On February 14, 2022, as protesting Canadian truckers filled Parliament Square in Ottawa, giving joyous hope to all those worldwide who were done with pandemic totalitarianism, it was Chrystia Freeland, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister, who gave chilling proof of how far the global elites would go to enforce absolute compliance to their diktats by the citizenry. “As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order,” she announced. “In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith … If your truck is being used in these illegal blockades, your corporate accounts will be frozen. The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended.”¹ Police shattered truck windows, arrested a hundred protesters, including the demonstration’s leaders, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked an emergency order.² For a time, representative government was suspended in the nation of Canada.

It would be an overstatement to say that Chrystia Freeland was ever a friend, but for a while we were in the same circle of hardworking, underpaid reporters and editors, all just trying to earn a living. I’d seen her around at social events in Manhattan, and one day when we were both adjusting our makeup — she after a television appearance, me in preparation for an interview — she mentioned, happily and with absolute confidence, that she was shortly to run for Parliament in Canada. At the time her humble title was as Reuters’ “Managing Director and Editor, Consumer News.” I remember looking at her with astonishment at this out-of-the-blue leapfrogging of many career levels. She must have powerful friends, I thought.

It turned out to be a good guess.

Ms. Freeland was part of a small cadre of “influentials” connected to the World Economic Forum; indeed, she is now on the WEF Board of Trustees.³ She and her peers, along with allied elites in other fields, eventually masterminded a crime against humanity unprecedented in our times — a crime that involves the theft of assets and the destruction of cultures, as well as untold deaths.

This book is about how we came to this harrowing civilizational crossroads — engaged in a war against vast impersonal forces with limitless power over our lives for the freedoms we have taken for granted; how those forces seized upon two years of COVID-19 panic in sinister new ways; and how, yet, against overwhelming odds, we still might win.

Others have looked at this war from a biomedical perspective, or from a strictly political one. My focus is on how this ongoing war against us is far more basic, aimed at nothing less than dissolving the meaning of humanity itself and undoing of the rich cultural legacy we in the West have long treasured and passed on to succeeding generations.

In those two years, the COVID-19 pandemic, which began unfolding with the unprecedented global “lockdown” in March 2020, has fundamentally remade human relations, capitalism, and culture in the West. No matter that in the past we had lived through far graver medical crises without even passing thought to stopping all congregation, suspending the production of all culture, or compelling all healthy people to cover their faces and close their businesses and keep apart — this time, our elites used the “crisis” to shut down Western norms of liberty, the human-centered world, and civilization itself.

But what is our culture, which we once thought durable, to be replaced by? A world managed by machines and mediated via digital interfaces; a world predicated on cruelty, without human empathy as an organizing principle; a world in which national boundaries, cultures, and languages are drained of meaning, in which institutions embody only the goals of distant meta-national oligarchs, a world organized for the benefit of massive pharmaceutical companies, a few global tech giants and technocrats, and a tyrannical superpower that is our deadly adversary. In short: a world redesigned to ensure the dominance forever of these distant elites, both geopolitically and via market share.

In 2020–22, we entered a time in which the post–World War II organizing principle of human affairs, the democratic nation-state, was being intentionally diluted in power and undermined in the interest of constructing a replacement meta-structure of unaccountable loosely aligned global nonprofits, Big Tech corporations, the WEF, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Their aim was to construct engines of history designed to dissolve human culture, closeness and community. United in an alliance of convenience, these forces see human beings and the troublesome individualistic West, with its stubborn insistence on human rights, on joy, on spontaneity, on quirkiness, acceptance, and tolerance, as obstacles to be managed, drained of power and resources, and sidelined. Their goal is to subvert Western cultural norms and ultimately to alienate Western children from their families’ influence and from Western history and freedoms generally. The war against “the virus” has really been a war waged via technologies and their masters to dissolve human culture and disempower human beings. It is a war on free thought and free speech — a war against our most fundamental beliefs.

