Anarchy from Above, Part III

Playing God

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To make the most of Part III, which before arriving at the promised practical advice traverses a good deal of territory, including the ‘God’ question, it is helpful to review Part I and Part II.

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What we must do now is to stop the other people from doing what they are doing now. The initiative is with the enemy. It is he who is already doing things, and will have done them long before we can begin to do anything, since he has the money, the machinery, the rather mechanical majority, and other things which we have first to gain and then to use. He has nearly completed a monopolist conquest, but not quite; and he can still be hampered and halted. — GKC

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On 18 February 2022, truly a sad day for Canada, baton-wielding police from multiple jurisdictions, by order of the petty tyrant Trudeau, marched out, masked and badge-less, to arrest leaders and disperse followers of the peaceful, flag-waving, prayer-saying, anthem-singing protest that had gathered round the Freedom Convoy, while behind the scenes steps were being taken to seize or freeze their assets. All without justification under the law, and without prior scrutiny of either parliament or court.

It was not just the fact, but the form of the fact, that Chesterton predicted with uncanny accuracy. In Part I, we pondered the sometimes lonely and desperate defence of democracy that had become necessary. In Part II we learned of the health tyranny that he foresaw even before the First World War, a tyranny already visible in outline in the Feeble-Minded Control Bill of 1912. Beneath it, as a foundation, lay the principles of the eugenists, the principles adopted during the Second War by the builders of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the principles still in play in the war that is being conducted against us now, though it has not yet come to that. We do not have bombs dropping on our heads; that is a different kind of anarchy from above than we have been experiencing. But as in the Ukraine at the moment—perhaps in preparation for things to happen shortly in various places around the globe—we have bombs being dropped inside our heads. The devastation caused by the latter, in the final analysis, is far greater than that caused by the former; or will be, if we do not find a way to stop it.

In both places it seems to have something to do with “Nazis.” Here in Canada the Rt Hon. Justin Trudeau was confronted in the House by a Jewish MP who objected to being told that she was standing with Nazis in calling, as the convoy had called, for an end to federal mandates. She asked for an apology, as did her colleagues, but did not receive one. No surprise there, for petty tyrants do not apologize; not for themselves, at any rate, though perchance for others? But no one seemed to grasp the moment of truth in what Trudeau (who is neither right nor honourable but everything we were warned about before he came to power) was saying. Some got as far as recognizing that Melissa Lantsman wasn't standing with Nazis but standing before Nazis—before people who claim to be attacking Nazis while themselves effecting a Nazi-like attack. Few, however, got as far as recognizing the basic tactic Trudeau was deploying, the same that Mark Carney had deployed when writing in The Globe against the convoy's “sedition,” so as to prepare the public for the actions the tyrant was about to take with his baton-wielding policemen and proletariat-trampling horsemen.

The tactic is a simple one. Take the awful truth about yourself and project it upon your enemy in a pre-emptive strike. “Follow the money,” said Carney, to identify your opponents, even the hidden ones; then choke it off and punish them. And no sooner was this order issued than obeyed. A hacker did the dirty work. A civil servant did the civil lawsuit work. The press did the shaming work. The tyrant saw to the paperwork. The banks began, as one foreign observer put it to me, the practical work of financially de-personing these opponents. And the police got out their batons. 

Much or all of this was already in preparation, of course. The tactic had been used with great success from the very beginning by those who engineered the whole covid conflagration. Project onto your opponent what is true of yourself. Tell the world that your opponent cares only about himself; that he is a grave threat to your health and welfare; that he is a threat to public order; that he is violent and prepared to stop at nothing; that he and his “culture of fear” (a label shamelessly expropriated by the masters of fear-mongering) must be eliminated for the sake of the common good. And teach all this to the public influencers: to the media, to the religious leaders, to the academics, to public health authorities, to the police. Teach it even to the Vatican, as Carney and colleagues have been doing, not without effect.

There were people assigned to each of these tasks. The media was easy, since much of it had been bought up in advance by Gates and Soros and Zuckerberg, or was being funded by government grants that can be traced back to similar sources. The religious leaders were mostly easy as well. In America and elsewhere, they fell hard when courted by the World Economic Forum. Of the academics, it can only be said that they were sheep for the shearing or, where necessary, the slaughtering. The greatest failure and betrayal, however—next to that of the religious leaders, who ought to have known better, and that of the scientists, who did know better—was in the realm of public health. For what could ruthless politicians have done, or the feckless have failed to do, if physicians had stood as one against the the malpractice that was being urged on them? But vocal dissenters were few and punished mercilessly by apparatchiks who had sold their leaden souls to lighten the load as they scurried up the scaffolding of our shrouded society.

