Peterson Ordered to Report to Reeducation Camp for Criticizing Trudeau *UPDATED*

Read this and weep:

Dr. Peterson, the best-selling author of 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos,  goes on to say,

We are now in a situation in Canada under @JustinTrudeau where practicing professionals can have their livelihoods and public reputations threatened in a very serious manner for agreeing with the Official Opposition and criticizing major government figures.... Canadians: your physicians, lawyers, psychologists and other professionals are now so intimidated by their commissar overlords that they fear to tell you the truth. This means that your care and legal counsel has been rendered dangerously unreliable.

Peterson rose to stardom in 2016 for his YouTube videos criticizing the Trudeau Government's Bill C-16, which added "gender identity" discrimination to Canada's criminal code. Peterson argued that this was a violation of the basic human rights of freedom of speech and thought, and vowed not to comply. His initial video went viral, as did his subsequent videos on the subject, and then his videos on nearly every subject.

Since that time he has developed into one of the deepest thinkers and most effective communicators of conservative ideas in the English speaking world. His podcast garners millions of listeners, and he's tackled some of the thorniest political topics of our age, including the climate madness which is our primary concern here at The Pipeline.

All of this has made Peterson a target. There have been numerous attempts to "cancel" him by branding him as racist or misogynistic or transphobic, or whatever hateful term of the moment is. This move by the Ontario College of Psychologists to threaten Peterson's clinical license and livelihood is just the latest. And, despite the flimsy nature of these allegations, it might just succeed where the others have failed. That's because in Canada, a nation which has already abandoned the freedoms of speech and assembly—take a look at our coverage of last year's Freedom Convoy, and the Trudeau government's reprehensible treatment of those who participated in and supported it—due process too is increasingly a dead letter.

Kudos to Dr. Peterson for continuing to fight. We hope he prevails against this injustice, for his sake and for the sake of the once great nation of Canada. But we're not holding our breath. Somehow one senses that the worst is yet to come.

UPDATE: Jordan Peterson writes on Twitter:

Peterson explained his stance in the pages of Canada's National Post:

If I agree to this, then I must admit that I have been unprofessional in my conduct, and to have that noted publicly, even as the college insists that I am not required to admit to any wrongdoing. If I refuse — and I have (of course) refused — the next step is a mandatory public disciplinary session/inquiry and the possible suspension of my clinical licence (all of which will be also announced publicly).

I should also point out that the steps already taken constitute the second most serious possible response to my transgressions on the part of the college. I have been placed in the category of repeat offender, with high risk of further repetition.

What exactly have I done that is so seriously unprofessional that I am now a danger not only to any new potential clients but to the public itself? It is hard to tell with some of the complaints (one involved the submission of the entire transcript of a three-hour discussion on the Joe Rogan podcast), but here are some examples that might produce some reasonable concern among Canadians who care about such niceties as freedom of belief, conscience and speech:

  • I retweeted a comment made by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre about the unnecessary severity of the COVID lockdowns;
  • I criticized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau;
  • I criticized Justin Trudeau’s former chief of staff, Gerald Butts;
  • I criticized an Ottawa city councillor; and
  • I made a joke about the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern.

I did all that “disrespectfully,” by the way, in a “horrific” manner that spread “misinformation”; that was “threatening” and “harassing”; that was “embarrassing to the profession.” I am also (these are separate offences) sexist, transphobic, incapable of the requisite body positivity in relationship to morbid obesity and, unforgivably of all, a climate change denialist.

For criticizing our prime minister and his cronies and peers, for retweeting Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the official Opposition in Canada, and for holding and for daring to express reprehensible political views, I have now been convicted by the College of Psychologists of “harming” people in some manner serious enough to justify my forced re-education. Now that I have refused, I will definitely face further exceptionally public, demanding, time-consuming and expensive disciplinary action, including the suspension of my licence. This, despite the fact that none of the people whose complaints are being currently pursued were ever clients of mine, or even knew clients of mine, or even knew or were acquainted with any of the people they claim I am harming. This, despite the fact (and please attend to this) that half the people who levied such complaints falsely claimed that they had in fact been or currently are clients of mine...

In any case: I’m not complying. I’m not submitting to re-education. I am not admitting that my viewpoints — many of which have, by the way, been entirely justified by the facts that have emerged since the complaints were levied — were either wrong or unprofessional. I’m going to say what I have to say, and let the chips fall where they will. I have done nothing to compromise those in my care; quite the contrary — I have served all my clients and the millions of people I am communicating with to the best of my ability and in good faith, and that’s that.

Canada: Fascist or Communist?

The lifting of the Emergencies Act is an enormous relief to all liberty-loving Canadians, but the fact that it could have been invoked on demonstrably flimsy grounds—for a peaceful protest in which no violence or property damage occurred—demonstrates the lawless lengths the Justin Trudeau government will go to secure total power. Perhaps the Act was a test to gauge the reaction of Canadians, many of whom accepted it supinely. Perhaps it was withdrawn because it appeared set to be revoked by the Senate. According to No More Lockdowns Canada, the reason may have had something to do with “an abrupt loss of institutional confidence in the banking system.”

