You can find an audio version of this on Youtube if you prefer to listen instead of read: https://youtu.be/8fwytDBdSc4.
Imagine you live in a country where the government can tell businesses when they can and cannot be open, how many hours they can run, who they can do business with (or not), how they can run their business (or not). Imagine you live in a country where the government decides what is best for your health and safety. Imagine the government wanted to force you to take whatever medical procedure or treatment they deem best, separate you based on your political or race affiliations, and insist that it’s all in the name of public health and safety. Imagine you lived in a country where the gods of government and tech told you and every other citizen where to go, when to go, and whether you were permitted to engage in various activities from protests to everyday tasks like going to the grocery store. Imagine living in a country where you are terrified to speak out if you have a particular political view because angry mobs of activists will be sicced on you, family may abandon you, and your job may be ripped away. Imagine living in a country where the government, the media, and your neighbors may crucify you, slander you, make up lies about you simply because you dared not to go along without a peep or a question.
Think this sounds like a dystopian totalitarian regime? Think maybe I’m discussing China or some other third world country that’s under a dictatorship? I’m not. In fact, what I have just described is what the freest country in the world has looked like for over a year now due to the crisis of COVID prior to a vaccine. Shocked? Wondering if I’m making it up? Hardly. Ask any American, and they’ll tell you this is true. Depending on whether you ask a leftist or a conservative, you’ll get a different reason for it. Those on the left will tell you it’s for our safety, parroting the same things the government has been spouting for the last year to excuse using a legitimate crisis as a way to snatch more and more power away from the citizens and the individual States. Ask a conservative, and you’ll get a message much like the one I’m about to go into but usually with less background or philosophy. Their message will boil down to: “you are being fooled, and when you lose everything you held dear and took for granted, don’t come crying to us.”
Oh, some of us will be nice about it, but the truth is, we’re angry. We’re angry because no matter how hard we try, no matter how many warnings we issue–many of which are coming from people who lived through the atrocities in Cuba, Holocaust Germany, and communist Russia or China–our fellow Americans on the Left seem insistent on handing off our freedoms in exchange for the illusion of safety. And based on the reports coming out of other countries with mass vaccination rates, that is exactly what is happening. Our freedoms are being traded for an illusion of freedom. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” That is the message I have for every fellow American today.
What This Article Is Not About
Before we dive in, I want to make it very clear what this article is not about. It is not about whether or not you should vaccinate or mask up. I am not a medical professional. The best I can do is give you the statistics and data and say weigh the risks yourself. Unlike the current totalitarian regime and the CDC, I trust that my fellow Americans are adults who can look at their unique situation as an individual and weigh the risks and rewards properly to determine which course of action to take. If you vaccinate, great. If you don’t, fine. I am not responsible for your health. You are. You’re also not responsible for mine. If I make a poor choice and end up severely ill, dead, or suffering from major side-effects from either vaccinating or getting COVID, I bear the consequences. I alone am to blame for it.
In literally any other health situation that has not been made so political, you would not consider yourself to blame if I chose to refuse a vaccine and got seriously ill or died; nor would you consider yourself to blame if I chose to get the vaccine for it and also ended up seriously harmed or dead. Why? Because you are not responsible for my decisions or the consequences of them. I want to make sure that’s understood because it seems like half of my fellow Americans can’t wrap their heads around the idea that individual responsibility means that you aren’t responsible for my stupid decisions any more than I am for yours. You can warn me. You can beg me not to be a moron. But at the end of the day, if I forge ahead anyway, then I get to bear the blame.
Just as those of you on the Left keep telling me that I don’t have a right to outlaw things I think are unhealthy, immoral, or dangerous like smoking, alcoholism, or abortions because it’s “that person’s right to make their own choices” or “it doesn’t affect anyone else”, I now say the same to you. Under that very same logic, you do not have the right to deny me a right to make a choice you dislike just because you were the one to decide that it is unhealthy, immoral, or dangerous. And before you go claiming that somehow this harms people more, the harm that is done to young women in an abortion (psychological and physical) impacts them and their family. The harm that is done to families who have an alcoholic running them is well documented and tragic. It is hypocritical to act like all of these other personal choices that could result in death or other immeasurable harm are somehow a matter we can’t regulate while this issue, which is just as capable of causing the same harm as the others do, can be regulated and your preferences forced down our throats.
In the end, this article isn’t about the health risks of getting vaccinated versus refusing the vaccine. As I said, I trust that my fellow Americans–regardless of political affiliations–can weigh the risks and choose for themselves which path is best for them and their families. Frankly, I don’t really care which you as an individual choose because I assume that in most cases, if you refused it you had a good reason and if you got it you also probably had good reason. I’m not going to presume you’re missing a few screws upstairs regardless of which choice you make. The article is about the use of a legitimate crisis to shut down legitimate conversation about solutions and approaches, the use of a crisis to cram down top-down “Big Brother” control from our federal government and the Left, and the use of the media as the platform of the Left to shut up anyone who dares to question the wisdom of allowing the government to tell us what to do instead of allowing us to have the data and make our own decisions with a recommendation as to what course of action might be advisable.