These oligarchical elites are supported in this vast project to remake humanity by massive, opaque nonprofits through which pour billions of dollars aimed at transformational social change. Behind benign-sounding “pro-human” mottoes — such as “We are a nonprofit fighting poverty, disease and inequity around the world” (The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) or “Who Stands Between YOU and the Next Pandemic?” (EcoHealth Alliance) or “Using the Power of Epidemiology to Fight the Spread of COVID-19,” (Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists) — these groups have used their power to advance the most malign anti-human ends.⁴

The pandemic gave them pretext and opportunity on an unprecedented scale, and they have taken full advantage.

The faces of some of those who have visited this evil upon us are all-too-familiar — the power-besotted political figures, the domineering healthcare “experts,” the bought-off media talking heads, the titans of tech and social media, the unapologetically tyrannical leader of Communist-ruled China, Xi Jinping. We know others, such as the super-elites of the World Economic Forum mentioned above, by reputation, by their pronouncements from their gatherings in Davos, Switzerland, or via their books. But collectively, during the pandemic, they have come to wield power over even the smallest particulars of human existence. And that is because this is a war aimed at undoing humanity itself.

This claim is hard to process, but we need to do so.

Since the end of the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance, and up until the near-present, we in the West have taken for granted that it is human perspectives that drive history.

No more. Machines have, in the past, served us, but we are at the point in history in which we are being reoriented to serve machines and their masters.

For all their public proclamations about building a “better world” some of the most powerful leaders arrayed against us do not even bother to obscure that this is their real goal. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, could hardly have been more direct about his intent, invoking the need to provoke a worldwide “Great Reset” in the wake of the pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis has shown us, Schwab argued, that our old systems are not fit anymore for the twenty-first century. On June 3, 2020, when we still did not know if the pandemic would be perhaps in the rearview mirror a week hence, Schwab declared, “[T]he world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”⁵

I remember reading this and thinking, “What? Why?” and also noting the megalomaniacal, dictatorial tone: “We must … ”

“Our old systems” — privacy, paper and metal money, the ability to drive a car without being tracked, the nation-state, human expression, human touch, cultural activities, churches, mosques, and synagogues, town halls, theaters and concert halls, democratic governance, a free press, schools and universities, books and libraries, and the right to decide what happens to one’s own body, property and family — none of these suit the WEF leadership and their tech- and pharmaceutical-industry and CCP allies.

“Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never. The world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” declared Schwab in his eerily early book The Great Reset.⁶ As early as July 2020, Schwab expected that we would soon see “a lot of anger”: “we have to prepare for a more angry world … how to prepare? It means to take the necessary action.” Again, he called for “a Great Reset.”⁷ He asked for “full global citizenship.” He confidently predicted winners and losers economically: “We know that certainly the health industries, the digital industry, will go out of this crisis strengthened, but we know that many industries that rely on physical interaction will have difficulties to survive.”⁸ He did not say “physical labor,” he said “physical interaction.”

In 2022, as resistance to his plans was in full force worldwide, in remarks that are no longer easy to locate online, Schwab irritably reiterated that the “good old world” of pre-2020 was never to return and that believing that it could do so was a fiction.

Davos 2022 shows clearly the intentions for humanity still ahead from this group of elites: from planning for endless pandemics and “variants” in the future, leading to endless social control; to the digitization of identities and currency; to the intervention in free markets by a “stakeholder capitalism” that chooses winners and losers in the world of commerce via the fig leaf of ideology; to “global cooperation” that seeks to dissolve nation states and national boundaries, the Davos cadre, with a gathering headlined yet again by Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, has plans for our subjugation that are being implemented, now into the third year of this pandemic, at full throttle.⁹

But the people of the world did not vote to abandon “our old systems” and destroy our old ways.