Whatever the case, the willingness to suspend peaceful citizens’ liberties so harshly demonstrates the autocratic impulses of the ruling party. In innumerable articles, blogs and podcasts I’ve consulted over the last few turbulent weeks, the government has been variously described as fascist or communist. The terms are used interchangeably. An acquaintance recently asked which would be the proper designation.

The red queen.

As Mussolini wrote in The Doctrine of Fascism, “The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions.” Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s recent directives under the Emergencies Act were wholly fascist in nature, to wit: 

First: we are broadening the scope of Canada’s anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use. These changes cover all forms of transactions, including digital assets such as cryptocurrencies. Second: the government is issuing an order with immediate effect, under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations.

Obviously, the freezing of bank accounts would proceed without a court order. The corporations and financial and social institutions seem eager to comply. The definition of “illegal,” of course, is moot, a tyrannical expedient.

Canada has also adopted the top-down, social credit and contact tracing system practiced by Communist China, a country it is rapidly coming to resemble. Justin Trudeau made no secret of his admiration for the Chinese “basic dictatorship”: “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.” Indeed, Trudeau invited the Chinese military to train in Canada. (The site chosen for cold-weather maneuvers was Petawawa, Ontario.) Fascist Venezuela and communist Cuba are also major influences and templates. 

Which is it, then, fascist or communist? The answer is both, for the distinction is fundamentally irrelevant. Both are totalitarian entities, defined as systems of government that are centralized and autocratic and that demand total subservience to the state—hence “totalitarian.” Jonah Goldberg made the point eloquently in his Liberal Fascism. There is no paradox. As Paul Gottfried writes in Fascism: The Career of a Concept, “Totalitarianism is defined as a twentieth-century problem that is illustrated most dramatically by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia…Hitler and Stalin were not ideological opposites but similar dangers to human freedom.”

Besties.

If there is a difference between the two totalitarian ideologies, it pertains to the relation between state and corporation: the communist system is a sealed unit in which state and corporation are one and the same; the fascist system uses the corporation as a semi-independent institution to be manipulated and controlled. Between one and the other falls the shadow of not much.

The issue of whether Canada in its current manifestation is fascist or communist is therefore immaterial. It is both, owing to the habitual governing practice of the Trudeaus. Invoking the War Measures Act to deal with national emergencies that are not national emergencies seems to run in the Trudeau family. During the 1970 “October Crisis,” Trudeau père applied the measure to disable, as Nationalist Passions puts it, “an informal group, organized in small, autonomous cells [that] had no more than thirty-five members.” In 2022, Trudeau fils invoked the successor Emergencies Act to crush a peaceful trucker convoy protest and shut down banking privileges of both protestors and those who contributed to the trucker fund, retroactively made illegal. 

“Getting rid of troublemakers en masse,” Gottlieb writes, “would help to advance the common project imposed by the leader,” consisting of control over the economy and public life, “a monopoly over all forms of communication” (Cf. Bill C-10), and the crushing of political dissent and fractious minorities. Sound familiar? What we are witnessing is a dynasty on the make and a country on the skids.

Père Pierre?

The Emergencies Act may have ben revoked, but the federal Covid mandates and restrictions, which the Freedom Convoy originally protested, are still on the books. Moreover, the truckers have lost their licences and operating insurance and many have lost their rigs. Their livelihoods have been destroyed. Some continue to languish in jail without bail. These are the wages of a peaceful protest that broke no laws, despite the misinformation and disinformation that is Justin Trudeau’s stock-in-trade.

We should not, then, be distracted by irrelevant distinctions and scholarly niceties. Whether the government is fascist or communist is moot. Under the current administration, a working coalition between two far-left parties, the Liberals and the enclitic NDP, Canada bears all the hallmarks of a repressive, oligopolist state that is laboring to permanently entrench itself. The Trudeaus have seen to that. Canadians have elected them on multiple occasions and, with the exception of those whose minds have not dimmed—a minority, be it said—Canadians have reaped the country they deserve. Mutatis mutandis, we now live under the boot of a communofascist regime and, barring some unforeseen change, we will all suffer for it.

THE COLUMN: Sic Semper Tyrannis

On this, the second anniversary of The-Pipeline.org, we present the first of a series of weekly columns that will appear each Monday morning. Everything on the table, nothing off the table. mw

And so we near the end of the Great Pandemic Hoax of 2019-22, an unprecedented and breathtaking power grab by governments around the world to seize powers far beyond their constitutional allotments and to transform a relatively minor flu virus — however originated and for what ill purposes — into a weapon of mass economic and emotional destruction whose effects will be felt for years and decades to come. It has been a textbook example of tyranny.

Consider it a warning shot, though, because while Covid may finally have been exposed for the non-apocalyptic event it always was, such tyranny is only the beginning until we put a stop to it. Put a stop to extra-legal "emergency" measures that are transparently and insultingly fraudulent, and which are invoked in the name of the "greater good." Put a stop to the notion of judicially sanctioned "protected classes" in a formerly classless society. Put to stop the notion of a "New Normal" of privation, deviancy, and spiritual and material penury imposed by Leftists as they continue their centuries-old task of undermining every tenet of Western Civilization in the name of "equity" — in a world in which equality is aspirational at best and equity is impossible.

