recorded Covid.  No one seems to die of flu anymore…everything is Covid.

Killing the Elderly

Several democratic state governors have sent Covid patients to senior care facilities which has exponentially raised the death rates of the virus, and witnesses in New York City are convinced Cuomo is intentionally hiding the actual number of deaths.  These residents make up only six percent of the nation’s population, but they count for 42 percent of nationwide deaths.  There were 6,600 deaths in Pennsylvania, but 4,500 or 70 percent were in nursing or senior care facilities.

Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry is pushing for a further probe of deadly nursing home orders.  He believes the numbers are far higher than reported.  He says the State Attorney General is now threatening to prosecute the nursing homes for murder.  Perry has sent a letter to AG’s in four other states, including Pennsylvania demanding an investigation.  He said the Pennsylvania administration is choosing to blame the nursing homes when they had no choice in the matter.  Watch the three-minute video.

The murder of our weakest elderly Americans was purposely done in at least five democrat run states.

Muzzling Mask Mandates

The Biden-Harris team is saying they’ll have a mask mandate for all of America.  To hell with the Constitution and freedom, they love muzzling the entire nation with face diapers.  There are questions every American should be asking about indefinite mask mandates.  When governments grab powers, they tend to hang onto them.  Indeed, unless the government is comprised entirely of halfwits, they must realize that the lockdown will have already killed far more than the coronavirus.  We have only a handful of constitutional conservatives who actually serve the people.

You have no rights; you only have the responsibility to follow the state’s dictates and wear your mask at all times.  Get on the train, we’re taking you to a work camp.

I’ve had two run-ins with these mask Nazis who believe I could kill them all by not wearing a mask, but if my not wearing a mask can infect those who are wearing a mask, what is their mask doing for them? These people will scream at you from 12 to 15 feet away as though you’re polluting the entire environment.  I’ve stated that I have a medical reason not to wear a mask, but that doesn’t assuage their fears.  My 6’2” husband doesn’t wear a mask either, and when I’m with him, no one says a word, but go out alone and the Nazis feel that a 105-pound woman is fair game.

American people do not venture from their homes without a face diaper that hides who they are. The Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center, (NORC) Center for Public Affairs Research found that 75% of those polled were “strongly” or “somewhat” in favor of requiring people to wear masks in public when around other people. Only 13% of respondents “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed such requirements.  Of democrats, 89% said they were “strongly” or “somewhat” in favor while 59% of republicans said the same.  What does that tell you?!  Our citizens are willing accomplices in destroying their freedoms.

Mainstream media as well as conservative media are all singing the same song, wear your mask, cover your face, eliminate expressions, smiles, frowns, fear, happiness, look like a Muslim!  It’s patriotic!  The hell it is!  And media fails to give both sides of the issue.  Anyone who fights the mask attacks is silenced by censorship.  We are in a war and most Americans haven’t figured that out yet.  George Orwell said, “Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect, and unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”  Our unalienable first amendment has a boot stomping on it.

Only a few will stand against the tyrants.  Only a few know fear is not from the Lord.  Only a few realize what is happening to our nation.  And only a few will refuse to bend their knees to tyranny.

Mandating masks has not kept death rates down anywhere. The 20 U.S. states that have never ordered people to wear face masks indoors and out have dramatically lower COVID-19 death rates than the 30 states that have mandated masks. Most of the no-mask states have COVID-19 death rates below 20 per 100,000 population, and none have a death rate higher than 55. All 13 states that have death rates higher than 55 are states that have required the wearing of masks in all public places. It has not protected them.

Okay, okay…some people should wear masks, masks that will really protect them and their loved ones…because this virus targets the elderly and those with comorbidities.  But get an N95 mask and have it properly fitted and wear it only for short periods.  The paper and homemade masks do nothing and actually can make you sick and that means sick with this Wuhan virus.  Did any of us wear masks in 2009-2010 when so many died of H1N1?  Nope…we never even thought about it, and we never think about it during yearly flu season.  Oh yes, we have vaccines for that, but people still die of the flu every year.

Hello Darkness

In Shirley Edwards’ recent column, she included a four-minute video that was telling as to what we’re facing in America today.  Please watch it!

The visual effects set to the song, Sound of Silence, which starts out, “Hello darkness, my old friend,” are startling in their true portrayal of what is happening to our country and to other so-called free countries.  There are pockets of Americans crying for freedom, but they are only whispers.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources wants its employees to wear masks for meetings that are held on teleconferences from home even when no one else is around.  They said, “Set the safety example which shows you as a DNR public service employee care about the safety and health of others,” he said.  How utterly fatuous are these people?

In Nashville, Tennessee, at a virtual meeting of committees, Nashville Metro Council, at-large member Sharon Hurt addressed some remarks to Mike Jameson, Nashville Mayor John Cooper’s director of legislative affairs.  She suggested that people who refuse to wear masks, be charged with murder or attempted murderLink

Mask Dangers

Not only is there little evidence (if any) to support masking; there are at least seven gold-standard randomized controlled trials showing that muzzling yourself won’t stop the spread of infection.  Masks are only really effective if they fit perfectly and if the wearer does not move their head while wearing them. Touching a mask appears to stop the mask providing protection. It has been suggested that you should put on a new mask if you have touched the one you are wearing.  Check out how many times a child touches a mask, not to mention adults.

Wearing masks for extended periods will make us sick and will probably make us more vulnerable to illness. They can damage the immune system. Fear and stress also weaken the immune system.  Forcing masks is partly to dehumanize us and they isolate us from one another.  The government wants us frightened to death and dehumanized for a virus that 97 % to 99.75% of people recover from.  Think about it, bandits and robbers wear masks.  Are we safer wearing masks?  Hardly, but the fear factor has been sold so well that Americans are afraid to hug their friends and family and will run from someone without a face diaper.