First, do no harm? What is harm but questioning the narrative? Never, never question the narrative, no matter who or what else has been harmed or is going to be harmed! Protect the hospitals. Protect the health service. Do as you're told, or else! We can't let the whole system collapse.­ 

We can't? Really? We've spent money we don't have in amounts that threaten its complete collapse. We've decimated routine patient care and abandoned preventative medicine. We were warned from the outset that we were sowing the wind with these novel gene therapies and must reap the whirlwind; that chronic disease and premature death will overwhelm our precious system like a typhoon. Pleas were made to halt the rollout as the early waves of adverse reactions and deaths poured in. But those pleas—countermanded, as Maajid Nawaz recently explained to Joe Rogan, by “military grade” psy-ops—fell on deaf ears. For bigger things were brewing, things known only to those who boast that they are “changing capitalism for good” (double entendre intended); that is, to Chesterton's industrialists and their State collaborators.

We will have to wait and see just how mighty this gathering storm will be, but the bad weather signals are quite dire, even as regards the health system. Pathologists and embalmers are noticing them; insurance companies are noticing them; nurses and doctors are noticing them. They are seldom called by their proper name, vaccine injury. Even specialists tend to speak rather of the strange surge of idiopathic difficulties being experienced by formerly healthy people now suffering various forms of autoimmune disease. “Idiopathic” is a rather ironic euphemism, is it not? For the rising tide of these idiopathic cases—of patients with disease appearing spontaneously from an unknown cause—cannot itself be put down as an idiopathic phenomenon. We were told that this would happen and we know why it is happening. We just don't know exactly how, or what to do about it.   

Not much, apparently, if that depends on parliamentary democracy. The feeble-minded men and women of Trudeaupia who voted on 21 February for its demise had already pumped it full of Remdesivir until its vital organs failed; so they pulled the plug on its respirator and sent it off to the morgue, perhaps with some secret hope that the courts will order it resurrected. It is doubtful courts will exercise that power, however, even if they have it; for many of them are highly ideopathic. To judge from recent remarks by Beverley MacLachlan, it's much more likely they will remand the brave men and women whom Carney characterizes as seditious to prison, or at least to penury, just as they do in Hong Kong where the former chief justice persists in her new gig.

MacLachlan, also writing in The Globe, renewed the attack on the Freedom Convoy the next day:

The freedoms guaranteed by the Charter stop where they harm others. With freedom comes responsibility... Freedom, misconstrued as license to do and say whatever one wants, is dangerous. True freedom—freedom subject to reasonable limits that allow us to live together—is essential to a peaceful and prosperous future for us all. Let’s not allow the freedoms we cherish to become ugly freedoms.

Here again we see the same tactic. What are the protesters themselves saying? You are harming us. Please stop it. You have seized both our freedom and our responsibility by arrogating to yourselves judgments and choices that belong to us, not to you. But in MacLachlan's piece, the scene is reversed. It's the protesters who are infringing freedoms and doing harm. How they are doing harm she doesn't attempt to say. Nor does she mention any of the harms alleged by the protesters, or attempt to refute them. The Globe, to be sure, is a limited venue, but working in Hong Kong seems to have lowered her standard of judgment. Even the tone has changed from earlier days, as of course has mine; for these are not earlier days, but later.

A Chesterton Moment

Thankfully, on 24 February, Senator Don Plett did something to stop the other people from doing what they have been doing. In a very fine speech of nearly ninety minutes, he systematically dismantled Trudeau's seizure of dictatorial powers and undressed the petty tyrant before the eyes and ears of the nation. While he was yet speaking, the Emergencies Act was folded up and put away for a more opportune time. Thus, at the bleakest moment in modern Canadian political history, Plett not only followed Chesterton's advice but demonstrated what good advice it is.

More such demonstration will be needed. For “public health” was not, as in the provinces or south of the border, the feds' proffered reason for seizure of dictatorial powers. It was a putative threat to law and order on which they moved to destroy law and order. This further exposes the fact that what we have been calling the health tyranny is all tyranny and no health. Some are even speculating that the reason for backing down on the Emergencies Act was that its use to seize bank accounts had prematurely tipped Trudeau's hand; or rather, the hand of those who intend to control all banking and, through “secure” banking, make all banking insecure. Others are wondering about those war-gamed cyber-attacks, which will demonstrate the need for such security. Most have turned their attention to the Ukraine and to Taiwan.

