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https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/20/norman-solomon-biden-is-the-latest-president-to-tout-the-vietnam-war-as-proud-history/

Biden Is the Latest President To Tout the Vietnam War as Proud History

When Joe Biden flew out of Hanoi last week, he was leaving a country where U.S. warfare caused roughly 3.8 million Vietnamese deaths. But, like every other president since the Vietnam War, he gave no sign of remorse. In fact, Biden led up to his visit by presiding over a White House ceremony that glorified the war as a noble effort.

Presenting the Medal of Honor to former Army pilot Larry L. Taylor for bravery during combat, Biden praised the veteran with effusive accolades for risking his life in Vietnam to rescue fellow soldiers from “the enemy.” But that heroism was 55 years ago. Why present the medal on national television just days before traveling to Vietnam?

The timing reaffirmed the shameless pride in the U.S. war on Vietnam that one president after another has tried to render as history. You might think that — after killing such a vast number of people in a war of aggression based on continuous deceptions — some humility and even penance would be in order.

But no. As George Orwell put it, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And a government that intends to continue its might-makes-right use of military power needs leaders who do their best to distort history with foggy rhetoric and purposeful omissions. Lies and evasions about past wars are prefigurative for future wars.

And so, at a press conference in Hanoi, the closest Biden came to acknowledging the slaughter and devastation inflicted on Vietnam by the U.S. military was this sentence: “I’m incredibly proud of how our nations and our people have built trust and understanding over the decades and worked to repair the painful legacy the war left on both our nations.”

In the process, Biden was pretending an equivalency of suffering and culpability for both countries — a popular pretense for commanders in chief ever since the first new one after the Vietnam War ended.

Two months into his presidency in early 1977, Jimmy Carter was asked at a news conference if he felt “any moral obligation to help rebuild that country.” Carter replied firmly: “Well, the destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.”

And, Carter added, “I don’t feel that we owe a debt, nor that we should be forced to pay reparations at all.”

In other words, no matter how many lies it tells or how many people it kills, being the United States government means never having to say you’re sorry.

When President George H.W. Bush celebrated the U.S. victory in the 1991 Gulf War, he proclaimed: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Bush meant that the triumphant killing of Iraqi people — estimated at 100,000 in six weeks — had ushered in American euphoria about military action that promised to wipe away hesitation to launch future wars.

From Carter to Biden, presidents have never come anywhere near providing an honest account of the Vietnam War. None could imagine engaging in the kind of candor that Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provided when he said: “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.”

Mainstream political discourse has paid scant attention to the deaths and injuries of Vietnamese people. Likewise the horrendous ecological damage and effects of poisons from the Pentagon’s arsenal have gotten very short shrift in U.S. media and politics.

Does such history really matter now? Absolutely. Efforts to portray the U.S. government’s military actions as well-meaning and virtuous are incessant. The pretenses that falsify the past are foreshadowing excuses for future warfare.

Telling central truths about the Vietnam War is a basic threat to the U.S. war machine. No wonder the leaders of the warfare state would rather keep pretending.

Comments to article:

" When has the US apologized for any of its grotesque crimes? the vaporizing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the pardon of the heinous butchers of Japanese Unit 731 in exchange for their data on gruesome human experiments, coup d’etats in Iran and Guatemala, backing ruthless Argentine generals in their genocide against their own people, the Chilean coup d’etat against Allende, the senseless slaughter of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan. And now the bloody proxy war in Ukraine. There is enough blood shed to turn the Amazon red……"

" I recall that John Pilger, in one of his documentaries, visited a Vietnamese hospital which had a section dedicated to the deformities caused in the unborn; shelves and shelves of infant-sized specimen jars.

Grotesque and horrible war-crimes committed because the US military opted to smother the countrysides of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — an area about the size of Massachusetts – with Agent Orange at concentrations up to 20 times the manufacturers recommendation.

As if any spraying of toxins on a population and environment is ever acceptable.