Wearing masks can cause a flare up of acne, candida infections around the mouth, candida in the mouth, and dental problems.  The new oral hygiene issue, caused by, you guessed it, wearing a mask all the time is leading to all kinds of dental disasters like decaying teeth, receding gum lines and seriously sour breath.

“We’re seeing inflammation in people’s gums that have been healthy forever, and cavities in people who have never had them before,” says Dr. Rob Ramondi, a dentist and co-founder of One Manhattan Dental. “About 50% of our patients are being impacted by this, so, we decided to name it ‘mask mouth’ after ‘meth mouth.’” Link

Schools in China are now prohibiting students from wearing masks while exercising. Why? Because it was killing them. It was depriving them of oxygen and that killed them. At least three children died during physical education classes, two of them while running on their school’s track while wearing a mask. And a 26-year-old man suffered a collapsed lung after running two and a half miles while wearing a mask.

Surgical Masks

Surgical masks are worn to stop bits of food or hair falling from the surgeon or nurse into an open wound.  They will stop some bacteria, but will not usually stop viruses.

However, Neil Orr’s study was published in 1981 in the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Dr. Orr was a surgeon in the Severalls Surgical Unit in Colchester. And for six months, from March through August 1980, the surgeons and staff in that unit decided to see what would happen if they did not wear masks during surgeries.

They wore no masks for six months, and compared the rate of surgical wound infections from March through August 1980 with the rate of wound infections from March through August of the previous four years. And they discovered, to their amazement, that when nobody wore masks during surgeries, the rate of wound infections was less than half what it was when everyone wore masks. Their conclusion: “It would appear that minimum contamination can best be achieved by not wearing a mask at all” and that wearing a mask during surgery “is a standard procedure that could be abandoned.”

There is no medical evidence that masks do any good but there is very real evidence that they can do harm.  The death rate from the Covid-19 bug has fallen considerably in recent weeks; most of the really vulnerable people have already died. The authorities have successfully cleaned out eldercare homes and exterminated a good chunk of the population receiving social security and Medicare. I wonder how much that has saved the treasury?

Other Mask Risks

A report published in the British Medical Journal summarized some other risks.

First, when you wear a face mask some of the air you breathe out goes into your eyes. This can be annoying and uncomfortable and if, as a result, you touch your eyes you may infect yourself.  And get them off the children who touch them all the time!  My God, have parents gone insane?!

Second, face masks make breathing more difficult and, as I have pointed out in previous articles, anyone who has a breathing problem will find that a mask makes it worse. Also, some of the carbon dioxide which is breathed out with each exhalation is then breathed in because it is trapped. Together these factors may mean that the mask wearer may breathe more frequently or more deeply and if that happens then someone who has the coronavirus may end up breathing more of the virus into their lungs. If a mask is contaminated because it has been worn for too long then the risks are even greater. How long is too long? No one knows. No research has been done as far as I know.

Third, there is a risk that the accumulation of the virus in the fabric of the mask may increase the amount of the virus being breathed in, especially if the mask is reused. This might then defeat the body’s immune response and cause an increase in infections, other infections, not just the coronavirus.

Another report, written with medical authority by Dr. Russell Blaylock, a retired neurosurgeon, offers even more problems with masks.

Conclusion

If masks work so well, why didn’t they give them to all the prisoners instead of letting them out into the public to rape, rob, murder, etc.?  They have no answer for that question.  There really is no medical evidence that masks help, but there is evidence that they harm.

The lockdown is now killing so many people that even if the number dying from the bug were to double in the next month the total would still not come anywhere near to the total who die every year from the flu, when you add on the number who have died because of the lockdown. Mental illnesses, anxiety and depression, will be the new pandemics. The government admits that the number dying from the ordinary flu has fallen, what a surprise that is, but they cannot tell us how many have committed suicide since we were all put under house arrest.

American citizens do not realize that Covid-19 is psychological warfare.  We are now frozen in fear of a virus that has proven to be no more of a killer than the pretty standard yearly flu virus.  Fear is the factor, and fear is not from the Lord God Almighty.

©Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

VIDEO: The Vortex — Trump and the Tech Tyrants

TRANSCRIPT

Late last Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump took a step that is emboldening conservatives everywhere. He finally struck out at giant tech and called them out for what they are — political censors.

Ever since his 2016 victory, the social media arm of the Marxist media has turned near-violent against Trump specifically and conservatives in general, zapping and deleting, suspending and deplatforming like crazy.

It’s all in an attempt to ensure that Trump does not get re-elected, and it can’t be surprising. This group hates America and pretty much everything it stands for.

They’ll drone on and on about constitutional rights when they can’t pervert them for, say, dreaming up the right to an abortion out of thin air and pretend that it’s there, right there, buried deep and mysteriously in the constitution, which it’s not.

But when it comes to something as straightforward as free speech, the howls from the lunatics on the Left become deafening. See, the tech tyrants are all for free speech, as long as they get to control it. They have set themselves up as the arbiters of truth — their truth — and you should be privileged and grateful for their service to you.

They go through and routinely screen and ferret out anything that is not liberal, Marxist propaganda and brand it as “violating community standards.” But they never tell the offending party exactly what standard was violated and what community established it.

The Marxist Left, like all divisions on the Left, need to control everything. They block and censor free speech — conservative free speech — because if the truth gets out there, someone like, oh, Donald Trump might become president.

At the conclusion of the 2016 election, during the transition away from an Obama White House and to a Trump administration, while he was still president, Obama even talked about — warned about — the role social media platforms had played in getting Trump elected, and said something had to be done about it.