And, once and for all, put paid to the notion that "when you've got your health you've got everything,"  the motto of a nation of neurotic hypochondriacs that is fundamentally at odds with every principle of the moral and socially productive life. For under this seemingly anodyne contention lies a wealth of mischief, chief among them the idea that your fellow citizens pose an existential threat to you by their refusal to conform, and thus can and should be restricted, incarcerated, or even killed as the need arises. And all in the name of Socialism, whether National or international.

Nicolae and Elena in happier times.

As we've seen via a recent study by the Johns Hopkin University (a study of studies, really), the lockdowns imposed by states, countries, and municipalities everywhere in the name of "mitigating" the spread of an illness with a 99 percent survival rate in the name of public health were completely ineffective.

Far better to have done nothing at all; instead, families were separated, the elderly (those most at risk from the respirational difficulties caused by the likely Chinese-manufactured bioweapon) died alone and often in squalor; weddings and funerals were canceled or held "virtually"; businesses were shuttered and driven into bankruptcy; more than two years of schooling were ripped away from forcibly masked children; and colleges and universities continued their descent into mere parental-money shakedown rackets by offering education-by-Zoom as they continued with their main mission of gobbling up real estate to take it off the tax rolls and fatten their endowments.

And the only people held responsible for this sanctioned crime wave were... you. You, the uncooperative, the recalcitrant, the deplorable. You, the anti-social, the rebellious, the individualists, the fighters, the darers, the doers. You, the people who founded this country in defiance of central authority and rule-by-pronunciamento, you who pledge allegiance not to a political party or a strong leader, but to a flag and to the country for which it stands. One nation, under a God whom the other side has no use for, but only contempt. Just as they do for you.

It's become axiomatic that inside every leftist is a totalitarian screaming to get out. So if there's one positive thing Covid has done is identify those people for all to see: the slave-muzzle wearers, proudly exhibiting their servile natures. They're the Karens, the mask nazis, the buttinskis who can't leave you or your family alone, the ones who screech at the sight of the unmasked like Donald Sutherland ratting out a real human being at the end of the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

These are the same people who want to force you into electric cars but not provide a reliable source of electricity for them. Who wish to destroy the energy industries that built our nation, and leave you freezing or sweltering in the dark. Who condone and even encourage mass looting of shops, the murder of small Asian women waiting for a subway train, the shooting of policemen by the underclass, and the flouting of nearly every law of civilized behavior on the streets in the name of "social justice." And these are the people who, under the rubric of "climate change" and "the Great Reset," want to strip you of your home, your cars, your livelihood and, eventually, your life. No matter which office they hold, high or low or none at all, these people are your enemies and should be treated accordingly.

Make no mistake: Covid was only a beta-test, one that a submissive population passed with flying colors. Instantly repealed, without all that pesky business about amending the Constitution, were the first, fourth, fifth, and the eighth articles of the Bill of Rights. (The ninth and tenth, of course, have long since been rendered null, void, and nugatory. You remember them, the ones that reserve all unenumerated rights not mentioned in the Constitution to the people and the states.) This is why former president Barack Obama infamously referred to our founding document as a "charter of negative liberties." Which is precisely what the Founders desired.

Read 'em and weep.

Ah, but "affirmative" rights sound so much better. Like FDR's Four Freedoms:  what could possibly go wrong with having government affirmatively promise you freedom of speech (already guaranteed by the first amendment), freedom of worship (ditto), freedom from want and freedom from fear. While they were never legislated formally, the first two were superfluous — and have in any case been repealed by Covid — and the latter two have been implemented by stealth under the false flags of "compassion" and "safety."

Affirmative rights, however, are essentially fascistic; your "safety" and material security, in the zero-sum mindsets of governments everywhere, come at the expense of someone else. Feminized guarantees of "safety" and "security" were standard fare in every European communist country until its collapse between 1989 and 1991, It's instructive to note that those are the same terms in which censorious social-media sites such as Twitter (from which I was "permanently banned" in August 2020 for unspecified "targeted harassment") and Facebook (in whose Sugarmountain Gulag I am currently spending another two weeks for "hate speech," which is Zuckerspeak for disparagement) couch their own "rules" and "community standards." The sooner both are destroyed, the better and freer everybody will be.

For when the preference cascade begins, punks, tyrants and dictators need to watch their backs as the real workers of the world unite. I spent the years between 1985 and 1991 shuttling in and out of East Germany and the Soviet Union, was in Berlin as the Wall was being torn down, and departed from Moscow just before the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of '91. (The Soviet Union folded four months later.) I stood on Fisherman's Bastion in Budapest with Hungarian friends in late 1989, looking east over the Danube, as they expressed their fears of an imminent invasion from Romanian troops. Hope was in the air — the Wall had just fallen — but uncertainty still ruled. Would the useless George H.W. Bush administration come to their aid? Or, once again, would the fascist-communist tanks roll?