Nawaz can help us put this game of Russian roulette in perspective. The internet, he says, has destabilized money and power by undermining control of information—hence also of the cultural and political narrative—much the way the printing press did in the sixteenth century. There was, in consequence, a bloody struggle for power in the seventeenth century and there is a bloody struggle for power again now. This time round it is a matter of gaining control of the money supply and of the means of production and distribution, especially of food and energy, along with information and narrative control. Nawaz sees what I argued last summer; viz., that covid is for the vaccines, and the vaccines are for the passports, and the passports are for control. Their purpose is to keep track, not of diseases, but of dissenters—indeed, to keep track of people and purchases everywhere. The point of all those internationally coordinated memes and coercive measures is not defeat of a virus, but defeat of what Nawaz calls the tendency to decentralize; otherwise put, defeat of the distributism to which the internet lends itself and of the populism that desires it.

Centralization versus decentralization, that is the contest on which Nawaz believes we must keep our eye. The former (not counting Russia, though Russia must be counted) has two great proponents, he says: the World Economic Forum and the Communist Party of China, which he thinks the more formidable. And these are cooperating, where they are not competing, in subverting the spirit of subsidiarity. In their war on decentralization, they have already achieved stunning success through elite capture and through their agents embedded in high places, including the cabinets of countries such as Canada; thus also through regulatory capture, at both the national and the international level. The goal that the SARS CoV-2 crisis has been made to serve is creation of a Checkpoint Charlie society over which global powers can reign supreme from their silicon towers.

We may observe parenthetically that there is no shortage of prima facie evidence for this claim. Why, even as covid fades and some restrictions are dropped for the moment, is the big sell for compliance-tracking apps being ramped up? Because the powers-that-be, before covid began, had already decided to embrace digital ID as the best means of dealing with data control, money control, regulatory control, and political control. In 2018, while the European Union was laying out its pre-covid plan for vaccine passports, the Canadian Bankers Association was telling us how they were going to handle our transactions—how indeed they were now going to handle us. “Identity is the representation of who you are,” they inform us in their supremacist white paper, hence something more than mere authentication.

Authentication is designed to answer the question “Is that you?” Identification, by contrast, is more complex. Identification is intended to answer the question “Who are you?” Digital ID is the challenge of answering “Who are you? with a high degree of certainty, without resorting to face-to-face interaction and the exchange of physical documents.

It doesn't take much imagination to see how the two plans are linked, or how convenient covid was in furthering them. That SARS CoV-2 was manufactured in a lab, with Western support and even (some say) global patents, suggests that it may have been a trifle too convenient. Be that as it may, many lives were treated as inconvenient in the rush to implement these plans.

Nawaz concludes that we have arrived at a crossroads; that a revolution is under way that requires a counter-revolution. We might rather say that anarchy has begun, imposed from above without any intention of stopping or any ability to stop, and that it requires to be met with a revolution—with a bottom-up act of reordering that makes it possible to stop. For Nawaz does not take sufficient account of the fact that the vision of the centralizers is anarchic; that the centralizers have no centre, though they do have a religion of sorts.

Anarchic Religion

Robert Kennedy Jr's otherwise thorough and thoroughly devastating exposé, The Real Anthony Fauci, in the section towards the end called “Laying Pipe for Totalitarianism,” ought to have included a few pages on the religious territory through which that pipeline passes. Were Kennedy to entertain that addition, Francis Collins, the genome giant, NIH director, and 2020 Templeton Prize winner, would have to appear as foreman. In the picture below, he appears alongside an old and dear friend of mine, N. T. Wright, sometime Prince Bishop of Durham, just one of many who were being were led down the garden path by a man who, besides knowing how to unpick strands of DNA with the tools of modern science, also knew how to “pluck silver strands of soul” with the language of God (to purloin a line from Cockburn and a book-title from Collins). Recombinant codes, the genetic and the biblical, somehow produced a deceptively simple message that Collins never missed an opportunity to communicate or to encourage others to communicate: Follow the Science, apply the protocols, take the vaccines; enjoy the fruit of what is at once both the tree of knowledge and the tree of life itself.

Collins' shenanigans with Fauci to maintain control of the covid narrative, especially as “bioweapon” rumours began to circulate, were not yet known when he began seconding Christian leaders to carry this message to the masses, but have since been documented through FOIA disclosures and through the failure of all the false promises that pair peddled. Most of the falsehoods du jour were insinuated by Collins into the BioLogos podcast with Wright, as into many similar interviews he conducted. Listening to their conversation at this distance highlights the facility with which Collins made plausible the implausible, while Wright focused on the wrong problem, the problem his friend wanted him to focus on: faith versus science, instead of science versus science. Wright was right that faith and reason are not in the least opposed; wrong if he fancied that scientists were not opposed. For the science on offer had been tailored to an agenda that had nothing to do with science.