Since the dominant media has been controlled for decades by the godless Left, it was only a matter of time until the forces of truth found a way to breathe. Truth is like water: It always finds a way. And the Left is like Hell, eternally raging against truth.

So no one could be surprised here that, when conservatives abandoned traditional media and took to the internet and social media, that the tech tyrants would eventually catch on and try to put an end to it. The approaching election has, shall we say, quickened their pace, which brings us back to Trump and last Thursday.

The executive order he signed goes after the tech giants where they live, which is behind a shield that protects them from being sued.

The shield is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, enacted 25 years ago to protect what were then-fledgling companies from being sued for allowing all but the most offensive material on their platforms. The idea was pretty simple. Outfits like YouTube were seen as platforms, and that’s all. They didn’t make decisions about content.

But since Trump’s election, these giant corporations have gone nuclear, no longer being just neutral platforms but actually switching, in practice, to publishers — outfits that make editorial decisions about this is true and this is not, and then censoring what they declare untrue.

What ticked off Trump and then kicked off this whole much-needed action was that Twitter decided to do a “fact check” on a Trump tweet about how mail-in ballots could easily be used to produce fraudulent results. Twitter posted that’s not true — which by the way, it is — and that so ticked off Trump, that he signed his executive order striking directly at Section 230, saying it needs to be re-examined in light of current abuse of it.

In Twitter’s appendage to Trump tweet, it said to get the facts on mail-in ballots and provided a link to — of all things — a CNN story saying mail-in ballots were safe. In the process of saying they’re safe, they apparently forgot a story from a month earlier they had produced saying the exact opposite, highlighting a race where thousands of ballots had gone missing and suddenly showed up.

Tech companies have to make a choice: They are either neutral, at which point Section 230 shields them from being sued, but they can’t censor people — or they can censor all they want, but then they can be sued for violation of free speech, interfering with businesses, meddling with elections and a host of other things. In short, they can’t have it both ways and Trump is calling them out.

United States Attorney General Bill Barr is now on the case, along with the Federal Election Commission, which under the executive order must now hear cases filed by citizens saying the tech giants have interfered in the election. Likewise, the Federal Communications Commission — the FCC — is debating how to react since people, citizens, can now bring their complaints against Silicon Valley to Washington D.C.

The issue isn’t denying the tech tyrants their right to do business as they want. It’s the manifest unfairness of allowing Lefties unfettered access to an audience of hundreds of millions, and yet swatting down conservatives at every turn. And those decisions are being made by Marxists for Marxists, which means believers and conservatives don’t have a prayer. But they do have Trump, who Thursday became the answer to their prayers.

Now here at Church Militant, we have up close and personal experience with this. A few months back, we suddenly — out of the blue — got a notice from the company we used to host our videos. The company’s name is Vimeo.

Vimeo told us they were canceling our contract and that was that. The reason? Because the Marxist-atheist Southern Poverty Law Center — the infamous SPLC — had labeled Church Militant a “hate group” and Vimeo does not do business with hate groups. And 72 hours later, that was that — poof. Access to our videos through Vimeo was a thing of the past.

Simon Rafe here on staff worked some magic behind the scenes and managed to seize and pull down all our inventory of thousands of episodes of premium programming and save it all, but it was touch and go for a while. As an aside, the next time you watch any premium program going forward, say a thank-you prayer for Simon.

This is the reality of the tech world today. It’s controlled by Marxists, just like every other cultural institution, including important parts of the Church.

If you remember, clergy like the lying, plagiarizing Fr. Thomas Rosica as well as Bp. Robert Barron spoke in broad terms about some kind of seal of approval from the Church for catholic social media websites, in effect, censorship by non-approval. That would create an ipso facto blacklist and that is exactly how various clergy would talk about us and others — as not credible, not worth listening to — because we would not be approved. Liberals love censorship.

Vimeo canceled us — as part of the larger cancel culture — because they did not approve of what we say, to which we say “too bad.” This is America, you Marxist morons. Its called “free speech.” You don’t get to censor us. That’s how the marketplace of ideas works. All ideas get a hearing and the truthful ones disprove the false ones and rise to the top. But that presumes an even playing field, a fair game, the rules equally applied.

There are a hundred good reasons Trump should be reelected. This makes it one hundred and one.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Growing anti-Government protests in Iranian towns of Mashhad and Shandiz

Complimentary reports from Mashhad city, in Northeastern Iran, indicate that more people are joining the Town of Shandiz protest against the government plundering of the people.

Reliable reports say that at this hour (1600 local time) Thursday, December 31, 2015, the number of protesters has reached 2,000.

They are chanting slogans including: “we have heard thousands of empty pledges”, “Shandiz shareholders have been lied to”, “the incompetent governor must resign”, and “we are mourning today, because our lives are up in smoke.”

iran protest signs

Mashhad residents say we only can rely on God, and nobody in the government.

One protester plead to God saying, “Oh Lord, please relieve us from this misery.”

iran protest people in street

Another angry protester said “I have lost everything. I gave all my livelihood for this project. My children are sick and I have nothing to care for them.”

iran protester in street

Yet another angry protester condemned the government for his poor state of life saying, “This government would not do anything until a number of these people die.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Canada’s Spy Agency Disputes Idea That Personality And Terrorism Aren’t Linked

Katniss vs. Power: The Hunger Games Finale by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Now that the final movie in the series is out, we know that The Hunger Games is not just a pop movie series for young adults, a fantasy tale about about a young girl’s heroism. It is far more sophisticated than that: It is a political allegory, one of the best known of our time, about power and the complications of its displacement.

In this way, it covers the same intellectual terrain as Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and de Jouvenel’s On Power, but in a way that is more penetrating for readers and viewers, and particularly relevant for our times.