The Philosophy of Totalitarianism and the Left
To begin with, lets cover the philosophy of those pushing mandates left and right for everything. Governmental figures have made their attitude more than clear: let no good crisis go to waste. But the attitude of the citizens who are supporting this seems to boil down to two things, mainly: fear and self-righteous indignation.
The first is a result of our media acting as though the virus is a huge threat to everyone no matter the age range or underlying factors and will therefore wipe us all out. According to the data the CDC and other health organizations in the US as well as other countries have collected, this is simply not true. Numerous doctors have come out throughout the pandemic to try to combat this idea that everyone is at equal risk of dying and therefore equally in need of safety measures. They were censored and shut down by a media that is, according to surveys done of members of the media, overwhelmingly leftist with a small percentage identifying as moderate Democrats or centrists and a miniscule 7% at most identify as Republican. Note that Republican and conservative are not the same! Conservatives are an even smaller percentage of the Republican percentage. For more information, Washington Post has an article with the data and a breakdown on the matter. The article is from 2014, and the numbers have dropped further since, but it is a good indicator of the situation in our media lest anyone thinks that Republicans calling out the media for being heavily Left-leaning are making things up. Stats performed by institutions who regularly study these sorts of issues say that this is actually the reality. So this is our first problem. Fear-mongering from a media that is ever more in favor of top-down control and censorship of any dissenting voices has caused those already in sympathy with them to believe that COVID is such a huge threat to everyone from infancy to old age, even with the vaccine available, that we absolutely must live in a state of panic.
Then there’s the second issue. The self-righteous indignation that anyone would dare defy the gods of “the science”. As if those gods haven’t gone back and forth on their own so-called scientifically backed policies time and again. Anyone paying an iota of attention to Fauci should be able to notice that he’s been horribly inconsistent throughout the crisis. Furthermore, his own behavior has been hypocritical given he has ignored the very things he’s mandating for everyone else on numerous occasions. Further, this has been the case with every single Democratic lawmaker we’ve observed initiating mass lockdowns and mask mandates (and now vaccine mandates) in response to a crisis that is now averted for now thanks to vaccines. There is no longer anyone who is unable to get a vaccine (besides children who are not at high risk of death or serious illness even from the new variant) if they so choose, and there is no longer a sky high death rate. The rate is now lower than the flu, and we don’t consider the flu a crisis.
And yet, I’ve seen a trend in the conversation from average Democratic voters and citizens–even among fellow Christians I know–that says anyone who dares to ask questions about the word from on high is a danger to society for daring to think and reason through the situation. Questioning whether a crisis still exists is even less acceptable. Heaven forbid anyone wanted the data presented without all the lies, reversals of previous stances with no evidence of new studies to back the change, and political grandstanding going on. This self-righteous attitude leads those who should be standing against the mandates to agree with them because it’s obviously bad that anyone would defy the authorities who, by the way, have no Constitutional right to do what they are. But it doesn’t matter because the fundamental belief in the superiority of their beliefs and their desires means they are doing “good” by forcing everyone else to go along. Time and again, the people I speak to on the Left persist in this idea that if you question, if you express any concerns, you are the danger. You’re the reason people won’t get vaccinated to save society. You should be silenced. Maybe even eliminated in extreme cases.
The irony is that if the position were reversed… If I were in control and tried to pull the same garbage on them, they’d be screaming and crying about it just as much as anyone else. But the difference is that the right historically tends not to attempt that sort of thing when they do have control because there is still a fundamental belief in decency, true responsibility (not for your whole country, State, or bigger still, the world but for yourself and your family), and basic rights to choose how you will live your life. While the right has their own set of issues, they usually tend toward being more weak-willed than authoritarian. Their problems are with standing up for what is true and right when it is under attack, not with trying to cram their agendas down everyone else’s throats. But if they lived per the philosophy I hear from so many Democratic Americans, imagine the outcry there would be whenever they were in charge. If you follow the news, you already know that the media hysterically decries every Republican as an authoritarian monster while deeming Democrats as the heroes. Imagine what it would be like if Republicans actually took a stand to warrant the vitriolic treatment they already receive. I guarantee it would be even worse.
In the end, the philosophy of the Left boils down to a few key things:
- Do what we say or else.
- Who cares if we have to break a few eggs to make an omelet? The vision of utopia through top-down control is more important than the individuals who might die for us to gain it.
- If you don’t do what we say, we will throw a fit and make sure you suffer for it.
- For those of you who still dare to speak out, we will do everything we can to perform a very public character lynching via social media or whatever other means we can find.
- Don’t think, don’t look, don’t speak, don’t see.