As I see it, Wright himself was in the wrong context. While he was busy correcting popular responses to the crisis among evangelicals he knew, bringing to bear his own pastoral wisdom, something far more sinister was taking shape—something in which the evangelical with whom he was now virtually conversing, and with whom he proceeded to sing a virtual duet, was heavily involved. I quite like the song they sang, mind you, both the Beatles' tune, Yesterday, and the Wright/Collins cover, Genesis, with its allusion to the yesterday of Eden. But what exactly was this virtual cover covering?

For Wright, nothing. What I go on to say in this essay is not directed at him, or at anyone with whom I differ merely on questions of fact or points of prudence. For Collins, on the other hand—who launched BioLogos in 2009, the year of the H1N1 attempt at a global pandemic and the year he became the sixteenth director of the NIH—a great deal. We know that Collins knew to be true, or very likely to be true, much of what he denied was true; just as he knew to be false things he said were true. We know that he was prepared to sacrifice truth to progress, or to what Fauci and others over whom he now had oversight regarded as progress. We can only surmise that he knew a good deal of what they were up to, perhaps even something of the history of unspeakably barbaric experiments under Fauci at NIAID, which are chronicled in Kennedy's stomach-turning seventh chapter.

Why were so few American Christians asking penetrating questions? Why do they not ask them now, in the wake of Kennedy's book? Collins' support for fetal experimentation and for the LGBTQ∞ agenda does give some fellow evangelicals pause—so much pause that they stop short of hard questions about his veracity. As Megan Basham observes, they never really got started with that. From Rick Warren to Ed Stetzer to Tim Keller they lapped up the Collins kool-aid and began dispensing it to their associations and congregations. Had they bothered to enquire, they might have discovered quite quickly that their soi-disant “non-political, non-partisan” scientist was a key agent of anarchy from above, which sought to penetrate the religious realm and to disrupt it, as Fauci would say, in a highly iterative way. We have already noted similar undertakings in the Catholic world, such as those who have lobbied Pope Francis proudly proclaim. These have been equally successful, or even more so. Catholics are no slouches when it comes to complicity. We must dig deeper, however, into the religious aspirations of certain elements in the capacious WEF fold, which go beyond any of this.

The Question of God

Wright's magnum opus is the multi-volume Christian Origins and the Question of God, to which there is simply no equal. If you are interested in the Christian Revolution, and wish to understand its emergence in the world of the first century, you can't do better than to consult it. But it is the “God” question in the twenty-first century that matters here. While the Christian answer remains the same, there have been permutations in the pagan answer. One of the World Economic Forum's favourite philosophers, Yuval Harari, has this to say about God, and about the correlative question of man:

We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls; we are now hackable animals... And if indeed we succeed at hacking and engineering life, this will be, not just the greatest revolution in the history of humanity—this will be the greatest revolution in biology since the very beginning of life, four billion years ago. For four billion years ... all of life was subject to the laws of natural selection and of organic biochemistry. But this is now about to change. Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some “god” above the clouds, but our intelligent design, the intelligent design of our clouds: the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud, these are the new driving forces of evolution.

In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton's most definitive answer to H. G. Wells, we are reminded that “Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavoured to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men's eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos.” Such a cosmos cannot hope to sustain itself, of course, since it rests on chaos and must ultimately return to chaos. The ancient world was collapsing in exhaustion by the time Christ appeared. A “sense of impotence and despair” prevailed, as men watched even “the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp” (1, VIII). But with the appearance of the babe born in a cave "beneath the floor of the world," a new and more permanent foundation was laid by God. On this foundation civilization could be built back better, as we now say in semi-conscious simulation; indeed, on this cornerstone the cosmos itself could be regenerated. "For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God" (Rom. 8:20f.).

For Harari, however, who in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow offers a Wellsian rejoinder, the new cornerstone is laid, not by the coming of the Christ, but by the coming of the supercomputer. Not the songs of the redeemed, but the dancing datapoints of the redeemers, will shape the new reality. If Collins dangles before us those glittering strands of DNA and whispers something about a “potential synthesis of scientific and spiritual worldviews,” Harari looks, not downward to DNA, but upward to his data-luminous Shekinah. In Harari one detects both the enormous hubris of modern man and his equally enormous despair. Science, he suggests in a great and desperate leap of faith, is on the verge of enabling life “to break out into the inorganic realm,” to escape this miserable realm of suffering and death by entering “the era of inorganic life.” That will change everything, including you and me and the entire race to which we belong. Here it is not the origins of Christianity and the question of "god," but the end of Christianity and the beginning of god.