The final installment is a fitting and dramatic end to the tale. It deals with the greatest conflict in history, that between liberty and power. Those who have followed the story until the last movie might have supposed that the problem was rather stark. One man, President Snow, held all the power. He was a cruel man and he used every means to keep his power. He sat at the center of a capital city that pillaged the districts of resources and held power through fear.

If that is all there is to the problem, the solution would be clear: President Snow has to be killed. The source of the problem out of the way, all will be well.

The Plot Thickens

This was the thinking of heroine Katniss Everdeen for most of the series. And one can see why she would believe this. Snow was a ghastly figure, and he was personally responsible for vast cruelty and crimes. He deserved to be overthrown and for justice to prevail.

Plus, she supposed that everyone she knew shared her vision: a normal life without oppression, without violence, without pillaging, without rigid geographic and caste classifications, and without televised death matches orchestrated to instill fear in the population.

Previous installments had strong hints, however, that there was more going on beneath the surface. The capitol city Panem was an autocracy but also the center of a nation-state, which is to say that the bureaucracy, the administrative apparatus, a standing military, and its methods of rule could survive the death of the leader. This is the difference between a personal state and a nation state. The power apparatus of the nation state seeks immortality, a continuing life regardless who happens to head it.

The problem of creating a world without power, then, is more complicated than the overthrow of the existing autocrat. In every revolutionary situation, those who are most motivated to achieve the aim are those who seek to hold power themselves. So long as the machinery of legal violence exists, there will be those who seek to control it — and, as Hayek said, it is usually the worst who make it to the top. Therefore, it is not just those who rule but also those who seek to rule who constitute a threat to liberty. This is how the existence of powerful nation-states end up creating multiple layers of dangers.

Revolutionaries as Bad as the Regime?

Anyone who seeks to end oppression has to keep his or her eye out for those who would use the chaos and confusion of political upheavals to seize and exercise power in the future. This is what Katniss learns, as she gradually discovers that her one-time allies had become skilled in the conduct of war, appreciative of the status that comes with leadership, and lusty for exercising state power themselves.

She learned that great lesson of history: It is not just despots who need to be kept at bay but also those who most passionately seek to overthrow despots. In order to realize liberty, you need more than just loathing of those in charge; you need the ascendance of the love of true liberty itself.

Once Katniss catches on to what is happening around her, she has to make a decision. Does she comply with the dictate of the increasingly centralized revolutionary forces or take a different turn and go her own way? The urgency of this decision is what turns The Hunger Games from being a simple Manichean struggle between one good and one evil into a real-life version of a Massive Multiplayer Online game.

US Foreign Policy

Let us apply this principle.

In the 1980s, the US sought to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan by supporting Islamic fundamentalists, who were then called “freedom fighters,” and they were given weapons and massive logistical support. After the Soviets left, the rebellion gradually metastasized into the Taliban, who ruled with an iron hand, and were then overthrown after 9/11, leading to 15 years of US occupation, which has stirred resentment among the population.

This saga coincided with a similar situation in Iraq after 2003, following a decade of embargoes, intermittent bombing, and harsh sanctions. The overthrow of the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein brought to power not liberty-loving constitutionalists, but rather a Shiite majority that oppressed in turn on the Sunni minority that Hussein had represented.

The Sunni insurgency against the Iraqi state caused a bloody civil war in Iraq that eventually spilled over into the rebellion against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and mutated into the Islamic State. Over the course of 25 years, Iraq went from a defeated and relatively quiescent state to a seething hotbed of poverty, violence, and hatred.

Fast forward to the Libyan case where the overthrow of another evil dictator Muammar Gaddafi sparked a grim populist blowback. Combined with all the other interventions, and alongside a surreptitious attempt to boot the Syrian overlord, we’ve seen the spread of ISIS into a region-wide insurgency that truly intends to rule through bloodshed.

Such is politics. You think that getting the bad guy will end the problem. What this doesn’t consider is the possibly that something even worse is waiting in the wings. This is not a case for tolerating tyranny, but it is a case for a good dose of humility to go with revolutionary impulses.

The Problem of Democracy

And it’s not just about foreign regimes. A famous trait of democracy is that the urge to kick out one group of leaders is necessarily tied to bringing another group into power. The latter are often no better and sometimes worse than the former. This is one of the reasons for so much political nostalgia in US politics: a look back almost always provides a better picture than a look at the present.

I can’t count the number of times I heard people tell me how much they long for the good old days of Reagan or Clinton — people who loathed them at the time… until their replacements came along. Or think of the number of people who believed that getting rid of Bush and replacing him with Obama would lead to peace, prosperity, and understanding, only to find that the new regime continued the practices of the old. And heads up: it seems like this history is likely to repeat itself in the case of Obama.

The simple lesson of The Hunger Games is that powerful people can do terrible things. We must resist in order to stop them. The more complicated lesson is that powerful institutions themselves corrupt, and that there will always be those lacking in moral scruples who are willing to assume the mantle of power.

At the end of the movie, we see Katniss out of battle gear, sitting in the grass, at her home, being bathed by sunlight, tending to her own life, cultivating her own personal vision of freedom, out of the limelight. Ruling herself, not others. Perhaps that scene offers the best lesson of all.

Jeffrey A. TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

Real Hero Cato the Younger: The Man Who Almost Stopped Julius Caesar by Lawrence W. Reed

In the estimations of many historians, two men hold the honor as the most notable defenders of the Roman Republic. Marcus Tullius Cicero was one. Marcus Porcius Cato, or “Cato the Younger,” was the other.