The attacks on organized religion have been particularly telling, as these attacks are characteristic of Communist policies, especially in China. From the Orthodox Jewish community in New York, to Christian churches in California, since 2020 the religious were often singled out for punishment for not following “official” COVID rules. One synagogue in Brooklyn was threatened with an investigation, and New York’s then-governor spoke out against it with hostile language when its community dared to hold a secret wedding celebration in November 2020.¹⁰ The Supreme Court had to make an affirmative ruling against the governor of California to allow people to worship at church in person.¹¹ Churches and synagogues by the thousands were forcibly closed. The Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center in Massachusetts was still, as of the first week of March 2022, “Zoom only” two years after the start of the pandemic.¹²

Policies that weaken the bonds between human beings and weaken the family were similarly introduced and policed. Shaming and ostracism, “struggle sessions” characteristic of CCP-style communism, replaced American-style civil debate and tolerance for different points of view. Hyper-empowered boards of health harassed members of formerly free institutions. These unelected board-of-health functionaries hounded professors at universities and demanded that houses of worship, historic sites, and community gathering spaces remain closed, long after any epidemiological danger had passed.

School boards with broad new powers and heavy-handed, seemingly centralized scripts and policies have bullied parents and tormented children, turning formerly safe and supportive schools into terrifying and hostile authoritarian battlegrounds. Concerned parents were even tagged as “domestic terrorists” by the FBI — just as dissident parents are targeted in Communist China or were in the former Soviet Union.¹³

None of this is accidental. Nor does it have anything to do with “science.” The data were soon widely available, and even in 2020 studies showed the “lockdowns” and restrictions did not stop disease and often made health outcomes far worse.¹⁴

But the draconian measures did not stop.

The agents of destructive change also have psychological targets. Under the “fog of war” the pandemic was from the start terrifyingly narrated in the direst of terms, thereby enabling the systematized global attack against traditionally human physical spaces, traditionally human speech and communications, and other traditionally human norms of Western civilization.

Simultaneously there was a systematic attack on what might be called “humane spaces” and “analog products” — the spaces, activities, and objects that are especially supportive of human enlightenment, social cohesion, and cultural continuity and especially resistant to being surveilled and tracked digitally.

Indeed, one of the reasons our current crisis feels so strange and disorienting to us humans, especially to us Western humans, is that it was in some ways modeled by machines and by programmers and may well have been continually modified via machine learning. We are not living through organic human history as it has unfolded in the past. Since April 2020, computer “models,” whether their assumptions turned out to be right or wrong, have driven policy.¹⁵ The other reason for its bizarre, uncanny quality is that it is aimed at translating and transitioning Western cultures and instincts into the language and instincts of CCP-type civic subjugation.

If you asked a computer program to define a human being or what supports human culture, it would likely spit out a list of all the relationships, attributes, and spaces that were targeted by the policies of 2020–22. The machine program might respond: smiling, touching, hugging, praying, and speaking; the ability to read and to communicate via speech and facial expressions and touch; the ability to cooperate and to form bonds. If you asked a machine program, “What makes people free?” It might respond with: “Their ability to gather in spaces where they generate representative government.” If you asked a machine program, “What are the building blocks of human culture?” It might spit out: “Dancing, listening to music, watching concerts and theatrical productions, holy days and rituals, teaching children in a school, singing, and worship.”

So it is not for nothing that the bad actors have intentionally targeted the “analog/humane world” of: physical books; physical bookstores; human-populated lecture halls; physical libraries; physical currency; physical maps; paper and metal money; human employees and human workplaces; concert halls and theaters; pubs, bars, and restaurants; in-person classrooms; churches, synagogues, mosques; dinner parties; summer camp; recess; Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; playgrounds; team sports; non-electric cars; holy days and rituals. They have taken aim at representative in-person democracy, at state capitals, in-person parliaments, and congressional assemblies, local town halls and in-person town hall meetings, and at the museums and statues and historical sites that give humans a sense of meaning and an origin story.