Instead, a miracle happened: the people, united, were not to be defeated.

On Dec. 21, 1989, the old dictator went to the well once too often, and called a rally he couldn't control. As the people's voices rose against him (if the Romanians had had trucks, they would have used them), his voice broke, his expression changed from confidence to befuddlement, the television transmission stopped, and he was whisked away. A rebellion that had started with a lone priest in the ethnically Hungarian town of Timișoara spread eastward across the country to Bucharest. The next day, the evil pair tried to escape by helicopter, but by then the army had switched sides. Ceaușescu and his wife were arrested, tried, and summarily executed.

What's the old saying?

Oh yes: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

And Now, a Word from Karen

We all know somebody just like this. And wish we didn't.

Medical Fascism, or, the Doctrine of Vaccination

The Covid controversy, which shows no sign of ending anytime soon, has now condensed around the irruption of viral mutations, and the need for an indefinite number of injections or booster shots, as Dr. Fauci has recently stipulated. Objections are routinely discredited or censored while mandates insensibly ramify. One may know people who collapsed shortly after taking the jab, or whose research suggests that the vaccines may be toxic or merely drive the emergence of workaround variants like the B.1.1.529  recently found in Botswana and South Africa (dubbed Omicron, aka Nu).

But such attestations are of no account. “Vaccinology has become a cult religion,” writes Dr. Christopher Shaw in Dispatches from the Vaccine Wars. People must vaccinate. People must submit to an increasingly despotic political system and its avowed program of legislating the health of the nation, otherwise known as Covid-zero. It is a system that had come to be known as medical fascism.

Germany, 1937: mens sana in corpore sano.

As The Lancet has pointed out with respect to the Nuremberg trials, its proceedings suggest “implications relevant for today's debates on the ethics of research involving human beings.” The Covid vaccines certainly qualify as such; long term trials are far from completed, mRNA injections were never tested on pregnant women nor on children, nor do they confer prolonged immunity and—despite disclaimers to the contrary—may not prevent “shedding.”

The Nuremberg Doctors Trial, which began on December 9, 1946, continues to impinge on contemporary medicine. As a result of experimental medical practices during the Nazi era, aside from the indescribable barbarities inflicted on Jews and other Untermenschen, “considerable minorities of the population… lost most or all of their civil rights.” The political system in place subordinated the individual person to “the importance ascribed to the health and wellbeing of society as a whole,” as exemplified by the infamous Gesundheitspass Des Hauptamtes Für Volksgesundheit Der NSDAP, or Health Pass Card, of 1938, with the backing in large measure of the medical profession. 

The National Library of Medicine informs us that more than half of all German physicians joined the Nazi Party, “surpassing the Party enrollments of all other professions.” Another study observes that research has shifted to elucidating the motivations of the medical community for such a transition from healer to political operative, incentives that include the glorification of the profession, improved incomes, and purging the profession of undesirables. As always, the political juggernaut advances under the mantle of national health, leading to a society that has been effectively vaccinated against democratic governance. 

Ich bin's!

Today, in almost all Western democracies, not having a vaccine passport is equivalent to wearing a badge of social pariahhood. Public spaces have become off-limits. Internet mobbing and civil incitement are daily occurrences. Snitching has become a social practice. Travel is forbidden to the unvaccinated. No jab, no job. People are being fired without compensation. People who quit voluntarily rather than accept the vaccine may be deprived of their legal benefits. Many commercial transactions are determined by the existence of QR codes, as if in ironic confirmation of a biblical presage:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. (Revelation 13:16-17).

Public personalities like Noam Chomsky suggest that the unvaccinated lose their access to food stores. Newspaper columnists have proposed that unvaccinated people should be prosecuted. Austria has just locked down one-third of its population, a measure enforced by police carrying out spot-checks on the streets. Certain countries are planning quarantine facilities that eerily resemble internment camps. Australian state governments, Chris Queen reports in PJ Media, now want to codify the emergency measures they took two years ago during the initial stages of the pandemic and to “haul Covid patients into quarantine camps.” (The Northern Territory website is most explicit). Other countries are contemplating compulsory vaccination of the entire population, curfews and indoor masking. If sources are accurate, Slovenia is now imposing gasoline-passports. The lockdown proceeds in everything but name and is beginning to look permanent.

The point is that such measures are ascending steps to autocratic rule. Decorated Canadian army veteran Tex Leugnar, an astute and passionate commenter on current affairs, has no doubt, as Cochrane Now reports, “that the measures being taken by the federal government are similar to those taken by the Nazi Party after it seized control of Germany.” The doctrine of vaccination with its attendant protocols and ordinances obviously entails a double peril regarding both the body of the person and the body politic as well. Both are threatened. Indeed, just today New York City has arbitrarily decreed that some 56,000 religious- and private-school workers be vaccinated by Dec. 20, including observant Catholics and Orthodox Jews. 

“We’re doing everything in our power to protect our students and school staff, and a mandate for nonpublic school employees will help keep our school communities and youngest New Yorkers safe,” said Gauleiter/Mayor Bill de Blasio, born Warren Wilhelm, Jr.