Anyone who defies these principles has to be prepared to face the consequences. And yes, there are consequences for standing up for the truth. I don’t have the kind of platform that Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, David Horowitz, or others like them have. And yet, even I receive nasty comments and am shouted down by others who are on the Left for daring to speak up and question. I don’t even have to tell anyone not to get vaccinated for Covid. Daring to say enough is enough, we want answers or to state that the government does not have the right to force us to inject ourselves with any sort of drug, experimental or otherwise, is enough to get me publicly scourged in the comments section of a post. Some days, I just keep scrolling even on posts from authors I know and who are fellow Christians because I don’t have the energy to hear it from everyone one more time. But that’s how we’re silenced. That is how the minority is able to silence a majority that desperately wants to hold onto their liberties. It happens because we the people are too afraid to say no and take a stand. I admit, I’ve often chosen to stay quiet around those I know disagree or to modify how I share my stance so that it’s softer because I just don’t want to deal with it. But that isn’t right. It isn’t going to help. In fact, it’s the quickest way to lose my freedoms. As Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
I’ve watched. I’ve waited. I haven’t said much on the blog or outside of Facebook posts friends put up. And I am through with doing so. Enough is enough. Now is the time to put an end to this debacle. Now, before the Gestapo, the Secret Police, or the Nazis come knocking on the door. You want to know how a country like Cuba or Venezuela goes from thriving to a hell hole? They waited too long to say no. They let the totalitarians come knock on their doors before they started doing something. Fellow Americans, don’t let that be our story. Because that’s the road we’re headed down, and if we don’t start standing up, it will be the death of Liberty. The death of our cherished freedoms. We say we love them. But can we really claim that we do when we’re not willing to stand for them when they are threatened or taken away? Our Founders loved their freedoms. And they proved it by putting their lives and fortunes on the line in order to stop the abuse of those freedoms. I’m afraid we have lost the true love and valuing of freedom that those men had, which compelled them to stand up when it became clear no compromise could be reached. We are living in a time where the philosophy I outlined above is prevailing in the Democratic party. No compromise can be reached with those running things so long as they insist upon aiming for total government control in true Orwellian fashion as they have in every major Democratic state in the country and as they are no pursuing under the Biden regime. They do not wish to compromise. To them, people like me who just want to get some answers and see research that proves they aren’t asking me to sign my own death warrant are a danger and must be either forced into cooperating or removed. They have proven time and again this is how they view us through the rhetoric they use, the way they paint every conservative and Republican with a broad brush as though we are all insurrectionists who hate the country, the way they accuse those who do speak out of attempting to kill thousands by promoting “anti-vaxx” rhetoric, and the attempts to shut us out of every major institution of our own country because we hold a view they don’t like. There can be no compromise with them any more than there was possible compromise with King George III when our forefathers defended themselves from his predations.
A Mandate for You, A Mandate for You, A Mandate for Everyone But Me
So what is the manifestation of a philosophy like we laid out above? Well, history actually gives us numerous good examples. Perhaps the most obvious is the Holocaust. Most people know very little about the history surrounding the Holocaust and Hitler’s rise to power, so let’s actually go through some of that to lay the groundwork for the points I’m about to make. First of all, after the German Empire (or as Nazis called it, the Second Reich) collapsed following WWI, the country was plunged into chaos. They set up a middle-of-the-road government in an attempt to appease both the Communists and the far right military, which would later become known as fascists or Nazis. The government appeased neither, and between the time of its installation and the return of the military units from their posts, the Communists declared war in the streets on the government and anyone who supported it. There was mass rioting, looting, and chaos to the point that those who lived through this time wrote that it was too dangerous to walk the streets in many places and no one wanted to be out. Sound a lot like the BLM and Antifa “rallies”? Yeah. Well, it gets worse, and the comparisons don’t end here.
When the military returned home, they saw the chaos. They too were displeased with the current government because they wanted to return to the days of the empire. So they decided to do something about. What did they do? They engaged the communists in the streets in all-out war. Eventually, they did manage to control everything. We didn’t see this extent of clashing and violence between far-Left and communist Antifa and BLM rioters and far right extremists, but part of that is because the far right in America has not enjoyed the same level of support and funding as Germany’s far right military groups did. Because Germany’s far right group was literally a group of trained soldiers aiming to restore the glory days of the German empire, they had a lot more power, organization, and clout. Nevertheless, the intent between our far right groups and far left groups remains the same. The roles are simply reversed. The Communist groups in Germany lacked the support to organize the same as America’s far right groups lacked it. And like the far right groups in America lost to the far left, Germany’s communist groups lost out to the far right military. During this time, Hitler was beginning his rise to power. And interestingly enough, he didn’t do it by declaring himself the dictator supreme. He did it through the legal system and by gaining the support of the German people through flattery, lies, and propaganda. Once he had the power, he then consolidated it.