The legacy of that continues to this day; it still impacts the health of local populations and the natural environment.

So whilst, as Norman writes, “U.S. warfare caused roughly 3.8 million Vietnamese deaths” – alongside numerous Laotians and Cambodians – the ongoing ramifications of that illegal war continue to inflict grievous harm on the locals.

Biden’s comment that

“I’m incredibly proud of how our nations and our people have built trust and understanding over the decades and worked to repair the painful legacy the war left on both our nations,”

is a load of crap.

According to the US Institute of peace, as recently as January 2022, “neither the U.S. government nor U.S. manufacturers have been held accountable in court for the harmful effects of Agent Orange.”

So much for Biden’s claim to be repairing “the painful legacy the war left.”

Biden, somehow tried to deflect US administrations collective responsibility when he added the proviso that the war had left a legacy “on both our nations.”

Any detrimental legacy that the US administrations left on the US was self-inflicted, and was duplicitous as it sprayed its own and allied forces whose vets and their children also continue to suffer. "

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-great-demoralization/

The Great Demoralization

On March 6, 2020, the mayor of Austin, Texas, canceled the biggest tech and arts trade show in the world, South-by-Southwest, only a week before hundreds of thousands were to gather in the city. 

In an instant, with the stroke of a pen, it was all gone: hotel reservations, flight plans, performances, exhibitors, and all the hopes and dreams of thousands of merchants in the town. Economic impact: a loss $335 million in revenue at least. And that was just to the city alone, to say nothing of the broader impact. 

It was the beginning of US lockdowns. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time – my own sense was that this was a calamity that would lead to decades of successful lawsuits against the Austin mayor – but it turned out that Austin was the test case and template for the entire nation and then the world. 

The reason was of course Covid but the pathogen wasn’t even there. The idea was to keep it out of the city, an incredible and sudden fallback to a medieval practice that has nothing to do with modern public health understanding of how a respiratory virus should be handled. 

“In six months,” I wrote at the time, “if we are in a recession, unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked, and people are locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose disease ‘containment’ over disease mitigation. Then the conspiracy theorists get to work.”

I was right about the conspiracy theorists but I had not anticipated that they would turn out to be right about nearly everything. We were being groomed for nationwide lockdowns.

At this point in the trajectory, we already knew the gradient of risk. It was not medically significant for healthy working-age adults (which still to this day the CDCs does not admit). So the shutdown likely protected very few if anyone. 

The extraordinary edict – worthy of a tin-pot dictator of a dark age – completely overrode the wishes of millions, all on the decision of one man, whose name is Steven Adler. 

“Was the consideration between maintaining that money, effectively rolling the dice, and doing what you did?” asked Texas Monthly of the mayor.  

His answer: “No.” 

Clarifying: “We made a decision based on what was in the best health interest for the city. And that is not an easy choice.”

After the shocking cancellation, which overrode property rights and free will, the mayor urged all residents to go out and eat at restaurants and gather and spend money to support the local economy. In this later interview, he explained that he had no problem keeping the city open. He just didn’t want people from hither and yon – the dirty people, so to speak – to bring a virus with them. 

He was here playing the role of Prince Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” He was turning the capital city of Texas into a castle in which the elite could hide from the virus, an action that also became a foreshadowing of what was to come: the division of the entire country into clean and dirty populations. 

The mayor further added a strange comment: “I think the spread of the disease here is inevitable. I don’t think that closing down South Bay was intended to stop the disease from getting here because it is coming. The assessment of our public health professionals was that we were risking it coming here more quickly, or in a greater way with a greater impact. And the longer we could put that off, the better this city is.”

And there we have the “flatten the curve” thinking at work. Kick the can down the road. Postpone. Delay herd immunity as long as possible. Yes, everyone will get the bug but it is always better that it happens later rather than sooner. But why? We were never told. Flatten the curve was really just prolong the pain, keep our overlords in charge as long as possible, put normal life on hold, and stay safe as long as you can. 

