Jeff Childers

” It’s working. Our relentless focus on resisting the narrative for the last three years is beginning to break through into the mainstream, starting to persuade people who have viewed themselves as “moderate,” and expanding what people are willing to think and talk about.

I don’t want to oversell it — we’re not “there” yet — but the latest evidence of significant movement came this week in the form of an Epoch Times op-ed, penned by libertarian journalist and founder of the Brownstone Institute Jeffrey Tucker, titled “Leviathan Must Be Stopped.” (It was originally published last week but updated yesterday).

About mid-way through the article, Mr. Tucker neatly described the entire problem; the pandemic, yes, but also what the pandemic has exposed: the deep network of institutional corruption digging its tendrils far beneath our social roots:

The institutions on which we used to depend to defend our liberties and rights—nonprofits, courts, intellectuals, academia, tech, and media—have failed spectacularly. We had no idea just how many of them had long ago been already captured. We didn’t know that the feds were deeply embedded at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We didn’t know that they’d already captured the news pages of The New York Times and so on. We thought that these institutions were merely ideologically biased. We didn’t know that they had become tools of the regime.
When the intellectuals and nonprofits went silent when lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates came along, we thought that they were merely afraid to speak. We hadn’t considered that their silence was evidence of a much deeper corruption. They were either being paid for silence or blackmailed into it.
Precisely. It’s not JUST that the non-profits and corporate media lean liberal. The real problem is they are now wholly-owned CIA subsidiaries. The spies are running the institutions so seamlessly that the cold-war-era KGB minders of Pravda’s editorial board could’ve learned a thing or two from this generation of spooks.

Mr. Tucker also noticed that, during the pandemic, certain groups were better able to resist the government’s psychological manipulation techniques:

[T]he communities that resisted … weren’t the secular elites much less the academy or corporations. They were religious communities: the Hasidim, the Amish, the Mormons, the traditionalist Catholics, and later, the Evangelicals. It turns out, just speaking empirically, holding to a hard faith and living in a community of others who also hold that faith turned out to be the greatest single mental and intellectual protection against [mental] infection[.] My humble suggestion, then, is that if you don’t have a faith, get one immediately. You need it to protect you against the lies of the secular elites, who are selling their own false version of religion.
While there were some secular folks who were able to resist the militarized mind games — some of them are part of the C&C army — they were few and far between. Jeffrey Tucker’s diagnosis and prescription are right: faith is the strongest defensive weapon against the élites’ demonic mind virus, and the Church is the group best positioned to organize a resistance. (It just needs to wake up.)

Apart from the Church, Mr. Tucker also had practical suggestions that will sound very familiar to regular C&C readers:

[W]e desperately need institutional reform and revolution. People talk about reforming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health, and the FBI. Forget it. These institutions need to be completely defunded and defanged. They’re corrupt to the core, to the point that there’s no hope. In addition, we need dramatic legal reform. The quarantine power needs to go away. We need reform of money to get it away from the hands of the Federal Reserve. We need education solely in the control of families and communities.
A few short years ago, Mr. Tucker’s commentary would have seemed a little unhinged, and would have been relegated to small, close-knit groups of hardcore libertarian readers. Now he’s been published in a major newspaper — true, it’s the Epoch Times, not the New York Times, but still.

For what it’s worth, the comments to his are almost universally positive. Specifically, nobody called Mr. Tucker crazy.

The message — what we’ve all been screaming for three years now — is penetrating. We’re THAT close. Now we must push it over the finish line. “