Since there was a “younger,” there must have been an “elder,” too. Cato the Elder was the great grandfather of the younger. Both men, separated by more than a century, were influential in public office. Think of the elder as the social conservative, concerned in his day with preserving the customs and traditions of Rome. The younger was one of history’s early libertarians, interested more in personal and political liberties because he believed that if they were lost, nothing else mattered. It is this second one to whom I refer in the balance of this essay as simply “Cato.”

By the time of Cato’s birth in 95 BC, the Roman Republic was long in the tooth. Founded four centuries earlier, it had risen from obscurity to political and economic dominance in the Mediterranean. Rome was easily the world’s wealthiest and most powerful society. It wasn’t a libertarian paradise — slavery was a part of its makeup, as it was even more brutal everywhere else — but Rome had taken liberty to a zenith the world had never seen before and wouldn’t see again for a long time after it finally fell. The constitution of the republic embodied term limits; separation of powers; checks and balances; due process; habeas corpus; the rule of law; individual rights; and elected, representative legislative bodies, including the famous Senate. All of this was hanging by a thread in the first century BC.

Cato was just five years of age when Rome went to war with its former allies in the Italian peninsula — the so-called “Social War.” Though the conflict lasted just two years, its deleterious effects were huge. The decades to follow would be marked by the rise of factions and conflict and local armies loyal to their commanders instead of the larger society. A “welfare-warfare” state was putting down deep roots as Cato grew up. The limited government, personal responsibility and extensive civil society so critical to the republic’s previous success were in an agonizing, century-long process of collapse. Even many of those who recognized the decay around them nonetheless drank the Kool-Aid, succumbing to the temptations of power or subsidies or both.

Before the age of 30, Cato had become a supremely disciplined individual, a devotee of Stoicism in every respect. He commanded a legion in Macedon and won immense loyalty and respect from the soldiers for the example he set, living and laboring no differently from day to day than he required of his men. He first won election to public office (to the post of quaestor, supervising financial and budgetary matters for the state) in 65 BC and quickly earned a reputation as scrupulously meticulous and uncompromisingly honest. He went out of his way to hold previous quaestors accountable for their dishonesty and misappropriation of funds, which he himself uncovered.

Later he served in the Roman Senate, where he never missed a session and criticized other senators who did. Through his superb oratory in public and deft maneuverings in private, he worked tirelessly to restore fealty to the ideals of the fading Republic.

Since the days of the Gracchus brothers (Gaius and Tiberius) in the previous century, more and more Romans were voting for a living to replace or supplement having to work for one. Politicians were buying elections with expensive promises to distribute free or subsidized grain. Cato saw the debilitating effect such cynical demagoguery was exacting from the public’s character and opposed it at first. The one time he compromised on this issue was when he supported an expansion of the dole as the only way to prevent a demagogue named Julius Caesar from coming to power. It was a tactic he hoped would be temporary, but it ultimately failed, becoming the only blot on an otherwise virtuous and principled public career.

It was Cato’s fierce and relentless opposition to Julius Caesar that made him most remarkable. He saw in the ambitious, power-hungry general a mortal threat to the republic and tried to block his every move. He filibustered for hours on end to prevent a vote on Caesar’s bid to attain Rome’s highest office, the consulship. Caesar eventually got the job, but while in office, Cato vexed him more than any other senator. Caesar even ordered Cato dragged from the Senate in the middle of one of his orations, whereupon another senator declared, according to historian Cassius Dio, that he “would rather be in jail with Cato than in the Senate with Caesar.”

In Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Caesar’s Mortal Enemy, authors Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni underscore Cato’s implacable resistance:

It had been an unprecedented year of obstruction and deadlock, all spearheaded by Cato. Never before had a senator brought forth such a range of legislation to the same dead halt in a matter of months. The tax contracts, the postwar plans for the East, the land reform, Caesar’s triumph (a costly public spectacle), Caesar’s bid for a strong consulship and a provincial command — Cato had not stood against them alone, but he was the common thread between each filibuster and each “no.”

Cato stood in the way of Caesar’s ambitious agenda but couldn’t prevent his postconsulship appointment as a provincial governor. In that post, Caesar mustered his forces for an assault on the very republic he had governed as a consul. In 49 BC, he famously crossed the Rubicon River and headed for Rome to seize power.

As a sign of strength and magnanimity, Caesar might have pardoned his old foe. Some contemporaries and present-day historians believe that was, in fact, Caesar’s intent and would have been a politically smart thing to do. Quoting again from Goodman and Soni:

But Cato would not give Caesar the gift of his silence; he had scripted his own scene. He would not recognize a tyrant’s legitimacy by accepting his power to save. As Cato saw it, Caesar broke the law even in offering pardons, because he offered them on no authority but his own. To accept forgiveness would be conceding Caesar’s right to forgive, and Cato would not concede that.

So in April 46 BC in Utica, using his own sword to do the deed, Cato committed suicide rather than live under the thumb of the man whose power lust was about to extinguish the old republic. While Cato lived, write Goodman and Soni, “every Roman who feared that the traditional virtues were guttering out, who saw the state’s crisis as a moral crisis — as the product of terrifyingly modern avarice or ambition — looked, in time, to Cato.”

With Cicero’s death three years later under the orders of Caesar’s successor, Marc Antony, the Republic died and the dictatorship of the empire commenced.

More than 17 centuries later, in April 1713, Joseph Addison’s play Cato: A Tragedy debuted in London. Depicting the ancient Roman as a hero of republican liberty, it resonated for decades thereafter in both Britain and America. George Washington ordered it performed for his bedraggled troops at Valley Forge during the awful winter of 1777–78. Congress had forbidden it, thinking its sad conclusion would dispirit the troops, but Washington knew that Cato’s resistance to tyranny would inspire them. And thankfully, it did.

“Few leaders have ever put ambition so squarely in the service of principle,” write Goodman and Soni. “These were the qualities that set Cato apart from his fellows — and that made posterity take notice.”