When two human beings are in contact with one another, they produce communication, culture and maybe plans. This is simply what humans do face-to-face. A facilitator of communication and alliance between humans is touch.

How do you dissolve human civilization? One way a machine program could target human beings is by attacking and undoing the magical power of touch. One of the strangest diktats from the start of the pandemic was the demand for “distancing,” that inorganic, awkward verb that was introduced in a new context, and redefined, early in the pandemic.

The implications of this war on touch, more than two years on, are beyond tragic. Physical closeness is not an “extra” for human beings. Without it, we suffer from mental illnesses ranging from depression to anxiety and are even vulnerable to hallucinations and other forms of psychosis, as many studies have demonstrated. As the Prison Policy Initiative warned, “The Research is Clear: Solitary Confinement Causes Long-lasting Harm.”¹⁶

Indeed, one reason that solitary confinement has been seen as torture by prison-policy networks is that isolation can cause permanent changes to the human brain that result in madness. First identified by psychiatrist Dr. Stuart Grassian, the ailment manifests along several lines, including “a progressive inability to tolerate ordinary things … hallucinations and illusions; severe panic attacks; difficulties with thinking, concentration, and memory; obsessive, sometimes harmful thoughts that won’t go away … and delirium.”¹⁷ Indeed, premature deaths — by suicide, homicide or opioid overdoses — are more likely for those who have been released from prison if they spent even a single day in solitary confinement. Loneliness, even a little loneliness, causes humans trauma.¹⁸

As those versed in addiction and mental-health issues well know, humans don’t simply want touch and close relationships; we need them. In the absence of positive human touch and social support, we can develop a condition called touch deprivation, leading to numerous additional negative psychological and even physiological effects. “Touch starvation” causes anxiety, depression and greater vulnerability to infection. Individuals who go without positive physical touch for a long period can even suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.¹⁹ From a hug to a high-five, positive moments of human touch can calm the nervous system, boost mood and release endorphins, strengthen the immune system, and improve healing.

Little wonder that the distancing requirements put in place allegedly to eliminate “the spread” of COVID-19 have led many people to experience profound sadness and an overwhelming sense of isolation. They could have also worsened illnesses. Love is indeed a drug — and a good one.

Unsurprisingly, group singing — from the start, weirdly singled out by pandemic policies — has likewise been shown to work magic on human beings in relieving pain and sustaining mental health.²⁰

The same near-magical advantages are inherent in “analog/humane,” non-digital spaces and products that humans have long used. Though advertised (by digital companies) as being second-rate these days in comparison to digital alternatives, these “analog/humane” products and experiences retain advantages that digital competitors cannot begin to approach.

Humans in human space create sophisticated outcomes unmatchable in many ways by technology. A human being in a lecture hall, speaking directly to five hundred people, can reach all of them equally without an algorithm mediating or censoring him or her; a human being walking alongside a physical bookshelf or speaking to a human bookseller can find a little-known book, or one out of print, or a controversial book or pamphlet that an Amazon algorithm will bury. A human being reading in a library of physical books cannot be hacked or surveilled or tracked. Indeed a physical book itself, like the physical pamphlets that launched many revolutions, is a miracle of cyber-secure technology. When you carry a book in your pocket or shoulder bag, no one can track it; when you read print on paper, no one can put tracking cookies on what you are reading. Your human brain is still private.

As a political force, humans in “analog/humane” spaces have unmatchable superpowers. A group of humans in a local town hall, or a statehouse, or Congress, or Parliament have powers that they lose when driven to digital alternatives. In person, they can privately caucus and form alliances. They can lobby one another in confidence. They can review paper documents together. They can point things out to one another free from censorship and surveillance.

A speech is a radical technology. A smile is a radical technology. It boosts endorphins better than a hundred smiley emojis. A physical classroom is a radical technology. A community of human beings is a radical technology.