Of equal importance for our purposes is an examination of how Hitler managed to get an entire group of people on board with the removal of another group’s rights and humanity to such a degree that he was able to allow doctors to perform literal experiments on them. The first step was to declare the groups that he found to be a threat or hated most a danger to public safety. He literally set fire to his own capital prior to his ultimate ascent to dictatorship and then turned around, investigated it, and “found” that it was the Communist Dutch and Jews that were “responsible”. They were, obviously, not. But in their dire economic straits and still smarting from the loss of WWI, the German people were looking for a scapegoat to blame for the situation, and Hitler told them who to blame. Primed by years of academics like Hegel and Kant, who systematically destroyed the important role reason played in society and replaced it with mysticism and blind fanatical adherence to the system, they never bothered to ask if the story was true. Those who did were ridiculed and shut up by their own neighbors. Hitler didn’t even need to use his soldiers to quell the voices within the German-born communities as a result. He instead weaponized them, cheered on by the people, against those he had called enemies of the public well-being. A careful study of what happened in Germany from there out reveals that he gradually de-humanized those who would not go along with his regime. He started by forcing them to wear special clothing, colors, or other markers to delineate them from everyone else. He fostered a sentiment of hatred and fear within the people against fellow citizens on the basis of race. Long before he ever began interring Jews, blacks, Communists, or other “enemies of the State” in concentration camps, the German people were already abusing them with Hitler to cheer them on. So when he moved to beginning atrocious medical experiments on them, doctors and the public turned a blind eye, and many in the medical profession went further by participating. This is how we ended up with Nuremburg Trials and the subsequent Nuremburg Code for the medical profession. All of this was done without any major dissent.
And lest anyone in the Christian community think that the German church was a pillar of virtue in protesting all of this, it was not. The church at large joined the Nazi party and promoted their philosophy. While initially many pastors put up token resistance, many signed on without protest because it was “for the public good” and many more cooperated the minute any pressure was put on them. Only the Confessing Church in Germany, led by men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who died by firing squad in a German internment camp after he was finally caught and arrested, stood up. Many of those Christians in the Confessing Church died and were persecuted right alongside the Jews and others deemed state enemies. Corrie Ten Boom’s story is an example of another courageous individual who suffered for being a part of the movement the Confessing Church gave voice to. But overwhelmingly, the church was also onboard. So every major institution of German life from media to education to religion hopped on board with the regime, and they turned a blind eye to all the atrocities that occurred, some out of a vicious sense of “justice” promoted by a media that lied time and again and later on, many out of fear that they too would be subjected to the things happening to others.
How does this relate to our situation today with all of the mandates? Well, first off, mandates and decrees were a major part of the beginning of Hitler’s progression to mass genocide. They were used to single out anyone who disagreed for any reason and to single out those he wanted to be rid of in order to mark them as enemies. Whether the masks or vaccines are themselves harmless, they have become the government’s way of doing exactly the same. Those who refuse to comply are overwhelmingly a part of the political party that the Left has been screaming is a “public danger” for years. And they are targeted time and again for standing up. Further, Hitler used those mandates and the visual clue of the Star of David to foster resentment in the German people against those he hated. He first blamed those people for everything happening to Germany, creating an anger in the German people against them, and then he put a visual reminder on the people that would constantly remind the Germans who they were and what they had done. What else has the mask mandate (and now the vaccine mandate with all the special colored wristbands in schools) done? If you didn’t wear a mask before the vaccine mandate, you were the Leftist equivalent of the demonic because you wanted everyone to die. It didn’t matter why you weren’t wearing one. You were the number one danger to society. Now, with the vaccines, if you wear a mask, you mark yourself as someone who refuses to get a vaccine and therefore as a danger to society because you dare to question the gods on high who declared you must get one. The colored wristbands for teachers and staff in schools are just one more way of doing so. The Left declares those in that boat to be the public’s enemy. Then they brand them with some form of permanent reminder to everyone. Any attempt to resist is met with public castigation.
Then there were all the things Hitler required the Jews to do. They had to have special permission to leave the country, to operate businesses, to–in essence–live life. These policies were intended to add to the ways they were outcasts and punish them for the sin of being Jewish or, in the case of those who stood up against the regime, for daring to stand for what was moral and right. The policies in our schools and many other places of business look much the same. If you refuse to comply with the vaccine demand they have made, then they will force you to undergo constant testing, mask you and force others to mask up around you to further separate you from the group (and doing so further fosters resentment in those who did cooperate because now they have to go back to the way it was before cooperating because of you), and routinely derail life in order to satisfy the requirements laid on you for not complying with the first demand. All of this leads to a sense of frustration that encourages compliance without protest. Of course, for the Jews, no amount of compliance helped. For those who weren’t ethnically discriminated against but simply stood up and spoke out, if they would comply, they were still watched but were left mainly alone. For Americans, we are in the boat that if we are of a certain political party, no amount of compliance helps. Notably, Ben Shapiro has been a major supporter of vaccination. He routinely advises getting vaccinated if you are a legal adult, and he has never said that the vaccines were dangerous. In fact, he considers them to be a miracle of modern science. And yet the media, acting under the same philosophy as the governmental regime currently in place, has excoriated him and outright lied about his stance on the issue. He has supported the very thing they demand support of, but because he isn’t on their side of the aisle without any protest, thought, or questioning on every issue, he is still a target for hatred and persecution. We haven’t yet escalated to the point that Hitler did, but the steps being taken against the political “enemies of the State” by those in power within every major institution of our country look an awful lot like the actions Hitler took to prepare for the next awful step he would take.