The same hubris and despair, the same hope in a breakout, is something the popular Jesuit theologian, transhumanist, and totalitarian, Teilhard de Chardin, was already talking about in the 1960s and praying about in his famous Mass on the World. At once intoxicated by technological prowess and weary of the world's warring ways, Teilhard looked beyond it all in an inflated hope that, at bottom, was nothing but despair:

As the years go by, Lord, I come to see more and more clearly, in myself and in those around me, that the great secret preoccupation of modern man is much less to battle for possession of the world than to find a means of escaping from it.  The anguish of feeling that one is not merely spatially but ontologically imprisoned in the cosmic bubble; the anxious search for an issue to, or more exactly a focal point for, the evolutionary process; these are the price we must pay for the growth of planetary consciousness; these are the dimly-recognized burdens which weigh down the souls of christian and gentile alike in the world of today.

Such is the vision of the redeemers. Their work is a divine work. Or rather it is a diabolical work—the work of those who are still trying, whether like the tyrants of old or like the loftier men of gnosis with whom Christianity did battle at its origins, to be as gods in their own way and in their own time, at the expense of their own humanity. Also, unfortunately, of ours. For, unlike the gnostics, they mean as far as possible to carry us with them, ready or not. Harari, who has quite the knack of warning us that this ambition is problematic while nonetheless promoting it as inevitable, insists that the old concept of man has been jettisoned along with the old concept of god. “The whole idea that humans have this 'soul' or 'spirit', and that they have free will,” he opines, “that's over.”

Non Deus homo, sed Homo deus

In other words, the curtain is dropping on those who are still singing out the biblical story. What will appear when the stage has been reset and the curtain goes back up? Technocracy is still the best word for it, in my opinion, and technocracy is now, or so Harari thinks: “People will look back in a hundred years and identify the coronavirus epidemic as the moment a new regime of surveillance took over; especially surveillance under the skin, which I think is maybe the most important development of the twenty-first century”—a development enabling those who collect and master the data “to understand human beings better than they understand themselves.”

This better understanding means better manipulation and control. As WEF-Führer Schwab also admits, it means (I take this from the same video collage, asking the viewer to remember that a collage lacks context) the power to change human identity, both collectively and individually. It is a sacramental power, capable of operating under the skin. It is intended ultimately to bestow a new character, albeit in a new liturgy that will take some time to perfect. To effect this in the best way—massaging the ethical and legal problems that are sure to arise and managing the optics—is the challenge of house philosophers and ideologues, and the work of some of the public-private partnerships that the World Economic Forum seeks to broker and on which, like GAVI, it spends vast sums of money.

That optics is an issue, none will deny. Whether there actually are any ethical problems is more difficult to say. For humans without souls are not really ethical creatures, are they? They seem to divide quite naturally into three categories, reminiscent of those of the gnostics, though we must update the language. There are the Übermenschen; there are the men without chests; and there are the servile, indeed, the slavish. The first instill fear; the second follow fearfully; the third will not follow, but must be herded and occasionally culled. The only “ethics” that matter, then, concern purely pragmatic questions: how to keep the first from falling out among themselves; how to keep the second from developing chests; and how to quell the seditions of the third.

In Homo Deus Harari probes what Schwab prefers to eschew; viz., the religious features of the technocrats’ brave new world, in which and from which the breakout is to occur. On Harari's view, we have already largely fulfilled Mill's mundane vision and are pressing on towards the realization of something very much grander. Calum Chase summarizes for us:

Harari predicts the dissolution of not only humanism, but of the whole notion of individual human beings. “The new technologies of the twenty-first century may thus reverse the humanist revolution, stripping humans of their authority, and empowering non-human algorithms instead … Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and finally into sovereigns.” As a consequence, “humans will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories their narrating self invents. Instead, they will be integral parts of a huge global network.” This seems to be an extreme version of an idea called algocracy, in which humans are governed by algorithms. 

New religions are needed here, techno-religions, and the algocracy will generate them. Techno-humanism will compete with Dataism, suggests Harari, but the latter will get the best of the former. Like Dadaism in art, Dataism will attack the preceding vision of man and overthrow it. “We often imagine that democracy and the free market won because they were ‘good’. In truth, they won because they improved the global data-processing system.” But they were merely instruments, as humans themselves are now instruments. Humans are but “tools for creating the Internet-of-All-Things, which may eventually spread out from planet Earth to cover the whole galaxy and even the whole universe. This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.”