Prolonging the pain might also have served another surreptitious agenda: let the working classes – the dirty people – get the bug and bear the burden of herd immunity so that the elites can stay clean and hopefully it will die out before it gets to the highest echelons. There was indeed a hierarchy of infection. 

In all these months, no one ever explained to the American public why prolonging the period of non-exposure was always better than meeting the virus sooner, gaining immunity, and getting over it. The hospitals around the country were not strained. Indeed, with the inexplicable shutdown of medical services for diagnostics and elective surgeries, hospitals in Texas were empty for months. Health care spending collapsed. 

This was the onset of the great demoralization. The message was: your property is not your own. Your events are not yours. Your decisions are subject to our will. We know better than you. You cannot take risks with your own free will. Our judgment is always better than yours. We will override anything about your bodily autonomy and choices that are inconsistent with our perceptions of the common good. There is no restraint on us and every restraint on you. 

This messaging and this practice is inconsistent with a flourishing human life, which requires the freedom of choice above all else. It also requires the security of property and contracts. It presumes that if we make plans, those plans cannot be arbitrarily canceled by force by a power outside of our control. Those are bare minimum presumptions of a civilized society. Anything else leads to barbarism and that is exactly where the Austin decision took us. 

We still don’t know precisely who was involved in this rash judgment or on what basis they made it. There was a growing sense in the country at the time that something was going to happen. There had been sporadic use of lockdown powers in the past. Think of the closure of Boston after the bombing in 2013. A year later, the state of Connecticut quarantined two travelers who might have been exposed to Ebola in Africa. These were the precedents. 

“The coronavirus is driving Americans into unexplored territory, in this case understanding and accepting the loss of freedom associated with a quarantine,” wrote the New York Times on March 19, 2020, three days after the Trump press conference that announced two weeks to flatten the curve. 

The experience on a nationwide basis fundamentally undermined the civil liberties and rights that Americans had long taken for granted. It was a shock to everyone but to young people still in school, it was utter trauma and a moment of mental reprogramming. They learned all the wrong lessons: they are not in charge of their lives; someone else is. The only way to be is to figure out the system and play along. 

We now see epic learning loss, psychological shock, population-wide obesity and substance abuse, a fall in investor confidence, a shrinkage of savings reflecting less interest in the future, and a dramatic decline in public participation in what used to be normal life events: church, theater, museums, libraries, fares, symphonies, ballets, theme parks, and so on. Attendance in general is down by half and this is starving these venues of money. Most of the big institutions in large cities like New York, such as Broadway and the Met, are on life support. The symphony halls have a third empty seats despite lowering prices. 

It seems remarkable that this three-and-a-half year-long war against basic liberty for nearly everyone has come to this. And yet it should not be a surprise. All ideology aside, you simply cannot maintain much less cultivate a civilized life when governments, in combination with the commanding heights of media and large corporations, treat their citizens like lab rats in a science experiment. You only end in sucking away the essence and vibrancy of the human spirit, as well as the will to build a good life. 

In the name of public health, they sapped the will to health. And if you object, they shut you up. This is still going on daily. 

The ruling class that did this to the country has yet to speak honestly about what transpired. It was their actions that created the current cultural, economic, and social crisis. Their experiment left the country and our lives in shambles. We’ve yet to hear apologies or even basic honesty about any of it. Instead, all we get is more misleading propaganda about how we need yet another shot that doesn’t work. 

History provides many cases of a beaten down, demoralized, and increasingly poor and censored majority population being ruled over by an imperious, inhumane, sadistic, privileged, and yet tiny ruling class. We just never believed we would become one of those cases. The truth of this is so grim and glaring, and the likely explanation of what happened so shocking, that the entire subject is regarded as something of a taboo in public life. 

There will be no fixing this, no crawling out from under the rubble, until we get something from our rulers other than public preening about a job well done, in ads sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna. 

