It is a long time since I last wrote a post. As mid-winter settled in the world seemed a very dark place. In Sweden, at the end of November, when life had been normal for so many months, the government introduced vaccine passports for venues with a capacity above five-hundred people.
I experienced this as a heavy psychological blow. I realised I had been holding onto the hope that the Coronavirus measures all around the world were more-or-less to do with politicians’ opportunism, cock-ups, and fear of political reprisals if their populations deemed that they had not taken sufficient measures. The sudden introduction of digital vaccine passports when there was clearly no health need for them brought home to me that the ‘pandemic’ had primarily been about extending digital authoritarian control over citizens and it scared me. I also had to process the knowledge that, as I was unvaccinated, I was now deemed unworthy to go to cinemas, museums, and galleries, theatres, or anywhere else where more than five-hundred people could gather. It was a deeply unsettling experience.
My husband reported seeing, on his way home from work, people queuing to get into the theatre and willingly displaying their vaccine passports, which also added to the blow. It seemed many people could see nothing wrong with the vaccine passport system and did not object in any way to their fellow, unvaccinated citizens, being excluded from some aspects of life.
The next few weeks were anxiety-filled. Rhetoric from the politicians and the media ramped up the discrimination against unvaccinated people. There was discussion in the government and the media of extending the vaccine passport system to other places, such as restaurants and cafes. It became patently clear that if they wanted to exclude unvaccinated people from every aspect of society except supermarkets and pharmacies, as had been done in Italy and Austria, then they could with just an announcement.
I found myself unable to sleep. Christmas was approaching and I wanted my children to have as normal a Christmas as possible, I had to organise food and presents even though some days I felt so scared and alienated I wanted to spend all day under the duvet. I tried to hide from them what was happening.
We had been discussing seeing the latest Spiderman movie at the cinema. In order to hide the fact that their father and I were no longer allowed in the cinema I suggested they go with friends instead. It was only weeks later my older daughter confessed that she had known we were not allowed in anymore.
There are no typical teenagers, but my daughter is sociable, she likes to fit in, and so she berated me for being awkward about the vaccinations. Why couldn’t her father and I just do what everybody else was doing? I have tried throughout this weird time to shield my children from the possible implications of what is happening, the fact that the western world may be sliding towards an authoritarian future that may rob them of their freedom and their joy. In answer to her question I discussed the importance of bodily autonomy, that nobody should be made to take a medicine or undergo a treatment that they did not want, that the Hippocratic Oath, the Charter of Human Rights, and the Nuremberg Code existed for a reason, that once one medical procedure could be mandated there was no barrier to others being so ordered and that it was foolish to assume you could give such power to your government and that it would only ever be wielded benignly. I thought that was enough for her to absorb. She accepted it.
The weeks rolled on. Christmas Day itself, amazingly, felt very normal: the dinner was perfect, we watched Lord of the Rings, as we do every Christmas, we opened presents of course. Somehow I had managed to get all the presents the girls wanted and enough surprises that it was exactly like every other Christmas a little oasis out of reality.
I pushed away fear of being locked out of society, fear that police would one day come to our home and vaccinate us all, and that we would all inevitably end up on the social credit system they have planned for us, but the following day my anxiety was back. The world seemed dark.
All Austrians were going to be made to get vaccinated. In the next few weeks many governments would tell their vaccinated citizens to turn on the unvaccinated. Macron would state that he wanted to ‘f*ck up’ the unvaccinated.
Yet the news that even those with a third jab, or first booster, were being infected by the new Omicron variant, got out, whether by design or accident. Joe Rogan’s podcast with Dr Robert Malone, broadcast just before Christmas, went viral. Whether you agreed with everything, or anything, that was said in that podcast the fact that so many wanted to hear it showed how desperate people were for a debate, to hear both, or multiple, sides of the argument. This seemed to have caused enough of a crack in the narrative that in many countries the relentless roll of ‘Covid tyranny’ stopped and then miraculously in January began to roll backwards.
Denmark, Norway, the UK, and Sweden all began to remove their restrictions. Elements of the mainstream media seemed to have picked up which way the tide was flowing and began to row-back on their calls for stricter measures, their ‘forever Covid’ mentality. This even happened in the US which through Fauci and the CDC seems to be the fount of all the Covid hysteria and restrictions.
Now, in early February, Sweden has lifted all restrictions. We will soon celebrate with a family trip to the cinema and another to an art gallery or museum. Sweden has even lifted all travel restrictions for those travelling from countries in the EU and UK.