And lest you believe it was just Hitler, every other totalitarian dictator in modernity pulled the same exact game. They got control of academia first, then the government, then the church. Once they had all three and had convinced enough people who had the power to back them that it was okay to commit unspeakable violations of human rights in areas ranging from medical experiments to imprisonment and death for daring to disagree, they then proceeded to kill thousands or, in many cases, millions. Examples of this include Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Vietnam. This was not a one off issue with Hitler, nor was it an issue of purely right wing fascism. It is an issue of totalitarian fascism across the political spectrum, and the playbook looks more or less the same every time. So when we see the same tactics being used to turn a legitimate crisis (Germany was in dire economic straits and people were legitimately suffering and dying due to the unrest; the COVID virus has legitimately caused suffering and the handling of it by a totalitarian regime that wanted to shut everything down beyond the reasonable time needed to prepare for the onslaught did create and still is creating true economic suffering) into a weapon to rob those suffering of their freedoms, we ought to sit up and take notice.
Why Isn’t Anyone Standing Up?
So why aren’t we standing up en masse across the political spectrum as Americans? On the Left and Right alike, I think the first reason is one we hold in common: lack of knowledge regarding history. The sad truth is that most Americans don’t know the details of what led to Hitler’s reign of terror or how Cuba and Venezuela went from prosperous capitalist societies to ones ravaged by the horrors of totalitarianism. We don’t grasp that every one of these regimes seized power by capitalizing on a real crisis that legitimately needed handling in one fashion or another. So when we see history repeating itself, we’re not alarmed because we don’t even realize what’s going on.
The second reason seems to be unique, at least in this situation, to the Left. Arrogance. I say it’s unique in this case only because the Right is actually taking heed of what warnings are being given from those who came from many of the very regimes I’ve listed here. That is, in this case, because confirmation bias skews us to be more inclined to listen anyway. We’re a fiercely freedom loving group, and even if most of us have no idea why we are or what it’s grounded in, that is our stance and we react harshly to anyone trying to rob us of it. Sometimes too harshly and swiftly, albeit, but nevertheless, we are inclined to listen. The people speaking up are, however, not agreement with the agenda of the Left. They don’t appreciate the “soft” socialism that so many Americans voting Democrat seem to support because that same “soft” socialism was introduced in their countries as a precursor to Communism, just as Marx intended it to be. So the Left hates them and, in their arrogance, believes that their attempts at the same regimes these individuals fled will somehow turn into utopia rather than dystopia as it has everywhere else. Human beings with this “visionary” ideal manage to hold onto this delusion time and again despite the evidence of history, and in the case of American leftists, they have the added help of the first reason no one’s standing up: they don’t know history anyway. So mix ignorance with the arrogance to think they’ll be the first human beings to make a innately flawed system work, and you have a bunch of people who refuse to heed or even listen to the warnings of those who lived through the atrocities that always follow the philosophy and policies that the Left in America insists on pursuing.
The third reason is hardly unique. Those who are moderately Democrat, centrists, and Republicans all share this one. We’re afraid of what will happen to us. With the rising number of figures from the Left who are being destroyed by their own side for saying just one wrong or “politically incorrect” thing, everyone is understandably worried about what will happen to them. If the Left can destroy its own moderate politicians or major public figures, how can we expect to fair any better as the little guys? We can’t. But the trouble here is that we’ve failed to realize there are many more of us who share a common belief that this infringement on personal choice and liberty is wrong than there are those who think it’s good in the name of “public good”. If we all spoke up, they’d be hard pressed at this moment in time to silence us. They’d try. But for now, they can’t make examples of us all. We need to capitalize on that while we still can.
The final major reason is more generally a Republican or conservative issue. We’re too polite, and we’ve bought into the idea that the Left has peddled that speech that disagrees with them is rude or impolite. Disagreement is nasty. Generally, Republicans have traditionally been taught to be polite and adopt a live and let live policy. This works great when your opponents also do the same and allow for discussion of different ideas. But as soon as your opponents determine to make even polite disagreement “impolite”, you’re left with a decision: speak up and be labelled impolite or go silent to keep the peace. Many Americans on the Republican side have been going along to get along and are then confused about why we’re losing everything to the Left. Well, it’s because we refuse to speak up and be “politically incorrect” or “impolite”.
What to Do?
It wouldn’t do much good to talk about all of this and then leave it at that with no ways to address the problem. So I have two messages, one for my fellow Americans that are conservatives and one for my fellow Americans who still believe this won’t end in tragedy and despotism if we allow it now in the name of “public safety”.