Anti-lockdown protestors: "You can't go for a stroll with Nazis."

On the one hand, the individual is at risk from an insufficiently and inadequately tested, premature and experimental vaccine that is not only “leaky” but known to cause harm. The actual numbers are disputed but are plainly not insignificant. Indeed, data released by the British government covering the last six months, based on all-cause mortality statistics, show that vaccinated adults are dying at twice the rate of unvaccinated people, a case of vaccine-caused mortality. (See also Table 4 of the Excel document).

Similarly, U.K. NHS consulting cardiologist Dr. Anseem Malhotra points to 10,000 non-Covid excess deaths since mid-summer 2021. A medRxiv licensed German preprint exposes the dangers from mRNA vaccines, including cytokine responses and the degrading of antitumor and antiviral functions. Interestingly, we now know that the Nu variant was initially discovered in four fully vaccinated Botswana patients, testifying to a major seroprevalence problem routinely ignored by medical experimenters, TV doctors and general practitioners. 

On the other hand, the health of Constitutional democracy predicated on the rights of the individual is equally in danger of infection, as government restrictions on personal liberty together with social media censorship, pharmacratic overreach, media sensationalism, and a billionaire class of left-oriented, build-back-better demagogues may inevitably lead to a condition of oligarchic socialism (aka the “Great Reset”). The political virus we are now experiencing, giving rise to a condition of growing social pathogenesis, may spell the end of once-free and representative democracy. 

Auschwitz or Australia?

In either case, the doctrine of vaccination, vigorously seconded by the medical profession and culminating in acceptance by the individual, expresses the tyranny of righteous conviction and totalitarian will. The result is the twin repression of personal independence and political freedom. As Spanish author César Madrigal writes in The Globalist Agenda Is Real, “we are already experiencing the reduction of our individual rights with the excuse of Covid-19,” which envisions “the extinction of our democracies.” Legislated compulsion backed by severe social and economic penalties is a harbinger of totalitarian rule, of which forced medical procedures and a rhetoric of civic obligation are, as they say, “part of the plan.” Blue-chip evidence exploding Covid policy and vaccine boosterism is routinely dismissed and suppressed as “misinformation.” 

In the United States, the Federation of State Medical Boards warned that “Physicians who generate and spread Covid-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.” In Canada the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has threatened to revoke the licences of doctors who question the safety of the vaccines. A Who’s Who of leading specialists in epidemiology and related disciplines who contest the prevailing narrative have been fired, stripped of their professional accreditations, and rigidly censored. Their message has been quashed. 

The shape of things to come?

The direction in which political policy and social developments are proceeding is not hard to discern. The Gesundheitspass in its current form and its enforcement of a regime of medical apartheid is merely a precursor to the installation of authoritarian governance. If things do not change, we will find ourselves living in a police state. The analogy to Nazi Germany, despite the obvious differences, is not as farfetched as it might at first appear.

The Coming Viral Dictatorship

A pivotal feature of dictatorial regimes is the institutional lie, expressed as an unfounded message of millennial hope, an ever-changing set of legislated policies, and the tendency of authoritarian leaders to violate their own axioms and edicts. We see this happening before our eyes as a Covid-19 tyranny takes root on our own soil.

The manifold inconsistencies and deceptions that circulate regarding the draconian mandates and coercive measures imposed by Big Government to combat the Covid pandemic should by now have alerted the public to their suspicious nature. We have observed the extent to which these ordinances are regularly flouted by the authorities, who have been seen without their masks, disregarding social distancing rules, and travelling during lockdowns. Such exemptions are obviously a privilege reserved only to the elites, who do not scruple to lecture us on the current proprieties.

One popular slogan that we meet everywhere, on radio and TV, on the Internet, and emblazoned on ubiquitous signage, is particularly irritating: “We’re All In This Together.” Clearly, we are not. While small business owners and entrepreneurs struggle with bankruptcy as their establishments are closed down, Big Box stores operate at full capacity, teachers retain handsome salaries while refusing to enter their classrooms, government personnel continue to be paid in absentia, and politicians suffer no loss of ample remuneration.

This means you.

Weddings, church services, funerals, social gatherings, holiday celebrations and anti-lockdown protests are either curtailed or banned to prevent proximity transmission of the virus; BLM demonstrations involving thousands of people cheek-by-jowl agitating for “social justice” are permitted and encouraged. Doctors are here to serve their patients; now many have embraced telemedicine, which does not impact their fees as it does their effectiveness. Diagnosis at a distance is not reliable medicine, though it is lucrative medicine. The overall hypocrisy that confronts us at every level of political, corporate and professional society is so blatant as to be unbelievable—except it is entirely believable. We are manifestly not in this all together, not by a long shot.

Another sedative to which we are constantly exposed is the official platitude that the mandates under which we malinger are intended “to protect public health and safety.” The collateral effects of this faux campaign have, in fact, endangered public health and safety. The category of “excess deaths” owing to delayed medical procedures for cancer, Alzheimer's, heart ailments and diabetes, among other conditions, including critical stress, depressive suicides, and adverse reactions and deaths linked to the Covid vaccines now arguably surpass Covid morbidity numbers—which themselves appear to have been grossly inflated. Indeed, in a crowning irony, the virus may itself be “boosted” by iatrogenic interventions. One need only consult virologist and immunologist Robert Malone, the actual inventor of the mRNA vaccines, who warns against them as Covid-19 suppressants. 