....

https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/the-covid-protesters-where-are-they

The Covid Protesters — Where Are They Now?

If you participated in the recent COVID-911 Watch Along then you'll have the trauma and tyranny of the darkest depths of the scamdemic fresh in your mind.

Remember when they were arresting people for the "crime" of shopping while maskless?

Remember when they were arresting pregnant women in their pajamas for the "crime" of posting information about public protest events on Facebook?

Remember when police were violently arresting teenagers for the "crime" of skating at an outdoor rink during lockdown?

Remember when they were debanking truckers and their supporters in Canada for the "crime" of assembling in Ottawa?

Remember when they were arresting pastors in front of their crying children for the "crime" of holding Sunday services during lockdown?

Remember when they were firing teachers for refusing to take the genetic slurry clot shot jabs?

Of course you do. But why do you remember all this so vividly? Because the establishment media was happy to air these scenes of trauma and abuse, that's why. The message of such images is clear: if you resist, you will be arrested, constitutional rights be damned. After all, this is an emergency.

This is The Big Lie of the biosecurity state. And, like every other aspect of the biosecurity state, it is all kabuki theatre. The reason the same establishment media that plastered these dramatic arrests all over the evening news never told you about the follow-up to these stories is because, time and again, these unconstitutional mandates and the violent arrests of the mandate resisters were found to have been illegal and the cases were thrown out of court. In fact, in many instances, the charges were dropped before the case even made it to court.

The people who are looking to traumatize and scare you, to keep you compliant and complacent, will never tell you what ended up happening to these people. So, allow me to do exactly that.

Here's the story of what happened after the cameras stopped rolling on these COVID resisters.

ZOE BUHLER

Remember Zoe Buhler? You might not know her by name, but if you were paying attention to the non-stop flood of egregious COVID tyranny coming out of the scamdemic hellhole that was Victoria, Australia, then you'll remember the heart-rending video of her arrest by the jackbooted thugs of Dictator Dan's lockdown police state.

So, there she was. Arrested in front of her children, her total bewilderment at the nature of her offence and her pleas for leniency falling on the deaf ears of the soulless minions of the biosecurity state.

According to the Victorian Police, she was arrested not for planning or organizing any violent activity or even for planning a peaceful protest, but for posting information about an upcoming lockdown protest on Facebook. "Any gathering of this nature is in blatant breach of the Chief Health Officer’s directions and puts Victorian lives at risk."

What's more, the police did not even attempt to hide their true motive for the arrest: to send a message to any would-be protesters or Facebook posters that they would be dealt with in a similar fashion. "Those still thinking of attending the protest in Ballarat on Saturday can expect a swift and firm response from police."

What happened next is even worse than what was caught on camera. This heavily pregnant woman was taken in for hours of questioning over her social media post, and she was taken to hospital the next day over fears that she was experiencing a miscarriage. Although she did not miscarry the baby, she spent two years tied up in the court system, appealing the ridiculous charge of incitement that was brought against her and all the while having to explain to her young children that she wasn't really a criminal.

And what was the end result of all this? After two years of legal rigamarole, all charges against her were summarily dropped because, in the estimation of the Ballarat Magistrates' Court, "it was not in the public interest to continue the case." (Translation: not even the brainwashed COVID-fearing public believed this arrest was justified, and the video of the arrest was bad PR for the police.)

In some ways, the fact that the charges were dropped is almost as infuriating as the arrest itself. It is a tacit admission that she was never seriously considered to be a criminal, but instead was being used as an example and a warning to other would-be COVID resisters. And, as The Spectator rightly observes: "The perverse outcome of the prosecutors' decision is that we may not have the chance to test the government's extraordinary claims. It is highly questionable whether the police had any valid basis for even arresting Ms Buhler in the first place."

So what was Zoe's message to the Australian public and the people of the world after learning that the charges against her would be dropped? Does she take it all back? Is she recommending people simply roll over and let the would-be authorities impose whatever dictates they want in the name of any declared emergency? Of course not.