Putting ambition in the service of principle instead of one’s own glory or power or wealth: now that’s a virtue to which every man and woman in public office — in any walk of life, for that matter — should aspire today.

For further information, see:

The Fall of the Republic” by Lawrence W. Reed

Enemy of the State, Friend of Liberty” by Lawrence W. Reed

Are We Rome?” by Lawrence W. Reed, and other essays on Rome


Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.

EDITORS NOTE: Each week, Mr. Reed will relate the stories of people whose choices and actions make them heroes. See the table of contents for previous installments.

Inside the Mind of the Man Who Could Be Bitcoin’s Creator by Max Borders

In political science terms medieval Iceland has been called an “anarchy,” but it is more realistic to describe it as a very peer-to-peer kind of government. — Nick Szabo

Many observers think Nick Szabo is the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin. Szabo, you see, is a coding wizard who had already created an earlier digital currency called “bitgold.” Could bitgold have been a practice run?

What’s more interesting is that Szabo has written extensively on the history of law. In particular, he writes about Anglo-Saxon emergent law, which collided eventually with the “master-servant” law of Justinian’s Rome. And Szabo argues that what we have today in the United States is but the shrinking vestige of common law operating within a growing body of Byzantine statutes.

All this might sound esoteric, but it has profound implications for cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, digital property titles, dispute resolution, and other potential applications of the blockchain at the heart of bitcoin — especially if Szabo is, in fact, the developer who set about writing source code for peer-to-peer law.

Szabo wrote in 2006,

Here’s my paper on private jurisdiction in English history. Franchise jurisdiction played a crucial but unheralded role in the history of English law and politics. Some private jurisdictions existed in Anglo-Saxon times but they grew in importance in the Norman and Angevin periods, and in the corporate form remained an important part of the British Empire until the 20th century.

A franchise, such as a corporation, a jurisdiction, or a right to collect certain tolls or taxes, was a kind of property: an “incorporeal hereditament.” English property law was very flexible; as a result franchise jurisdictions came in a wide variety of forms.

One can see how Szabo would have appreciated that flexibility as a developer.

Of course, some of these aspects of the common law (law by many) are still with us, but they have been overtaken in many quarters by edict (law by one) or especially by statute (law by few).

So what happened?

The Anglo-Norman legal idea of jurisdiction as property and peer-to-peer government clashed with ideas derived from the Roman Empire, via the text of Justinian’s legal code and its elaboration in European universities, of sovereignty and totalitarian rule via a master-servant or delegation hierarchy. By the 20th century, the Roman idea of hierarchical jurisdiction had largely won, especially in political science where government is often defined on neo-Roman terms as “sovereign” and “a monopoly of force.”

Indeed, as I wrote in “The End of Politics,”

Once-great empires soon grew up amid the detritus of war. The clan-king became a god-king. The administration of empire required more layers of hierarchy, which meant delegating power to satraps and governors. The emperor would issue commands to subordinates and those commands would be carried out by those on down the chains of command. Patronage relationships became the norm. The order of man lording power over man took on religious dimensions. Values such as loyalty, honor, obedience, and patriotism firmed up the hierarchy, and without such values, the structure could be weakened either from internal dissent or from better organized enemies.

Hierarchy became more elaborate over time as each layer was added, and hierarchy persisted, apparently, as humanity’s dominant social technology.

This militaristic law is so ingrained in our understanding now that it’s difficult for most of us to imagine life outside of it. Our understanding is of wise stewards minding the upper echelons of statecraft, while the rest of us team and hustle in the relatively peaceful interstices the regulatory state provides for us. It’s hard to conceive of alternative forms of governance and law doing better, and when people drop the A word with respect to these alternative forms, people can’t get past their own connotations.

Most of us have been thoroughly inculcated with this Hobbesian rationale. For example, just in debates among classical liberals, there are those convinced that persistent peace requires a final arbiter — one whose final word quashes conflict and whose law is made absolute through enforcement. And when it comes to alternatives, our failure of imagination has given rise to some of the most predatory regimes in history. As Szabo writes,

Our experience with totalitarianism of the 19th and 20th centuries, inspired and enabled by the Roman-derived procedural law and accompanying political structure (and including Napoleon, the Csars, the Kaisers, Communist despots, the Fascists, and the National Socialists), as well as the rise of vast and often oppressive bureaucracies in the “democratic” countries, should cause us to reconsider our commitment to government via master-servant (in modern terms, employer-employee) hierarchy, which is much better suited to military organization than to legal organization.

Indeed, we should reconsider our unreflective commitment to such hierarchies, because law and society are not only possible without them, but could be more robust, peaceful, and prosperous without them. But how do we move beyond those hierarchies?

The person who designed the basic protocols of the blockchain understood the power of “dumb networks” as opposed to Byzantine codes. As Szabo writes,

Fortunately, franchise jurisdiction has left permanent influences on modern governments, including on the republican form of government in general and the United States Constitution, federalism, and procedural rights in particular. It also left a record of a wide variety of forms of law and government that can provide us with alternatives to the vast employee hierarchies wielding coercive powers that have given rise to modern oppression.

Likewise, the inventor of bitcoin is helping us imagine a different sort of world. I wrote the following in part two of “The End of Politics”:

The architecture of the Web has already shown the world what’s possible in terms of upgrading our democratic operating system (DOS). This is true both in the sense that our new social technologies are like our online technologies, and in the sense that our online technologies enable new social technologies to emerge. Little platoons are already emerging on the spine of the blockchain, for example. And just as Lyft and Uber are showing taxi cartels how it’s done (or as Kickstarter is showing the NEA how it’s done, or as Bitcoin is showing the Federal Reserve how it’s done) new parallel governance structures will soon show State hierarchies around the world how it’s done.

