Police not taking death threats against COVID Rebel barbershop/film studio very seriously
You may recall our stories regarding the plight of Chrome Artistic Barbering. Back in January, owner Alicia Hirter reimagined her St. Catharines, Ont., barbershop as a film production studio. And so, too, did nearby Evolution Salon & Spa, operated by Dennis and Lisa Cosentino. Thus, the shops now provided auditions as opposed to haircuts. Alicia notes that she originally received the blessing of the city’s bylaw enforcement department to do so (and she has the voicemail to prove it).
In any event, since Chrome is no longer a barbershop (meaning it would have had to remain locked-down back in January and February), this facility is instead offering auditions. And like any good film production studio, a haircut is provided as part of an audition. So, these days at Chrome, it’s: “Lights! Cameras! Scissors!’
And best of all for Alicia, business was booming: Chrome was soon booked for several weeks.
But alas and alack, the various COVID- Karens emerged, hellbent to bring down Alicia, seemingly because Alicia is a super-spreader when it comes to that virus known as… freedom.
So it was that the City of St. Catharines did a complete 180, and said it was no longer bullish about allowing film production studios to operate (unless, of course, those studios are big budget Hollywood studios on location in the Great White North — those are not only allowed, but courted with open arms).
Niagara Region came a-calling, too, and called “Cut” on Alicia’s film production studio. (Sidebar note: the regional bylaw enforcement officer barking orders is Mishelle Brown, who allegedly runs a topless cleaning service. Brown would neither confirm nor deny this allegation, and told us, bizarrely, to reach out to the communications department of Niagara Region. We did so, but no answers were forthcoming.)
Then there’s the local newspaper, the St. Catharines Standard, which defamed Alicia by suggesting she had issued a death threat online to the region’s acting medical officer of health, Dr. Mustafa Hirji. Not only was this allegation completely false, it is Alicia who is receiving death threats and other forms of harassment, both in person and online. But get this: the Niagara Regional Police Service can’t seem to be bothered to lay charges (for reasons that truly evade us).
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Thousands of people the world over have reached out to Alicia, praising her for taking such a brave stand by opening her shop. And we tend to believe the silent majority is indeed in her corner.
But in the department of perverse irony, hair salons in St. Catharines have now been allowed to operate legally. But not Chrome. Alicia is in the bylaw enforcement penalty box, and has to make a case that she should be allowed to reopen. Incredible.
Indeed, we can’t wait for the day when Alicia premieres her biopic chronicling her plight against belligerent bylaw officers, odious online trolls, pathetic police and malicious mainstream media. How about we recycle this title from 1984: The Evil That Men Do.
UPDATE: After publication, Mishelle Brown wrote to Rebel News to say that it is “incorrect” that she owns or runs a topless cleaning company.
Tell Amazon: Stop The Selective “Woke” Book Censorship
Amazon, by far the world’s largest bookseller, has until recently promoted itself as an open marketplace of ideas, with all kinds of transgressive and provocative works for sale, Now you can still order a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but not When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.
On February 21, Amazon suddenly removed any trace of When Harry Became Sally, a book published three years ago by Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ethics and Public Policy Center Ryan T. Anderson. Described as “sensitive” and “fair-minded” by professors at top medical schools, the policy treatise takes a traditional stance on the controversial issue of transgenderism. Amazon did not inform the author or publisher of its decision, and other books by Anderson are still for sale on Amazon as are books by other authors that take a similar stance on transgenderism. Amazon’s actions suggest that it has adopted an ominous new “woke” censorship approach where certain books suddenly become problematic and disappear. Others – like “Mein Kampf” – remain openly for sale, with no discernable universal standard. Amazon needs to hear from consumers like you that such arbitrary yet highly politicized censorship must stop before it goes any further. Sign the petition demanding that Amazon stop the hypocritical censorship and restore Anderson’s book to its virtual shelves!
Come on, Canada. End the hysteria, end the forced masking, end the lockdowns. Act like Florida and now Texas, Mississippi and Utah. Open all businesses & end mandatory masking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0H3WkBCIkE
The Pirates of Penzance was the fifth comic opera to come out of the collaboration of librettist Sir W. S. Gilbert and composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. It premiered in New York City – the only one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas to open first in the United States rather than London – on New Year’s Eve in 1879, a year and a half after their fourth work, the H.M.S. Pinafore, had become a huge hit, both in London and internationally.