"I definitely have no regrets," she said. "I’m glad I stood up for people's human rights and freedoms. I’m glad that it is all over."

SHAWN JASON

As the frost of COVID-1984 tyranny began to settle on the frigid climes of Canada, Shawn Jason—a long-time activist whose pre-COVID campaign had been titled "I Love You — Pass it on!"—knew he had to do something. That "something" turned out to be Druthers, a self-published alternative monthly newspaper run by a handful of activists on a shoestring budget that has so far managed to distribute 8 million copies across Canada.

And when the truckers began descending on Ottawa for the Freedom Convoy in early 2022, he knew he had to do something more. That "something more" came in the form of an innovative idea: offer the truckers a $10 contract to deliver a copy of Druthers to Trudeau's office. The public could then "adopt a trucker" and support the convoy by donating funds to pay for these contracts. The theory behind this campaign was that if the truckers were in Ottawa working a commercial contract, then it would be more difficult for government agents to interfere with them.

The problem with the plan was that it was too successful. Rather than raising a few hundred dollars to support a few dozen truckers, as Jason had expected, the campaign, fueled by an energized Canadian public that rallied around the convoy, ended up raising $150,000 in donations. Nervous about the amount of money pouring in from across the country and realizing the government was about to begin a crackdown, Jason went to the bank to withdraw $100,000 of the funds in the form of forty $2,500 bank drafts, which he could then distribute directly to the truckers.

You've probably guessed by now exactly how that bank transaction unfolded. Rather than hand him the bank drafts, the bank instead informed Jason that his account had just been seized and they couldn't allow him to access any of the funds.

As he discussed with Dan Dicks in the immediate aftermath of that incident (and as I showed in my Give Send Gone podcast on the Canadian account freezing fiasco), this was particularly devastating because, not having a corporate account, everything—Shawn's personal expenses, the Druthers expenses, the cost of the new house that he had just rented to work on Druthers with his team, and the donations for the truckers—were all suddenly inaccessible.

So, what happened to Shawn, anyway? And what about the other people who had their accounts frozen?

Well, just ask The New York Times. Or better yet, DON'T ask The New York Times.

You see, on February 22, 2022, they published a Canadian government press release masquerading as a news article under the headline "Canada Ends Its Freeze on Hundreds of Accounts Tied to Protests." In it, establishment stenographer Ian Austen "reports" that "Isabelle Jacques, an assistant deputy minister in Canada’s department of finance, told a House of Commons committee that the banks had begun unlocking accounts on Monday and that no more finances would be locked up."

Of course, that's not what Jacques actually said. As Austen dutifully notes in the very next paragraph, her specific words were, "[t]he vast majority of assets are in the process of being unfrozen."

The "vast majority" of assets does not mean all assets, now does it? Just ask Shawn Jason. As he explained in a November 2022 update video, his bank (BMO) still has the $150,000 that was donated to the truckers. He cannot access that money to either give it back to the donors or to pass it on to the truckers to whom those funds were promised.

So here's the real question: has all of this government-induced, bankster-enabled financial harassment stopped Shawn from continuing his work? Of course it hasn't.

In fact, Druthers is going stronger than ever, with 250,000 copies of each issue being delivered each month and the next issue due out shortly. Strangely, though, the CBC doesn't seem too keen on highlighting this Canadian success story.

CSABA VIZI

Like many Canadian truckers, Csaba Vizi's life was devastated by the Canadian governments' COVID mandates. Having lost his job, he was unable to provide for his family. With absolutely nothing left to lose, he headed to Ottawa in late January 2022 with the Freedom Convoy and vowed to stay there as long as was required to attain freedom for himself and for all Canadians.

"I'm going home glorious, like Caesar, or in a body bag," Vizi told one interviewer, vowing that he would be the very last trucker to leave Ottawa.

Then all hell broke loose.

Vizi's website describes the harrowing ordeal that followed when the police began to move in to clear out the truckers.