What might the world look like when this process is further along? It’s hard to predict. But the network architectures show the way.

All of this was my rather roundabout way of saying that we’re already weaving together new law and using it, without permission.

Echoing legal scholar Bruce Benson’s Enterprise of Law, writer and venture fund manager Michael Gibson leaves us with an even brighter glimpse of the future in “The Nakamoto Consensus”:

It turns out there’s only one thing that guarantees production of good laws. The people bound by the laws have to agree to be bound by them. Not hypothetically or tacitly, as in some imaginary will of the people or behind a veil of ignorance. Consent must be real, transparent, and continuous. No law can bind a single person unless that person consents to be bound by that law. All laws must be strictly opt in. Lawmakers could be saints, devils or monkeys on typewriters — doesn’t matter. The opt out–opt in system lets only good laws survive. Bad laws are driven out of production.

Bad laws can only inflict harm and destroy wealth up to the cost to opt out of them. We can underthrow the state one contract at a time.

This single insight — articulated so well by Gibson — is what surely informed Nick Szabo and inspired Satoshi Nakamoto.

But if the “underthrow“ of Leviathan lies ahead, it will be thanks not only to encryption technology but also to understanding the beauty, flexibility, and robustness of emergent law. Smaller jurisdictions created by forking the code or by allowing people to vote with their boats are enough to reduce the costs of exit.

Szabo writes,

The overall goal of Juristopia is to improve the most important functions of government (especially defense and the abatement of public nuisances) while preventing the corruption, oppression, war, genocide, and other abuses that have so often come with police powers and taxation. Those evils have been particularly prone to occur when those powers are bundled into a locus of sovereignty, a la the personal totalitarianism of the Justinian Code, Bodin, and Hobbes or the parliamentary totalitarianism of Bagehot. These traditions of legal procedure, assuming political relationships are a matter of delegation rather than of property, have given us almost all of the worst in Western history: the Caesars, the Tsars, Napoleon, the Kaisers, the communist dictators, Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler among others — based on the profoundly false and destructive assumption, derived from the legal procedure of the Roman Empire, that there must be “one person” who is “responsible” for all politics and law — a person or (for Bagehot) small organization sitting at the top of a vast pyramid of principal-agent, usually boss-employee, relationships.

Although it discards totalitarian political structure and legal procedure, our proposed form of government is based on historically proven legal mechanisms. With the clarity of legal procedure it avoids the vague nonsense that often passes for political philosophy. Much of the political structure of Juristopia is based on highly evolved common law mechanisms such as property and contract, but these are used in the same basic manner as in the common law, rather than as misleading analogies or mere labels.

Let’s hope this process unfolds before the hierarchies grow too authoritarian in response.

Whether Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto I cannot say. But at the very least, Szabo was part of a community from which Nakamoto drew knowledge and inspiration. And that community was built on great ideas that are finally being given expression in ones and zeros.


Max Borders

Max Borders is the editor of the Freeman and director of content for FEE. He is also co-founder of the event experience Voice & Exit and author of Superwealth: Why we should stop worrying about the gap between rich and poor.

Real Hero Peter Fechter: The Berlin Wall and Those Who Refused to Be Caged by Lawrence W. Reed

For the 28 years from 1961 to 1989, the ghastly palisade known as the Berlin Wall divided the German city of Berlin. It sealed off the only escape hatch for people in the communist East who wanted freedom in the West.

No warning was given before August 13 when East German soldiers and police first stretched barbed wire and then began erecting the infamous wall, not to mention guard towers, dog runs, and explosive devices behind it.

By one estimate, 254 people died there during those 28 years — shot by police, ensnared by the barbed wire, mauled by dogs, or blown to bits by land mines — most of them in the infamous “death strip” that immediately paralleled the main barrier. The communist regime cynically referred to it as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.”

In my home hangs a large, framed copy of a famous photo of a poignant moment from that sad day in 1961. It shows a young, apprehensive East German soldier glancing about as he prepares to let a small boy pass through the emerging barrier. No doubt the boy spent the night with friends and found himself the next morning on the opposite side of the wall from his family. But the communist government ordered its men to let no one pass. The inscription below the photo explains that, at this very moment, the soldier was seen by a superior officer who immediately detached him from his unit. “No one,” reads the inscription, “knows what became of him.” Only the most despicable tyrants could punish a man for letting a child get to his loved ones, but in the Evil Empire, that and much worse happened all the time.

Like millions of others, a strapping 18-year-old bricklayer named Peter Fechter yearned for so much more than the stifling dreariness of socialism. He hatched a plan with a friend, Helmut Kulbeik, to conceal themselves in a carpenter’s woodshop near the wall and watch for an opportune moment to jump from a second-story window into the death strip. They would then run to and climb over the 6½ foot high concrete barrier, laced with barbed wire, and emerge in freedom on the other side.

It was August 17, 1962, barely a year since the Berlin Wall went up, but Fechter and Kulbeik were ready to risk everything. When the moment came that guards were looking the other way, they jumped. Seconds later, during their mad dash to the wall, guards began firing. Amazingly, Kulbeik made it to freedom. Fechter was not so lucky. In the plain view of witnesses numbering in the hundreds, he was hit in the pelvis. He fell, screaming in pain, to the ground.

No one on the East side, soldiers included, came to his aid. Westerners threw bandages over the wall but Fechter couldn’t reach them. Bleeding profusely, he died alone, an hour later. Demonstrators in West Berlin shouted, “Murderers!” at the East Berlin border guards, who eventually retrieved his lifeless body.