To my fellow conservatives,
Stand up. Stop worrying about being polite. Standing for what’s right firmly and holding to your standards is not impolite. You can do it without being truly rude. You can stand for liberty without condemning the character of every other American who stands up differently. The point is this. We can hold to what is morally right and morally wrong without name-calling and nastiness, but we have got to start calling things what they are. Words have power. They are descriptors of reality, but the Left has twisted them to make them the creators of reality. If they say it, then it is, according to the Left. Therefore, any attempt to speak truthfully is violence against the “reality” they want to create. But we know that just because you say something does not mean it’s true. If I tell you that I can fly, will you let me jump off a building in the name of being non-violent or will you tell me that I can’t and try to stop me? The reality doesn’t change just because I’m delusional or trying to warp someone else’s view. Words have power, and we must use them to speak out for what is true as we know it. We can remain open to those who wish to have an honest conversation and have those discussions. We can be open to changing our views when presented with hard evidence that something else is true or a better model of reality than what we had. But we cannot compromise and stay silent when outright lies or half-truths are promulgated unless we want to lose our freedoms just as so many did in Germany. As so many who lived under totalitarian regimes say, we cannot wait until the totalitarians are knocking on our door to speak out, and we must ensure we speak out against it in whatever form it takes. This means verbally and vehemently distancing ourselves from those in the Republican party who are either far right extremists tagging on the coat-tails of legitimate conservative efforts or those who really support Democratic agendas while masquerading under the Republican name. Conservative does not equate to Republican, and we have to fight back against the tide of untruths being weaponized against us. You are not in the minority. Stand up and fight. Say no. They will hurl whatever they can at you for it. We’re going to suffer. But our Founders didn’t win our freedoms without spilling blood, sacrificing, and suffering. Go back to our roots and screw your courage to the sticking point. Now is the time to fight while we, like our Founders, have legal means by which to fight.
And above all, for those who are believers, we must be praying that God will open blind eyes, revive the church, and bring them back into the fight for what is true and right. This isn’t a matter of vaccinating or not vaccinating. That decision is yours. But the moment that the government wants to come in and refuse parents the right to decide what is best for their children, force us against our will to participate in taking a drug or a treatment we have clearly stated we wish to refuse, or treat us as public enemy #1 to make it acceptable to grab top down control to “eliminate” the threat, we cannot stand idly by. That is what this is about. As soon as we no longer believe in individual body autonomy (and no, I don’t mean the right to choose to murder your own child like pro-abortion activists claim individual body autonomy means; there are two bodies involved in that argument, and you obviously have no right morally or otherwise to murder someone else), we end up in the same exact territory that Hitler and the Nazis went into where some or even all people had no right to deny consent to being part of medical trials or experiments. That is exactly the same philosophy that led to all sorts of other similar atrocities in various totalitarian regimes: the philosophy that you have no right to determine what happens to you, especially if the government claims it is for the public good. Don’t be deceived as to the nature of this. Believers need to be praying about the spirit of wickedness that is behind this. And no, I am not talking about the vaccines themselves. I keep stressing this because I know for a fact that there will be those who try to claim I am trying to dissuade people from taking the vaccine and am therefore evil and want people dead. This has nothing to do with the vaccine beyond the government’s use of the pandemic overall as an excuse to take power they should not have and under our laws have no right to.
We need to be praying that God will rouse the church in America from her apathy to the evil going on, cut to the quick the hard hearts of rulers who believe they are above God, conscience, and the rightful authority of the family as granted by God, and restore unto us the Biblical moorings that kept society from decaying to the point where it is today. That was the one major thing that every one of these totalitarian regimes lacked. They lacked a major true, Biblically grounded church that would stand up. Where there was one, as there was in America, it was the very first target of every totalitarian dictator because they knew that was where the resistance on the strongest grounds of all, morality, would come from. My prayer is that God would revive the church, strengthen us for the fight now and the worse things to come if the rest of the country refuses to stand, and bring souls to Himself through this. At the end of the day, Christians, we are here to preserve as salt. We cannot forever prevent the decay, and we cannot turn back the clock on the world’s decay or their eventual destruction. All we can do is attempt to preserve for as long as God allows and work to bring the light to the darkness wherever possible. We do need to pray and be active. But we don’t need to be fretting and worrying either. We know that America and every other power on this Earth will be destroyed on judgment day, and we will rejoice in finally seeing justice done even as we will likely mourn at the sorrow that is the loss of a soul to eternal damnation. But we know the end of the story, and Satan and evil will not triumph. The people doing these things, attempting to and even succeeding in robbing us of our freedom, will not prevail ultimately. What can man do to us if God is for us? So let us search our own hearts and ensure that we have nothing there that would leave us out in the cold without God on our side as we fight the battle for our country and the souls of our countrymen in the coming days. This is about ideology. This is about faith in God or faith in men and the systems of the prince of darkness. This is, in the end, about God’s glory and the salvation of those He has chosen. Let us not forget that and let us ensure that we are not in the way of that. Dive into the Scripture. Ground yourself in it. You’re going to need it if you want to have any hope of standing in the day of evil that is coming upon us.