On February 19, 2022 at 9:30 am, Csaba quietly exited his truck, dropped to his knees and placed his hands behind his head. He was jumped and beaten by a group of officers in unmarked uniforms. This pivotal moment in Canadian history went viral around the world. Along with other truck drivers, Csaba was arrested and taken to a warehouse far from Parliament. One by one, they entered the warehouse to be searched, questioned and booked. Hours later, with his charges in hand, he was released into the bitter cold, it was -35 degree Celsius. He had no idea where he was nor were there any signs of life. Without a cellphone, he could only guess which direction he should walk in. After 1.5 hrs he crossed paths with the first stranger, and he eagerly offered his assistance.

The video of the incident did indeed go viral, causing consternation around the world.

Why did the police begin violently attacking this unarmed, peaceful protester, who was already demonstrably complying with his own arrest?

Remarkably enough, that incident was not the end of the story. When Vizi vowed not to leave Ottawa until freedom had been restored for all Canadians, he wasn't joking. As Druthers discovered when they went to the Canadian capital last month, Csaba is still there, fighting for liberty.

Incredibly, Vizi is still facing charges for his participation in the convoy, including charges of resisting arrest, criminal mischief and failing to obey a court order by committing the grievous sin of honking his horn during the protest. He was offered a plea deal by prosecutors last year—plead guilty to the charges and get off with 30 days in jail—but (as you might have guessed by now) he didn't take it. Instead, he's fighting the charges in an Ottawa courtroom, where a five-day trial is slated to begin this month.

Those who are interested can contribute to Csava's legal defense fund here.

TIM STEPHENS

And while we're on the subject of the Orwellian COVID hellhole formerly known as Canada, how about Tim Stephens?

For those who don't know, Stephens is a pastor at Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary, Alberta. His ordeal began on May 6, 2021, when—as the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) explained at the time—"Associate Chief Justice John Rooke of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench issued what might be the broadest restraining order in common law history."

The injunction upped the ante on Alberta's draconian COVID tyranny, meaning that people gathering at funerals or meeting friends at the park or attending a church service would not only face a $2,000 fine for their "offense," but would be arrested and then imprisoned until brought before a judge. As a legal instrument, it was particularly remarkable because (again per JCCF):

Normally, courts issue injunctions only against specific individuals (or organizations, businesses, governments) to deal with specific and extreme situations. For example, a court may issue a restraining order against a violent domestic partner. [. . . However,] Justice Rooke’s injunction applies to any Albertan who "promotes" an "Illegal Public Gathering" via social media or otherwise, and any Albertan who "incites" others to attend.

So did the boys in blue take advantage of this totalitarian carte blanche to imprison ordinary, peaceful Albertans? You bet they did.

No one who sees the footage of Pastor Stephens being arrested in front of his crying wife and children will soon forget it.

So, what was the actual legal justification for this heart-breaking scene of trauma and abuse by Calgary's finest? Oh, that's right. There was no justification whatsoever for this arrest. They didn't even have the fig leaf of a pretense of an excuse that is usually used to explain away the worst police abuses.

You see, that injunction issued by Justice [sic] Rooke—the one that put a blanket restraining order on any Albertan found to be promoting an "illegal" gathering—was amended by the court just days after it was issued. Instead of an unprecedented, province-wide restraining order against every single Albertan, it would now apply only to the people associated with one specific gathering. Theoretically, this meant it could not be used to arrest people unaffiliated with that event.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that it no longer applied to him (or to almost anyone in Alberta), Stephens was arrested three days after the restraining order was amended. Needless to say, Stephens was on the other side of Alberta from the gathering specifically named in the injunction and had no conceivable link to that event.

Details, shmetails.

What resulted was a months-long legal ordeal for Stephens and his family. Released after spending three days in the Calgary Remand Centre for the horrific crime of conducting a church service, Stephens was then re-arrested the following month for having the temerity to conduct an outdoor church service. This resulted in another 18-day stint in jail, which, outrageously, lasted longer than the public health order that had been used to arrest him.