Christine Brecht, writing on the Berlin Wall Memorial website, reveals subsequent events involving the Fechter family:

In addition to the painful loss of their only son, the family of the deceased was subjected to reprisals from the East German government for decades. In July 1990 Peter Fechter’s sister pressed charges that opened preliminary proceedings and that ultimately ended in the conviction of two guards. Found guilty of manslaughter, they were sentenced to 20 and 21 months in prison, a sentence that was commuted to probation. During the main proceedings, Ruth Fechter, the victim’s younger sister who served as a joint plaintiff in the trial, expressed herself through her attorneys. They explained that she thought it important to speak out, to no longer be “damned by passivity and inactivity” and to get out of “the objectified role that she had been put in until then.” She movingly described how she and her family experienced the tragic death of her brother and had felt powerless to act against his public defamation. They had been sworn to secrecy, an involuntary obligation that put the family under tremendous pressure. “We were ostracized and experienced hostile encounters daily. They were not born of our personal desire, but were instead imposed on us by others, becoming a central element in the life of the Fechter Family.” After all those years, participating in the trial as a joint plaintiff offered Ruth Fechter an opportunity to participate in the effort to explain, research and evaluate the circumstances of her brother’s death. And she added that the legal perspective occasionally overlooks the fact that in this case “world history fatally intersected with the fate of a single individual.”

The world must never forget this awful chapter in history. Nor should we ever forget that it was done in the name of a vicious system that declared its “solidarity with the working class” and professed its devotion to “the people.”

We who embrace liberty don’t believe in shooting people because they don’t conform, and that is ultimately what socialism and communism are all about. We don’t plan other people’s lives because we’re too busy at the full-time job of reforming and improving our own. We believe in persuasion, not coercion. We solve problems at penpoint, not gunpoint. We’re never so smugly self-righteous in our beliefs that we’re ready at the drop of a hat to dragoon the rest of society into our schemes.

All this is why so many of us get a rush every time we think of Ronald Reagan standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” This is why we were brought to tears in the heady days of 1989 when thousands of Berliners scaled the Wall with their hammers, picks, and fists and pummeled that terrible edifice and the Marxist vision that fostered it.

Peter Fechter and the 253 others who died at the Berlin Wall are real heroes. They deserve to be remembered.

For further information, see:


Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.

EDITORS NOTE: Each week, Mr. Reed will relate the stories of people whose choices and actions make them heroes. See the table of contents for previous installments.

The American Dream Is For Dreamers

Over 230 years ago, a group of men had a dream.  They dreamed of a nation of free people.  A nation that existed solely to allow its citizens to live out their own dreams on their own terms with their own God given talent and grit.

They dreamed of a people free from the fear of government oppression.  A people free from tyranny from within and from without.  They dreamed of a people that could not be stopped from achieving greatness.

They dreamed long and hard.  They dreamed of that nation morning, noon and night.  They shared their dream with others who had the same dream.

They would talk about their dream in back allies, in local pubs, in living rooms, in town halls, in their churches, in the streets.

It was a dream that would not die.  It would not relent.  It would burn itself into their very being.  They woke with a burning desire to fulfill this dream every single day of their lives.  They went to bed every single night hoping God would allow them to wake so they could pursue that dream.

It was a dream that was real in their eyes, in their minds and in their hearts.  It was a dream that would lead them to war.  It was a dream that they knew would not become reality easily.  It was an elusive dream but it was an achievable dream.

So these men, these dreamers set out to fulfill their dream.  They fought, they bled and some even died before they could realize that dream for themselves.  But it was not a selfish dream.  It was a dream they believed would become reality even if they would not live to see it.

They dreamed for their children.  They dreamed for their grand-children.  They dreamed for their posterity.  They believed in the dream so much that they would willingly lay down their life if in doing so it would bring that dream to fruition.

It was a truly selfless dream.  A dream to be free.

That dream is still alive today.  That dream that those men fought and even died for became a reality.  That dream became the United States of America.

That same dream is still alive today.  Although it may seem that fewer than ever share that dream.  That thought would be wrong.

Today we are still a bunch of dreamers.  But we are now a strong nation of many dreamers.  More dreamers than those who first had the dream.

Today we dream the same as they dreamed centuries ago.  We dream about freedom.  We dream about pursuing our own happiness.  We dream of little of not government interference.  We dream not only for ourselves but for our children, our grand-children.  We dream for our posterity.

Today, the United States of America still attracts dreamers from all over the world.  They come here in boats, in planes, in cars, even by foot.  The people of the world have had the same dream and they heard the call.  They heard the dreamers call.  They heard the dreamers call from America.  They come to answer the call.

They sometimes risk their very lives to make that dream come true.  They do not dream only for themselves, but for their family, their children, their grand-children and their posterity.

This is a nation of dreamers.  All that we have accomplished that history will consider to be great came at first as a dream.

The great industrialists of the 19th  century dreamed of a nation that was fully modern and full of promise.  The great minds of the 20th century dreamed of fast cars and landing on the moon.

The great minds of the 21st century dream of an intelligent world full of smart devices that help man dream even bigger.

Yes, we are a nation that still dreams.  Yet in no ones dreams is their room or a place for an oppressive government.  There is no dream about sliding backwards.  There is no dream about having someone else take care of us.

Indeed, that would be a nightmare.

Instead we dream of being free to pursue our own dreams.  And we dream of even better days for our children, our grand-children and even our posterity.

That is the American way.  That is the American Dream.  That is the dream we are still willing to lay down our lives for so that others may keep that dream.

That is the American dream.  And that dream is not dead.  It is very much alive.  It is still very vibrant.  And that is what drives others from around the world to risk everything they have to come here.

Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream.  It was a dream of freedom for all.  That has always been the true American dream.

And that is my dream.

Is it yours, too?