Very few of those who have thought about Harari's transhumanist views—or those of Jeremy Farrar, say, whom Whitney Webb has dubbed Pandemic Narrative Manager—suppose that they will attain a sustainable orbit. But the idea of tinkering with hackable animals is already in orbit. It is what we are doing. It is one crucial thing the covid narrative is covering. The anarchy from above, though in Britain not presently dedicated enough to satisfy Farrar, whose Wellcome Trust crew apparently wants to hack babies from birth, is a cover for eugenics and other evils, other very great evils. “It should be clear,” concludes Webb,

how sinister it is that an organization that brings together the worst “mad scientist” impulses of both the NGO and military-research worlds is openly planning to conduct such experiments on the brains of babies and toddlers, viewing them as datasets and their brains as something to be “pruned” by machine “intelligence.” Allowing such a program to advance unimpeded without pushback from the public would mean permitting a dangerous agenda targeting society’s youngest and most vulnerable members to potentially advance to a point where it is difficult to stop.

The new religions are capable of this, as were some of the old ones treated in The Everlasting Man. The new are not afraid to repackage elements of the old. That is just what Teilhard himself did in the sphere of Catholicism and what his acolytes continue to do. Actually, any old elements will do in a pinch, even a few scraps of bone, as Chesterton observed. In 1912, while he himself was writing “On Industrialism,” Teilhard was participating in the Piltdown hoax. And to what Chesterton had already begun to foresee—the vast Global Health hoax to which we are today subject—Teilhard would contribute some of the seminal ideas. It is just such ideas that are being passed down the pipeline to religious communities, so as to neutralize their credal opposition to the proposed history of tomorrow.

Science synthesized with religion, “the Science” as religion, is tyrannical Science. Dale Ahlquist reminds us of the passage in Eugenics (1, VIII) that points out that it is not the churches subjecting us to “that special tyranny which consists in using the government.” On the contrary, says Chesterton, “the thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science.”

The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen – that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics. Vaccination, in its hundred years of experiment, has been disputed almost as much as baptism in its approximate two thousand. But it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism.

Unfortunately, however, we must reply that materialism, or occasionally even something like Harari's immaterialism, has established itself in the churches, which is why they are cooperating with the governments through which the Science is working its all-but-unstoppable agenda. And this above all must be stopped. There is no hope that anarchy from above will be overcome in the world at large if it is not overcome first in the Church. 

What then shall we do?

Chesterton speaks for all those who believe in liberty because they believe that the Creator endowed man with freedom and hence with responsibility. “We say, not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth” (Everlasting Man 2, V, emphasis added). In fact, they say now that they will not allow us to be so free. They will not even allow us to be free enough to exercise our constitutional rights and liberties. “Right has a right to be right, and therefore a right to be there,” insists Chesterton. But not in Ottawa, apparently; not in the false Canada of Justin Trudeau. In my tribute to the truckers I said, “You are Canada.” But parts of this Canada, the true north strong and free, are now in jail. Those running the Canada that crushes democracy and constructs tyranny through treason and performs medical experiments even on unsuspecting children have put them there. And with great shame I confess that many Christians, many no doubt very fine Christians who pretend to believe in freedom, have stood watch over the cloaks as they did so.  

Was it not from a kind of excess of Christian freedom that constitutional democracy was born? Is it not from the excess of this freedom that people, whether Christian or no, strive to maintain freedom? And if they strive even unto penury or prison, perchance to martyrdom, is it not because of this same excess? Yet many are those who watch passively the betrayal of democracy and the advent of tyranny, judging it too inconvenient or too risky to resist. Thus do they display the fact that they are already in bondage to that which renders it inconvenient or risky—that they are materialists or immaterialists or anything but Christians. But such as are free love freedom, and in freedom defend freedom, even at great cost. The question before us, then, is not whether to defend it, but how.

First, we must trust in God rather than man.  To man belongs only a qualified trust at the best of times. Where man has ceased acknowledging God, with his heart as well as his lips, man is unworthy of trust. The much-lamented erosion of institutional trust, from which few sectors are exempt, will not easily be fixed without repentance before both God and man. For we have been learning, learning indeed all too well, that we cannot trust what human authorities keep telling us to trust, beginning with the absurdly unscientific construct called "the Science." We have been learning that we cannot trust the mainstream media. We have been learning that we cannot trust—not as we thought we could trust—our doctors or the police or those responsible to maintain our rights. We have been learning, alas, that we cannot trust the pastors and shepherds. Great has been the betrayal in the churches, as well as of the churches! Great also in families, as Jesus predicted—brother will betray brother, he said, and parents children—where hypnotic fear has triumphed over fraternal love. But God betrays no one, for he cannot betray himself. So do not fear what others fear. Fear only God.