Let me state that again: by the time he was finally released, the "law" that had been used to arrest Stephens was no longer in effect.

Incredibly, the drama didn't end there. It wasn't until November of 2022, more than one year after his initial arrest, that Stephens was finally acquitted. As his legal counsel noted after the acquittal:

Pastor Stephens was illegally arrested and imprisoned for having allegedly violated the Public Health Orders, which have since been shown to be ineffective and harmful. This decision sets the record straight about the justifiability of his actions and about the importance of respecting Charter rights and freedoms.

NYC TEACHERS

As you may or may not recall, the New York City health commissioner issued an order in August of 2021 mandating that all city employees provide proof of COVID vaccination by September 27 of that year. You might also recall that a number of those employees (including a fair few public school teachers) said not just "no" but "hell, no!" to that order.

The city's public school teachers took their case to the courts but found no justice there. They took the issue to their union but found no justice there. And eventually, after exhausting all other options, upwards of 2,000 Department of Education personnel were axed over the mandates.

To add insult to injury, earlier this year it emerged that the fingerprints of teachers who refused the jab were sent to the FBI and "problem codes" were placed on their employee files, making it more difficult for them to find employment elsewhere.

So, there you go. Some crazy wackadoodles tried to stand up for their bodily autonomy but were beaten down and humiliated by the state. And that is where the COVID dictators and their loyal lapdogs in the mainstream media would like you to believe the story ended. But, unfortunately for the tyrants, the story doesn't end there.

You see, earlier this year, Children's Health Defense helped some of those terminated city employees file a lawsuit in the New York courts protesting the city's actions. And guess what? They won the case.

That's right, in a headline you won't be seeing trumpeted in the controlled corporate media, the New York Supreme Court has reinstated ten of those fired teachers with backpay, arguing that the city's denial of their vaccine exemption requests was "arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable."

And this is just the start. Noting that the "court's ruling on class certification still left the door open to future relief for thousands of teachers," Sujata Gibson, attorney for the plaintiffs, called the ruling "a precedent-setting victory, and a watershed moment in the teachers' fight."

Weird that you haven't seen that story blasted on the front page of The New York Times, though, isn't it?

CONCLUSION

I could go on, but I trust you get the point.

Just in case you don't get the point, here it is: The Big Lie that the establishment loves to push is that they are all-powerful and that their dictates are law. Those who resist will be hunted down, arrested in the most humiliating fashion and, when the mood strikes, beaten and kicked for good measure. And there is nothing you can do about it, citizen!

But this is a lie. Time and time again, we find that the phoney, trumped-up charges that these brave COVID resisters were slapped with didn't hold up in court. Even the often-wrong justices of the usually corrupt court system have to concede that presumed "emergencies" do not, in fact, grant politicians and their appointees the right to impose whatever arbitrary mandates and pass whatever irrational edicts they want.

Now, it is certainly the case that, as the old saying has it, "justice delayed is justice denied." It is also true that politicians and their lapdog enforcers know that "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride" and that merely putting activists and protesters like Buhler and Vizi and Stephens and others through the legal process is itself a form of punishment that can have profound impacts on the mental health and the family life of any would-be resisters, regardless of the outcome.

But it is also true that, time and again, these resisters say they have no regrets about their decision to stand up to tyranny and would do it again if they were forced to.

Perhaps the real meaning of these cases, then, is what we make of them.

Will these examples of bravery and self-sacrifice in the face of dire consequences dissuade us from standing up ourselves? Will these traumatic scenes have the effect, intended by the establishment media, of keeping us cowed and afraid?

Or will they be the examples of resilience that we turn to as sources of strength during those times when our rights are being violated by the state? Will we use our knowledge of these stories and their little-known denouements as inspiration when the time comes for us to take a stand against tyranny?

The choice is ours to make. Let's hope we choose wisely.