We were assured that vaccine passports were the route to “public health and safety” and that life would soon be back to normal. Now triple vaxxing, masks and renewed lockdowns have become mandatory in many jurisdictions and nations. The temptation to blame and penalize the unvaccinated for any upsurge of “cases” is spreading and may easily translate into second-class status for the unvaccinated and a policy of forced internment. 

But who are the “unvaccinated”?  Israel’s Director of the Ziv Medical Center Dr. Salman Zarka admits that the definition is changing: “We are updating what it means to be vaccinated.” In the absence of a third jab (and counting), even the double-vaxxed fall into the category of “unvaccinated.” As Kit Knightly writes in off-guardian, “Israel is the petri dish”; if it works there, the rest of the world will follow suit. Of course, in another sense of the phrase, it doesn’t really “work there.” A multi-sourced chart published in the Financial Times, comparing over-vaxxed Israel to under-vaxxed Egypt, provides a sobering metric. Egypt is doing at least an order of magnitude better than Israel. Equally distressing, on August 22 West Virginia governor Jim Justice reported a 26 percent surge among the fully vaccinated and a 25 percent increase in vaccinated deaths. This surely is not a one-off.

Where do you think you're going?

It should be obvious by this time that we are dealing with a vast shell game. In an open letter to the Canadian Minister of Health, McGill University theology professor Douglas Farrow argues, correctly, that vaccine mandates are incoherent. That is surely the right word. Masks were supposed to keep us safe. They didn’t do very well, so the first jab was introduced, which should have offered immunity. Then came a second jab, followed by a third and counting. Then came the vaccine passports. Meanwhile, as noted, double-and-triple-jabbed Israelis are still fighting infection and transmission and have now even been refused entry to Portugal and to open, prosperous Sweden.

It is no surprise, at least among the concerned, that distrust is growing of our health authorities, the political class and the collusive “misleadia,” assiduously promoting a medical dogma that is plainly muddled, deceptive and hypocritical. It is also, to put it bluntly, totalitarian.

The next step is the construction of quarantine or internment camps, as currently planned in Australia. Similarly, in the U.S. the CDC has proposed a “shielding approach” that would establish “a group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector…where high-risk individuals (the unvaccinated) are physically isolated together.” As if this weren’t plain enough, the proposal states that “High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or ‘green zones’ established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector or community level… They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.” 

Meanwhile, the National Guard is in process of hiring “internment resettlement specialists” to supervise detention operations and “provide guidance to individual prisoners.” It is not clear from the explanatory description what this program precisely entails, but it doesn’t augur well. On August 6, 2021, governor Bill Lee of Tennessee signed an executive order authorizing involuntary internment of targeted citizens, under the convenient designation of “regulatory flexibilities.”

Not to be outdone, the Department of Homeland Security claims that those resisting the vaccines pose a “potential terror threat.” If you oppose the vaccines, you are an “extremist.” The document is very clear: “These extremists may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.” Bill HR 4980 currently before Congress would place unvaccinated persons on a No-Fly list and lead inexorably to a No-Buy gun control law. A No-Buy gun list would prevent people from arming themselves. As they say, you have been warned.

Welcome to Australia.

My own country of Canada marches in lockstep with the heavily mandated nations of Israel, the U.K. and, of course, Australia and parts of the U.S. According to NaturalNews, the Canadian government has ordered enough vaccines to inoculate every man, woman and child many times over for the next three years, having stockpiled 293 million doses for a population of 38 million. The report continues: “Just months ago, the Covid-19 vaccines were hailed as a ‘miracle of science’ that were putting an ‘end to the pandemic’… But now the narrative has changed” and we can expect more censorship, travel restriction, contact tracing, deprivation of human rights, dodgy testing, and mask and vaccine mandates. The fear is that even supermarkets may eventually be placed off limits for the unvaccinated, forcing one to rely on doorstep deliveries. 

As we’ve seen, this despotic program is being implemented in the name of “protecting public health and safety.” It appears, rather, as if it is being put in practice to create a system of “vaccine enslavement” and authoritarian control. Our Prime Minister, after all, is on record as admiring the “basic dictatorship” of Communist China.

What next? One shudders to think. Where next? Who's next?

From Dundee to Dan Andrews, the Fall of Oz

When we think of a country, we often conjure up a view of the character of its people. For example, Americans are individualistic and brash, the Japanese are collectivist and polite. It’s all nonsense. Each country’s population contains people with a range of temperaments and personalities.

Nonetheless, I consulted an organisation which claims to compare and scale cross-national cultural characteristics. I noticed that individualism was put at 91 for America yet only 46 for Japan. Preconception ticked. Australians, scoring 90 by the way, have built a reputation for being of a larrikin disposition; individualistic, disregarding of conventions. Probably started from our convict past, burnished through stories, true or false, of an irreverent attitude of soldiers to their officers in the two world wars. Crocodile Dundee brought the same attitude to the silver screen.