Second, we must not treat lawless law as if it were lawful law. Recognition that lockdowns and coercive mandates are fundamentally wrong is what led to the protests. Claims to emergency powers—eviscerated by Senator Plett at the federal level but equally perverse at the provincial—cannot justify what is intrinsically wrong. Nor can dropping those powers erase the lawless precedent. The rule of law rests upon the supremacy of God, who ultimately orders and governs all things, as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms acknowledges. No positive law that violates natural or divine law should be obeyed, as Leo XIII reminded us in Libertas. No law that requires us to act against conscience should be obeyed, as Martin Luther King Jr reiterated for us from his cell in that Birmingham jail. Anyone who does obey is secretly or openly attacking law, not upholding or defending it. Where are the champions of natural law, of law that is not merely arbitrary, in our law schools and among our benchers?  Where are the judges who do not merely rubber-stamp what fellow “progressives” in provincial or federal cabinets decree? If we do not wish, as some of them wish, to progress so far and so fast that there is no such thing as Canadian-made law at all, we'd best find some. But we won't, if we continue to show the respect proper to law to that which is improper law.

Third, we must not give to the usurpers what they seek. And we now have a pretty good idea what they seek; for the truckers, whose protest has spread to America and around the world, together with the hundreds of thousands of others who were already protesting, have forced them to show their hand. They seek, not our health, but our subservience. They seek to impose on us their surveillance program. They seek, through the imposition of digital identities, to create the conditions for complete oversight of individuals and society. They seek the end of ethnic and national loyalties. (Hence the “white supremacist” epithet; for anti-racism is not merely the scoundrel's last refuge, as patriotism used to be, but cover for a direct assault on the latter, for an attack on tribal loyalty as such.) They seek the consolidation of all political powers, such that legislative and executive and juridical functions are one, and of all financial powers, such that the political and the financial are one. They seek, as Nawaz says, centralization. O yes, and management of the human genome; the power to change not only how humans live but what humans are. They seek to be gods.

Denying them what they seek means, at a minimum, an overhaul of emergency power provisions, such that they cannot be seized so readily or held for so long. Lockdowns and coercive mandates must be forbidden. Genetic modification programs must be halted and non-consensual experimentation on human subjects punished. A Royal Commission must be established to determine appropriate forms of accountability for the crimes and failures, not only of the last two years, but of the preceding decades of preparation, especially where those who have betrayed public trust are concerned. Parliamentary reform must be undertaken, including reforms that make impossible such obvious conflicts of interest as appear at present through elite and regulatory capture. (Many have noted, for example, that WEF trustee Chrystia Freeland, who wrote a book about the rise of plutocrats and the fall of everyone else, now sits and rises on both sides of the public-private partnership that is Trudeau's cabinet.) Quite crucially, plans for a cashless society and for a crypto-currency monopoly must be scrapped. Digital ID as a condition for participation in any part of public life must be made illegal. Identity is indeed "foundational for political, economic, and social opportunity," as the CBA says; which is precisely why neither identity nor proof of identity can be commodified by industry or commandeered by government without destroying both the opportunities in question and the identity itself. The plan developed by the World Economic Forum and promoted by the bankers must be stopped in its tracks. This is one of the most urgent tasks we face. Mr Hopkins is right. Here “there are only two sides … fascism or freedom.”

Fourth, then, we must redouble our efforts to explain what freedom is, and what responsibility. We must show that the two are mutually dependent, and how both depend, in the first place and the last, on being free for God and accountable to God. This cannot be left to those who are not competent to do it, not even former chief justices. And it must be done despite the objections of the data-worshipers, who desire to eliminate those who will not confess Dataist dogma, to suppress those who stubbornly persist in "resorting to face-to-face interaction" as a basis for free judgment.  It must be done despite the outcry of militant secularists, who mistake autonomy for pure subjectivity or heteronomy for merely arbitrary order. It is no accident that their mistakes tend to compound, yielding coercive diktats suspended over an abyss of prejudice—the very thing the protesters are protesting.