Does this mean that our fears over digital ID and the social credit system have been some kind of psychosis, similar to the Covid hysteria that has afflicted the greater majority of the West’s populations? It is possible but I do not think so. The evidence is there: EU documents from 2018 on the need to push all EU citizens onto digital vaccine records; the WEF document ‘How digital identity can improve lives in a post-Covid-19 world’; the WEF Global Young Leaders programme through which Macron, Trudeau, and Ardern have passed, to name just a few. The fact that the Gates Foundation is the second largest donor to the WHO and its donation is equal to the total of the next five nations combined. That the Gates Foundation is responsible for the establishment of GAVI and the idea of Universal Health Coverage, which in the context of digital ID now has a sinister ring.
Even the idea of vaccination programmes has taken on a sinister edge. When it comes to improvements in human health the most significant came before the discovery of penicillin through improved sanitation, cheaper and cleaner energy, improved nutrition, and increased personal wealth. It would be just as valid to help the developing world through a drive for universal sanitation coverage, or universal cheap energy coverage. Those things could do just as much as vaccines to promote good health and increased life-expectancy, but for the technocrats and their foundations the returns are just not good enough on irrigation and sanitation systems, and hydroelectric dams and coal-fired power stations are huge, complex and time-consuming projects.
Pharmaceutical companies, especially if long-term five or ten year trials can be side-stepped, provide a quick and potentially massive return on investment. There is also a temperamental and ideological similarity between tech geeks and lab-scientists that make them comfortable collaborators. The engineers, and construction workers that would be required to provide big, infrastructure projects, are more practical, less technocratic, and less susceptible to hero-worshipping a bespectacled geek in a pastel jumper. That is just my instinct.
Also the governments of developing countries, where these surveillance ‘health’ projects have been trialled, are far more likely to allow a relatively small and light team of health workers set up mobile vaccination centres with minimal oversight, than they are to allow foreign companies to build massive infrastructure projects that are permanent, highly visible, and may involve moving and compensating indigenous populations.
Rather than really caring about the health of the world it is far more likely that a figure like Gates sees pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical companies as another market, similar to the tech market. In the same way Gates envisioned a computer in every home, he now imagines an injection in every arm. What a market! And, unlike with personal computers, you cannot saturate this market, as there can always be a new vaccination to be administered to every individual annually. Nobody replaces their computer annually.
So no, I do not think fears of digital ID and social credit systems are over-blown, but many of us are in a period of respite. There is still some shocking tyranny happening in countries around the world. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Germany, France, and other European nations.
However, the Canadian truckers have appeared. They have begun to have an effect on the restrictions in Canada, and they have inspired trucker movements around the world in the most oppressed nations. They have given protests in countries like Austria, that have been going on for months, a new lease of life, a new momentum. The trucker protests have managed to break through into the mainstream media and now that is bringing coverage of the protests in other countries that the mainstream media have largely ignored.
Many factors have been brought to light over the last few weeks. Big tech censorship, the willingness of a tech platform like GoFundMe to intervene on behalf of a tyrannical government, this in turn has made many more in the populations around the world aware of the dangers of digital currency and how even now governments can mobilise banks or payment companies against us if we engage in activities, or even opinions, with which they do not agree.
More and more people are awakening to the net of tyranny which has been slowly growing and strengthening around us over the last twenty years. Needing a digital code to access your bank account online seems relatively benign, when you realise you now use this ID to make any card payment online it begins to seem less so. Banks asking you what you are using your cash for when you withdraw it seems mild when viewed as a measure to ensure you are not being coerced, but increasingly seems to be an invasion of privacy, an attempt to prevent us from using cash because it can not be tracked. Watching an early episode of Ozark the other evening in which the main character gathers together millions of dollars and then asserts his right to the bank to take out the cash all at once because it is his, I realised that I had no idea whether if I went into my bank now and asked to empty my accounts in cash I would even be allowed to do so, even though that money is mine. That made me realise how much we have become accustomed to being controlled by our governments.
Clearly the freedom we want is not the freedom to commit crime, but how can we be in a situation where we doubt our right to our own money? If I wanted to take it all out and keep it under my mattress, that is my right, and not a crime, but in practical terms, would I be able to do so? How much will we allow our lives to be monitored and controlled under the auspices of eradicating all crime from society?