Sincerely,
A concerned fellow conservative
To my fellow Americans on the Left,
If you have continued with me thus far, thank you for taking the time to consider what’s been said. I am one more voice for the truth, for the reality of what is going on, but I am far from the only one. I would suggest looking into some of the others and seeking out what the other side of the political spectrum (which composes half of our country) has to say. We might surprise you by not all being rabid Trump fans who want Nazi rule. Whether you’re surprised to find we’re normal people too or not, I pray you won’t close your eyes and ears to what is happening. I’m going to level with you all here, and I don’t say this to be unkind. I say it because I believe lying to you about your precarious position is the cruelest, most unloving, immoral thing I could possibly do in this situation, and I refuse to do it. In that spirit, my message to you is to wake up to what’s going on within your party and do something about it. You have the most power to change the trajectory of your side of the aisle because you hold the voting power to vote politicians who are against freedom and American traditional values of liberty out before it’s too late.
The predominant trend I see from most I speak to in your position is that they believe they’re on the right side of this machine’s progress and therefore won’t suffer. Everyone else might get mowed over by it, but “we won’t because we’re smarter than the people who did this before us”. It’s a lie. It’s arrogance. It’s delusional. History gives voice to the lie everywhere we look from our own country’s struggle against tyranny in her Founders’ fight against England to the history of Eastern Europe and Germany.
You will suffer. You will not be on top of the machine you have set into motion but under it like all the rest of us you are seeking to mow over now in your attempt to squelch those your side’s media and politicians have deemed racist, intolerant, evil scourges to society. In your attempt to silence anyone you’ve been told is inhuman and backward, you have silenced everyone who has tried to warn you of your own impending doom by your own hand. I’ll likely be one of them, but I’ll reiterate the message countless other voices have given. Those you put into power will, and history shows time and again that those with a lust for power forget those who put them in power once they have attained it. You will become the victims of your own refusal to listen. Myself and the other half of the country really don’t want to suffer for your mistakes, but we want even less to watch those after us suffer because of our generation’s taking leave of their senses or refusing to see what was happening. We really don’t want our children to be left to clean up the mess as our generation has been left to clean up the mess our parents’ generation is leaving behind. I don’t believe any of you do either. I don’t believe that most of you have evil intent, even if you may believe it of us because your politicians and media have screamed it for so long that it seems to be reality. Maybe you truly buy into the vision of utopia promoted or maybe you simply feel the only way to survive the coming days will be to comply. I’m sympathetic to the wish to see societal ills addressed and the fear that if you don’t comply you’ll be ruined.
But as sympathetic as I am, the reality is unchanged. Compliance will not save you. Utopia is not where the train you’ve set into motion is headed. All that is coming is dystopia. You can claim I am wrong. You can rail against me. Many of you will likely hate me, scoff at me, try to discredit what I am saying. You’re welcome to do so instead of listening if you wish. I’m all for allowing people the choice to metaphorically hang themselves on their own philosophical foolishness if that’s what they choose because I do believe in meritocracy and the right of an individual to make their own life choices so long as those choices do not invade another’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the form of their own physical well-being and property.
But know this. You may choose how you act. You may not choose your consequences. The consequences will be what they are, and no amount of weeping, regret, or begging will save you when those consequences come. They will be the just reward for what you chose. History is witness to where the philosophy of your party leads. Rome, Germany, Russia, Prussia, Italy, Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam. All these names stand for those who have fallen due to the same philosophy, the same attempts at denying natural law and the nature of man, the same goal of building a utopia that could change what is unchangeable in man. If you are fellow Christians, you have the Bible to tell you what happens when man is given unfettered power. You have Scripture to warn you that man cannot be changed by man no matter how good the system is. If you aren’t a Christian, you still have history to warn you of it. You have reason to tell you of the foolishness of believing you will be different. You have so many voices from those who lived in the hell your philosophies created to tell you what awaits if you persist. So please, for the love of the society you claim you care so much for, desist. Stand with us. I don’t care if you get the vaccine. I don’t care if you mask. That isn’t the point. The point is that just as you are free to choose to do those things, others should also be free to decide for themselves if they wish not to. Just as you will suffer or benefit from the consequences of bad or good decision making, those who disagree with you will as well. Let reality, not government, be the final arbiter.