Let me say that when I first came to Australia from England, numbers of decades ago, there was a refreshing egalitarianism in society; akin, I think, to larrikinism. That was then. It has most definitely faded. Australia itself has changed profoundly. We are now much more multiethnic and multicultural. Whether this good or bad is incidental. It has changed the character of the nation.

Does that change in character of the nation account for the ludicrous response of government and health authorities in Australia to a virus which has killed so very few people compared with overall deaths from other causes?

Specifically, does it account for state border closures; banning citizens (à la North Korea) from leaving the country; preventing citizens from returning; keeping a child from its parents across a state border for weeks on end, preventing a daughter from visiting her dying father, handcuffing and arresting a pregnant woman in her own home for advising the time and location of a public protest; burly policemen wrestling women to the ground; using pepper sprays and rubber bullets on protestors in Melbourne; imposing curfews; putting troops on the streets; locking people in airless hotel rooms; and, beyond parody, Dan Andrews (the Victorian premier) ordering people not to demask while drinking their cocktails outside?

The answer to these questions is that the changing character of the nation might have played a small part. I don’t believe it played a large part at all. It’s complicated.

But to get mythology out of the way. It is clear that the (mostly) passive acceptance of the egregious overreaction to Covid on the part of the authorities has shown that the Australian population is not a race of larrikins bucking authority. Like any rule which fails the test, that particular romantic idealisation of national character is well and truly debunked. It cannot be resurrected. But was it ever true? I don’t think it was. Nor do I think Australia stands out in failing the test.

Individuals are powerless against the apparatus of the state. Where we see push back, trade unions are often instrumental. This is happening with opposition to requiring vaccine passports for employees in Australia as it is, for example, in the United States.

The twin keys to distinguishing one country from another in responding to Covid are leadership and circumstances. The liberal response of Sweden compared with the Denmark and Norway is purely down to leadership. Sweden by chance, I imagine, had an enlightened public health official and a prime minister willing to go along. No other country has been nearly so lucky.

Australia has been particularly unlucky. You might say that the population has the politicians it deserves. OK, but so do the Brits (Johnson), Americans (Biden), Canadians (Trudeau), French (Macron), Germans (Merkel). True, we have a mediocre bunch of like-minded state premiers (two of them Andrews and the Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk seemingly with undiagnosed personality disorders), and the prime minister is not much better; but that’s surely par for the international course. In the best of all possible worlds, they would have only done as badly as their overseas peers. That they are doing worse is down to circumstances, which have led Australian state premiers into a trap of their own making.

The trap was first set by Australia being an island continent. This gave the alluring, if delusional prospect, of keeping Covid out. Eradication or elimination became the goal, not merely flattening the curve. Backing this delusional prospect, Covid struck and the border closed before tens of thousands of Chinese students were due to return from China to Australian universities.

Only in the past week or so have the premiers of NSW (Gladys Berejiklian) and Victoria reluctantly conceded that Covid is here to stay. Mark McGowan, the premier of Western Australia, with zero new cases, still thinks he can keep Covid out of his state; and has his state border closed down. He's madder than Dan probably, but what can be done?

If elimination is the goal, lockdowns are imposed whenever cases get away from contact tracers and that doesn’t amount to many cases when the strain of Covid is highly infectious. When you have locked down for a hundred cases, it’s difficult to justify opening up when cases increase to two hundred. The trap springs shut.

And it's not as though the federal government can override the states. Australia is a federation. States have responsibility for public health and the ability to frustrate the federal government.

Each state premier did his or her polling. People liked the idea of being kept safe. Normally there might have been political or media opposition to impart perspective and lead people into having a less cowed more stoical response. Not so with Covid. And there is no financial burden to speak of on state governments locking down their states. State governments don’t levy their own income taxes or sales taxes. Their revenue primarily comes from the feds.

When states lock down the federal government funds people and businesses affected. Could the federal government do otherwise? Theoretically. But not with federal elections every three years it couldn’t.

The fanaticism of state governments in trying to eliminate Covid bled over to law enforcement. As we know police have enormous powers. And, as a fact of life, there are some within police forces prone to misusing them. Effectively, licence was given to such misuse by the stance and demeanour of state premiers. The woeful 1984-type encouragement of citizens to dob in one another for breaking Covid rules – having friends over, travelling too far, being unmasked (fine $500 in NSW) – is a particularly pernicious by-product. Part of the disintegration of civil society when put to the test.

My conclusion: Covid has revealed the nasty underbelly of the western world’s so-called system of limited government. Only limited in good times. Nowhere has this been greater exposed than in Oz.

Beware the Environmental Emojis

It needs to be said: radical environmentalism is both a scam and a destroyer, hiding behind a smiling-face-with-hearts emoji.

I have little doubt that Jim Jones and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, once much-loved messianic figures, would today be staunch environmentalists. In fact, Jones’ “apostolic socialism” movement was called the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, which culminated, as we recall, in “revolutionary suicide.”