Cash is almost obsolete in Stockholm, yet there are still drug cartels in Mexico. Do we really believe these powerful criminal organisations will disappear because we submit to total control over our lives? Perhaps the new digital world will involve some elaborate way of legalising what are currently illegal drugs so that they can be paid for digitally. You may sacrifice some of your social credit points, but as in Brave New World, it will be in the interests of the overlords to keep the underlings happy and if that means allowing access to illicit drugs that will be tolerated. Will the cartels be able to keep their countries free of digital surveillance? When you begin to play it out as a thought experiment, it seems ever more clear that total digital control is something we will allow to happen to us. Criminal gangs will not. We can prevent it by standing up against it, and we have to be less afraid of authority in order to do that.
The Canadian truckers are also showing us how to stand against this authority. So GoFundMe decided they would not give the truckers their money, there was an outcry, refunds were promised. Now there is a new payment platform facilitating their fundraising. The mayor calls the tow-truck companies to tow away the big rigs, they refuse. The police confiscate the truckers fuel, hundreds of people bring them fuel in gerry cans. If their funds are stopped again, people will bring them cash, food, and other necessities.
We are being shown in real time how to resist authority and bureaucracy and it turns out we can still just about do it. We still have cash. Not quite all land is owned by Monsanto, so if we are not permitted to access food in the stores we can still get it from independent farmers. There is still a way to resist just now, but not for much longer until we keep pushing back against the digitisation of everything. Not just stop it progressing but push back.
I for one could manage without online banking. I still remember when you checked your balance at the cash-machine and you could even print out a mini-statement if you wanted to check your cash-flow. There was also a secure deposit box on the wall for paying in cheques and cash. Seems amazing but it worked and it was quite efficient. You included a visit to the bank in your daily or weekly shopping trip. If you lived in a small community you knew the tellers well and each week you would catch up on the gossip with them. It was actually pleasant and they did not ask you intrusive questions every time you wanted to take out cash because they knew you well enough to know you weren’t a criminal and they knew if you were in trouble, or under coercion, you knew them well enough to appeal to them for help. Those were the days, and not so very long ago, maybe just ten years ago. We can get back to those days.
We have handed power over for convenience. These companies knew we would do it. The perfect example is Google who gave us so many services, a search engine, email, for free because they were taking our data and selling it.
Free email is convenient, search engines obviously are useful. Now they have unfathomably vast amounts of information on us all. I am sure governments and big tech have used this information during the ‘pandemic’ in order to manipulate us, as well as to find out when they had gone that little bit too far and needed to pull back. They have control over us, they can predict what we will do as individuals and as crowds because they have programmes that crunch the numbers and produce results constantly. It is as if the internet, social media, online shopping, all of it, sucks our thoughts and impulses into a huge, overarching hive-mind which can be constantly monitored.
Now we need to wrest our information back through a combination of getting back to real life instead of buying and doing so much online, and by using the alternative companies which promise to guard our privacy. We had better get on and do it because if we don’t start letting the air out of this balloon quickly those tech companies that do guarantee freedom and privacy will find themselves destroyed by governments through legislation and fines.
When all this began, alternative media providers, journalists, writers, and podcasters, were worried that they may be kicked off YouTube and have to use Rumble or Odysee. That they would have to stop writing on Twitter and instead produce Substack newsletters. Now we are beginning to realise that these alternative platforms may soon come under threat as America’s Department for Homeland Security makes moves to mark not just extreme voices, but anybody formulating ideas that fall outside the mainstream, government-approved narratives, as terrorists. Things move faster and faster and we begin to become adept at predicting the directions they will move in.
Things have been dark and now in many places if we are not actually standing in the sun we can see that the light is moving towards us. As the truckers win their war of hearts and minds against their technocratic-elite, poster-boy Prime Minister, and begin to sway opinion against his New Zealand and Australian counterparts. As more and more nations roll-back their authoritarian health measures. There is going to be a respite and in that time we will have to work. Most people realise it.
We will have to work against giving all our data to big tech. We will have to work to stop laws being passed which will allow governments to limit our free-speech so that their own narratives can thrive unchallenged. We have to block every move for digital IDs of any kind, whether that is driving licenses, voter ID, or health passes. The fact is these people have been planning this for decades, just because we can not see how something might be dangerous does not mean they have not effectively weaponised it, best just to block any moves in that direction completely. Any mandatory health measures, whether it is testing, or vaccination, for any sector of a population, not just an entire population, must be blocked. Companies, educational establishments, shops and restaurants must not be allowed to institute vaccine mandates even if to some this seems like a breach of their freedoms in a capitalist society. The thin-end-of-the-wedge threat to liberty is too great. They must not be allowed. There are many other actions we can take. Every one of them small and manageable by individuals and small groups. If we just hold in our minds our hope of freedom we cannot go wrong. There is still everything to play for and every chance that we will win.
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