Evidence shows that in areas where the Delta variant is proliferating, more and more people are choosing to get the vaccine. Even in Republican areas. We are all responsible for our own health, and just like you, most of us take it seriously. We may make a different choice than you think is wise based on the same data you have available to you, but it doesn’t mean we haven’t weighed the risks. We are okay with the risk we are taking on, just as we presume you are okay with the risks associated with the choices you make. None of us will come crying to you if we refuse the vaccine, get COVID, and end up having to live with serious consequences. I would hope none of you would come crying to us if the same thing happens to you due to taking the vaccine. Furthermore, if you truly believe the vaccine works to either prevent illness or significantly reduce its impact upon you, then those who choose not to vaccinate are of no risk at all to you. They are themselves at risk, but you are not in any more danger just because they didn’t choose to also take the experimental treatment offered. And they were offered the option to take it. No one, at this point, that is of the age for which the emergency status has been approved is unable to get one on the basis of availability. Those of us remaining unvaccinated are doing it for our own reasons with full understanding that it means our vulnerability to COVID is the same as it was prior to the vaccine’s availability to us. And we’re fine with that. We’ve weighed the risks. If we have weighed wrong, you aren’t the one to suffer. We are. Reality will be the judge between us on whether one or neither group is correct. Either way, what have you to fear from those who won’t get it when you have? Don’t be hypocritical in insisting everyone else should do as you think they should while also freaking out at the suggestion that places like Florida might refuse to allow mandates for those things. If the situations were reversed and you were denied the vaccine on the grounds that “Republican health officials don’t think it’s safe”, you would have a fit. And, actually, I’d be right there with you on pitching a fit because if you want to inject yourselves with something that some people feel is safe and some don’t with the hope that it will help keep you healthy and safe, that is your choice. You should have that choice because you are an individual with your own set of risks. You may be more at risk of becoming severely ill if you catch COVID than I am as a healthy female with no underlying risks in my twenties. I can understand why you’d want to take the vaccine at that point because COVID poses more risk to you than the shot does. And I’d support your right to take it just as I support another’s right to refuse it because my philosophical basis is applied consistently. So apply yours consistently. If the situation were reversed and your philosophy were applied to it, would you be happy? If not, then don’t impose it upon others.
At the end of the day, the problem is not the vaccine. The problem is the continual push forward to rob all of us of our rights and our power to make our own decisions by a regime that wishes to impose the same sorts of communistic, fascist regimes that led to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and many other dictators around the world. Don’t make the mistake the German people did. Learn from the mistakes of others before it’s too late for you right along with the rest of us you’ll condemn. And if you refuse to stand with us, don’t be shocked when you are met with resistance. Expect a fight. We will not cooperate. We will not comply with you if you attempt to rob us of our freedoms along with everyone else. You may be unwise enough to hand yours over, but we will not allow you to hand ours over with yours so long as we have breath left to fight. We’d prefer to have our fellow Americans unite with us for a cause that impacts all of us so greatly, but if we have to fight alone, we will.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Fellow American
Conclusion
Whatever your stance on vaccines, COVID, and masks, now is the time to stand up against a government that persists in attempting to manufacture panic even when the crisis has passed in order to rob us of our rights. We don’t have time to dawdle around or pretend that it isn’t a threat. We don’t have time to be afraid of what the powers that be will attempt to do to us. We need to stand bold in the truth, and we need to fight back with every legal avenue available to us right now before those are taken too. And if they still persist and we are no longer able to vote them out, sue them, or refuse, then we will find ourselves in the same positions as our Founders, and with every recourse legally available attempted and rebuffed, we must then arm ourselves for our defense. I am not advocating that we storm the Capitol or behave as the lunatics who did so on January 6th. Let me be very clear about that. I am advocating that just as the Founders and their fellow Americans armed themselves and prepared for a fight after they declared their independence while still hoping it would not come to that, we must do the same. We must be prepared to defend ourselves if they will not allow us to leave peaceably. And we must all do so regardless of whether we are right, center, or left. If you are a moderate with any of those positions and believe freedom to be essential regardless of whether your fellow American agrees with your ideas on policies intended to achieve the protection of that freedom, then you too should be prepared to do this. We do not respond to their violence or their attempts to rob us of all we hold dear by burning down their stores, smashing windows, looting, rioting, and screaming in the streets as Antifa and BLM did. To do so would to become the very fascists trying to steal all we love. Instead, we stand firm, we refuse to comply with authoritarian measures because they go against the Constitution and the natural law that gives our rulers their authority, and we protect ourselves when they inevitably try to use force to make us comply. We do not fire the first shot, but we will fire if necessary. That must be our stance if we have any hope of holding onto what our Founders purchased for us with their own blood, sweat, and tears.
Resources
Statistics on political views within the mainstream media
Benjamin Franklin on sacrificing liberty for temporary safety
Edmund Burke on triumph of evil
Further Reading
On Germany:
Short list of biographies on Bonhoeffer
The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff
Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Janet Benge (Excellent biography to listen to or read with the whole family, and has a lot of details on how Hitler rose to power through what we know of Bonhoeffer’s experiences and observations of that rise.)
The Cause of Hitler’s Germany by Leonard Peikoff
The Rise of Hitler’s Germany Explained
On totalitarianism and Leftism:
The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro
Blackout by Candace Owens
The Vision for the Self-Anointed by Thomas Sowell
A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell
Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
On America’s Traditional Liberties and the Struggle for Freedom
Thomas Jefferson’s Autobiography
John Wise’s “A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches”
Elisha William’s “The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants”
How Collectivism Nearly Sunk Early Colonies by Charles W. Sasser
Jonathan Mayhew’s “A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers”
John Adams’ Letter to Hezekiah Niles on the American Revolution
History of the Black Robe Regiment from National Black Robe Regiment
John Wise: The Man Who Inspired the Declaration of Independence
John Witherspoon’s “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men”
The American Story by David and Tim Barton
One Nation Under God: Ten Things Every Christian Should Know About the Founding of America by the Christian Law Association
Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution
The Federalist Papers