And one of the central concepts in the Reverend Moon’s Divine Principle is the responsible stewardship of the earth and a caring attitude for the entirety of nature. This doctrine did not prevent him from incarcerating and brainwashing the members of his Unification Church, while operating among his many businesses a car manufacturing plant in North Korea, a sea food consortium, media and estate agencies, and a munitions racket that funded his mansions, castles and large properties around the world. For some of the shadier characters in the salvation business, a tenderness for nature can become a most profitable proposition.

In fact, liberal environmentalism is the cutting edge of the movement for bureaucratized state control of both private life and free market economics, not only conscripting the media, the NGOs, government departments and the intellectual classes to advance its agenda but shrewdly operating through the very corporations it seeks to regulate by offering tax and other incentives to ensure compliance. And it seems to be working.

The former Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, author of Blue Planet in Green Shackles, is on the mark when he warns of the irrationality of the bullish “global warming” industry: “As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism… Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.”

Like Vaclav Klaus, we might one day find ourselves living under a regime that would in many ways resemble the Communist nightmare from which half of Europe has only recently emerged. Similarly, in Left in Dark Times, Bernard-Henri Levy speaks of “the former Reds who have now turned Green and the friends-of-nature type of Greens who have now become greens of the revolutionary jihad variety.”

Green has become big business even though its effects have been largely counter-productive. It should be obvious by this time that the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side of the ecological fence. What we see at work is the bizarre confluence of leftist autocracy and wealth known as fascism, that is, corporate totalitarianism, in which capital wealth is placed at the service of but also facilitates the rule of the managerial state. As Jonah Goldberg (among others) elucidates in Liberal Fascism, fascism and communism are kissing cousins, totalitarian movements and regimes that differ only in the disposition of industrial authority, but to the same end.  

Hitler with Opel, 1937.

Corporate totalitarianism is now an internecine phenomenon, predicated on corruption. Robert Morton points out in the first of a multi-part series for The Pipeline that the major “charitable” foundations enjoy lucrative dealings with national competitors while at the same time aiming for oligarchic control of the very nations they putatively serve—all in the name of creating an egalitarian society where the environment is preserved by its self-appointed custodians and stewards, and men can live in harmony with nature. But the underlying motive is almost always money and power.

Morton mentions, for example, the Sea Change Foundation, Renaissance Technologies, Klein Ltd. and their umbrella entity the Lord Jim Trust. These organizations, which have “funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States,” are run by “executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests.” Cui bono? Clearly neither the environment nor the climate. The founders and managers of these firms and trusts are profiting handsomely, as is the state-owned Russian oil company, Rosneft. 

These left-wing, faux-environmental trusts, foundations and endowments tend to breed like rabbits on steroids. They are owned and managed by obscenely wealthy people who flourish in a privileged milieu of money, influence, business deals and political connections. The Tides Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation (which “contributes to a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world,” according to its promo), are among the most notorious of these progressivist organizations. 

Other such concerns, reported by the Capital Research Center, include the California Endowment, the Chicago Community Trust, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Memorial Trust, the Union Square Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Novo Foundation, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the Ben and Jerry Foundation, the Sierra Fund and of course the George Soros Open Society Foundations.

No names, please.

These enterprises are collectively awash in billions of dollars which they use, under the guise of public charity, to promote their own interests. What author Hayden Ludwig says of Tides seems true across the board: “Using a sophisticated funding model, Tides has grown into a leading platform for laundering away ties between wealthy donors and the radical causes they fund—while generating hundreds of new organizations along the way.” That is, many of these groups are conveniently set up to obscure the connection between donors and grantees, many of these latter violent activists who blockade railways, disable pipelines and foment riots.

Such consortiums, then, are designed “to maximize the flow of donations to far-left nonprofits while minimizing donors’ public exposure to the fruits of their largesse.” The motives behind these left-wing philanthropists and groups are a blend of fiscal and political objectives, promoting a “social justice” agenda, a single-party state governed by a plutocratic and technological elite (called “democratic socialism” and “the Great Reset”), and ultimately a monopoly controlling the nation’s wealth.

The environment in which these plutocratic pseudo-philanthropists function, and which galvanizes their interest is not river, land and air but finance, stocks and power. The only hedges they care about are hedge funds. The only power they are interested in is not electrical but political. The fact that the engine of Green energy will render the landscape unsightly, leak toxins into soil and water, remain variously unreclaimable and undisposable, fail to supply sufficient power to sustain a nation’s infrastructure without oil, gas and coal back-up, cost hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of jobs, and crush the population under a punitive tax-and-utility burden is of no account to them. After all, they are our gracious benefactors, complaisant and benign, “friends of nature” laboring to save the planet, just like Jim Jones and the Reverend Moon.

One thinks of Hamlet: “A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

As responsible citizens, we must do our utmost to put the brakes on hasty and poorly thought-out Green infatuations and should proceed carefully and slowly to develop and introduce so-called “renewables” to offset a portion of our energy consumption without collapsing the economy and without fattening the revenues of parasitical corporations intent on political domination.

Above all, caution, thorough study and robust skepticism should be our watchwords. Beware the smiling emojis.