Fifth, we must regenerate, with God's help, that innovative distributism in which Chesterton expressed faith, which is the only hope for democracy's revival. This is an economic as well as a political task, a cultural as well as a religious task. Politically, we must insist on better regional representation, preventing the urban centres from dominating and dismissing the rural. Economically, we help one another to eat and so to work (Gen. 2), to work and so to eat (Gen. 3), resolutely rejecting the introduction of a universal basic income, that prelude to full-blown socialism which our Senate is currently debating with an eye on Freeland (who else?) as commissar. Culturally and religiously, we must stand together, arm in arm, holding the line on the right to integrity of soul and of body, to integrity of the human being as body and soul. We must take care of one another's families and of those in prison. We must ready ourselves for new opportunities, including the opportunity to be generous. Not those opportunities being so generously offered us by the anarchists on high, but those that arise, quite unlooked for, from below. And we must capitalize on our opponents' mistakes, for they do make mistakes, some so large as to appear almost deliberate. We must not assume, however dire present appearances, that "the lady left for dragon's meat" has already been consumed. Malthusian industrialists, meticulously mapping planetary salvation down to the finest reproductive and carbon-footprint details, manipulating models based on assumptions debunked a century ago, are playing God, while playing us for fools. But as David prays, and we should pray with him: “Let the wicked together fall into their own nets” and be “given over to those who shall condemn them,” while the rest of us escape (Psalm 141).

Sixth, we must redouble our efforts to grasp and to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ: of the babe that was born in the cave beneath the floor of the world; of the young man who invited his followers to take up their cross and follow him. He it was who, near the End that proved the new Beginning, warned them of the trials ahead and encouraged them with the famous admonition: “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” He also told them that, though the timeframe was unknown, the nature of the times was known: that progress in evil would accompany progress in good; that false messiahs would arise; that a powerful deluding influence would overwhelm much of the Church, as of the world. These things, which I have tried to explain elsewhere, seem to be unfolding before our eyes. The prototype, of course, unfolded in first-century Jerusalem, as Wright has explained. The antitype will also take place in Jerusalem, whether in our century or some other. Anarchy from above will then be destroyed once and for all by the One who actually sits above, enthroned on the cherubim. Meanwhile, we must confront false gospels with the true, while (as Wright sings) “we long for God's new day."

False gospels have been overcome by the true, as Chesterton cheerfully reminds us, time after time. Yet they were never more widespread than they are now, or backed by greater forces. When our own end comes, the end of the age, we shall have some idea what it looks and feels like, for we already experiencing something like it. But just so, seventh and finally, we must defy every effort to supplant faith with fear or to suppress song and worship, to prevent our meeting together in freedom as free people.

The first wave of the present crisis to crash upon our shores brought exactly that. Waves are still rolling in that pound away at such freedom, not only on Parliament Hill where for a fortnight there was much singing and praying and dancing, but even in the backwaters of Quebec parish life, where there is very little. “Mask. Mumble. Don't sing. Remain seated and don't approach the altar.” To the bishops and pastors who have been cooperating with this, I am tempted to say that Søren Kierkegaard, though he was not cheerful enough in certain respects, was right at least about you. You have not only turned the Church into a creature of the State but into a servant of the Serpent. You “shrewd” creatures—shrewd in all the wrong ways—have “resorted to hypocrisy” and “falsified the definition of being a Christian” (The Instant, no. 5). Sursum corda! It is precisely through song and worship, and through the great Act of Thanksgiving, that faithful souls are lifted up to the Lord and homo gratus appears on the mount of God, with the divine glory illuminating his face. Away with masked and shrouded assemblies! Away with cloud-worship and the virtual, hence virtueless, assembly! Away with your QR-code guards on the doors of the house of God! All this is anarchy from above written with the devil's own finger. Have you forgotten that our Lord saw him fall from heaven like lightning?

The churches must do what is proper to the Church and nothing that is not proper to the Church, no matter what men say. And wherever possible, they must do what they do openly. In the surveillance society there is, after all, no very effective hiding place even for those who wish to hide. Our Lord advised us to hide only at the very end; to seek only then some secret place, some shelter outside the city, while his wrath is poured out on those who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace, or “peace and safety,” when there is neither—poured out on those who, as the same psalm says, “keep company with men who work iniquity” and have not yet learned “that the word of the LORD is true” and his judgment certain.

It is not the mission of the church to hide, though hiding is sometimes necessary, as it was in the days when catacombs crawled with Christians, and is now in lands further along the road than we have yet traveled. No, the mission of the Church is to worship and, just so, to proclaim and to save. But to conduct this mission freely we must travel lightly, showing no regard for this world's disordered idea of “goods,” from which we must become more detached that we might cling to the goods that really are goods. What is needed for this life will be added to those who “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

As for those who wish to be gods without God, or to play God over others—taking charge of their livelihoods and of everything that establishes their identity, from their DNA to the deliberations of their minds and the determinations of their wills—from such will be taken away even what they have, and all that they might have had.  They shall be repaid with interest for their evil deeds. They can bank on that.