They are miraculously sophisticated technologies, the human body and mind, human touch and faces and verbal communication, especially within a group of fellow humans, in a classroom, a library, a statehouse, a church. Digital technology simply cannot touch these advantages. And Big Tech knows and hates that fact.

These human advantages over technology are precisely what the world of Big Tech, supported by powerful globalist allies, longs to annihilate. For these “analog/humane” spaces and analog products are far more empowering to human beings than is the digital alternative world.

Indeed, these enemies of the human advantage seek to erase it all — physical flirtation, physical play, physical expressions of love, physical worship, physical teamwork.

By isolating us for more than a year and a half, leaving us terrified in our homes, and bombarding our minds with messages that activate the amygdala, where fear is processed and reason cannot enter — and then re-allowing humans only to reconnect in restricted, muffled, silenced, and surveilled ways — our elites have stifled troublesome Western cultural norms and effectively made us far more manageable and more completely controlled within their own digital matrices.

Again it was left to the WEF’s shameless Klaus Schwab to openly envisage the future he sees via technology. Quoting Eric Schmidt, the then-executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Schwab observed: “The coming decade would be a battle between robots and humans, and to win that battle we would have to know what makes us human.”²¹

What did not have to be said was that the WEF and its Big Tech allies have indeed examined the question of what makes us human, only to use that analysis in alliance with the machines against the humans.

And the obvious first step in that process is the obliteration of free assembly, of community.

As pandemic panic took hold, “restrictions” poured out in waves around the formerly free world, echoing one another, but continually shifting and changing their flavor, endlessly assaulting a disoriented, increasingly fragmented, and psychologically fragile set of formerly free nations. (Remember: AI models can tweak simultaneous soundbites and input global outcomes to alter them in real time, in a “cat’s cradle” type of dynamic.)

It is no exaggeration to say that these coordinated offenses, orchestrated by government in lockstep alliance with tech and pharmaceutical companies and the dominant media, represent an evil we had never seen before in human history.

Worldwide, as well as state by US state, we heard the same soundbites and the same charges aimed at those who dared speak up against these plans; we saw the same novel methods of bypassing legislatures and laws to empower boards of health to restrict rights and liberties. Later we saw the same vaccination goals in nation after nation, and the same abuse heaped upon the recalcitrant. Finally we observed the same punishments, from the denial of access to restaurants to the denial of the right to work — even the same lures of free donuts²² or McDonald’s coupons²³ to cajole “the hesitant” to fall into line.

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The end goal is something much darker than simply a dark-enough world in which everyone is coercively vaccinated, whether they are at risk or not, whether they have natural immunity or not, a world in which “boosters” for seven billion people annually are guaranteed forever.

The end goal, rather, is to ensure that our pre–March 2020 world disappears forever. Irretrievable. To be replaced with a world in which all human endeavor is behind a digital paywall, and a world in which all of us ask the permission of technology to gain access to the physical world, access to culture and access to other human beings.

The data presented in 2020 about the uselessness and harms of “lockdown” were reconfirmed again and again. The Great Barrington Declaration had warned, in October 2020, that this would be the case.²⁴ In 2021, The Wall Street Journal reached that conclusion again, after tens of thousands of businesses had permanently closed.²⁵ Eight months after that, a study in Johns Hopkins University’s Studies in Applied Economics series reached that conclusion yet again.²⁶ But it was not until February 2022, that tanking poll numbers, an internal memo from a campaign advisor,²⁷ and a court decision to lay bare 55,000 pages of Pfizer internal documents²⁸ led US governors and the US presidential administration to pull back on “masking,” “mandates,” and “restrictions.”

The real goal had nothing to do with public health.

The real goal is to dissolve and destroy Western and human culture, and to replace it with a techno-fascistic culture — a culture in which we have forgotten what free human beings can do.

The crime that was perpetrated during the pandemic years of 2020–22 was perhaps the greatest ever committed against humanity. And it is being perpetrated still.