The hero of The Pirates of Penzance is the character Frederic, a role performed by a tenor. The opera begins with his having completed his twenty-first year – not his twenty-second birthday, for he was born on February 29th, a distinction, or rather, a “paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox”, that becomes essential to the plot in an amusingly absurd way – and the titular pirates throwing him a party. He has, up to this point, served as their apprentice due to a mistake that his nurse, Ruth, made, when he was a boy (she had heard the word “pilot” as “pirate” in his father’s instructions regarding his apprenticeship). The bass-baritone Pirate King (“it is, it is, a glorious thing to be a pirate king”), congratulates him and tells him that he now ranks as a “full blown member of our band”, producing a cheer from the crew, who are then told “My friends, I thank you all from my heart for your kindly wishes. Would that I can repay them as they deserve.” Asked what he means by that, Frederic explains “Today I am out of my indentures, and today I leave you forever.” Astonished, since Frederic is the best man he has, the Pirate King asks for an explanation. Frederic, with Ruth’s help – for she had also joined the pirate crew – explains about the error, and that while as long as the terms of his indentures lasted it was his duty to serve as part of the pirate crew, once they were over “I shall feel myself bound to devote myself heart and soul to your extermination!”
In the course of explaining all of this, Frederic expresses his opinion of his pirate colleagues in these words “Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable, but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation!”
As tempting as it is to continue this summary until we get to the “doctor of divinity who resides in this vicinity” and Major-General Stanley who, as he likes to introduce himself, is the “very model of a modern Major-General”, I have already arrived at the lines that are the entire point of my having brought all of this up.
I have stated many times in the past that I prefer to call myself a Canadian patriot rather than a Canadian nationalist. There are two ways in which patriotism and nationalism are usually distinguished. The first is a distinction of kind. Patriotism is an affection that people come by naturally as they extend the sentiment that under ordinary circumstances they acquire for the home and neighbourhood they grew up in to include their entire country. Nationalism is an ideology which people obtain through indoctrination. The second is a distinction of object. The object of nationalism is a people, the object of patriotism is a country. I have talked about the first distinction in the past, it is the second which is relevant in this essay. I love my country, the Dominion of Canada, and its history, institutions and traditions. When it comes to my countrymen, however, Canadians, and to be clear, I mean only those who are living at the present moment and not past generations, I often find myself sharing Frederic’s sentiments which were again:
Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable, but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation!
The more my fellow Canadians show a lack of appreciation for and indifference towards Canada’s traditions and institutions the more inclined I am to think of them, taken collectively, in such uncharitable terms. If opinion polls are any real indication – and to be fair, I do not think that protasis to be certain, far from it – this lack of appreciation and indifference has been very much on the rise among Canadians as of late.
Take personal freedom or liberty, for example. This is a vital Canadian tradition. It goes back, not just the founding of the country in Confederation in 1867, but much further for the Fathers of Confederation, English and French, in adopting the Westminster constitution for our own deliberately chose to retain continuity with a tradition that safeguarded liberty. Sir John A. Macdonald, addressing the legislature of the United Province of Canada in 1865 said:
We will enjoy here that which is the great test of constitutional freedom – we will have the rights of the minority respected. In all countries the rights of the majority take care of themselves, but it is only in countries like England, enjoying constitutional liberty, and safe from the tyranny of a single despot, or of an unbridled democracy, that the rights of minorities are regarded.
Sir Richard Cartwright made similar remarks and said “For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality”. This sentence encapsulated the thinking of the Fathers of Confederation – Canada was to be a British country with British freedom rather than an American country with American equality. In the century and a half (with change) since then, this has been reversed in the thinking of a great many Canadians. In the minds of these Canadians “equality” has become a Canadian value, although not the equality that Sir Richard Cartwright identified with the United States but a much uglier doctrine with the same name, and freedom has become an “American” value. The Liberal Party and their allies in the media and academe are largely if not entirely to blame for this. Indeed, this way of thinking was evident among bureaucrats and other career government officials who tend to be Liberal Party apparatchiks regardless of which party is in government long before it became evident among the general public.
About fourteen years ago, in the Warman v. Lemire case before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, Dean Steacy, an investigator with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, was asked “What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?” His response was to say “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.” This despite the fact that in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which people like this usually although contrafactually regard as the source of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms in Canada, “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” is the second of the “fundamental freedoms” enumerated in Section 2. Perhaps Steacy did not think “speech” to be included in “expression”.
When Steacy’s foolish remark was publicized it did not win him much popularity among Canadians. Quite the contrary, it strengthened the grassroots movement that was demanding the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, a movement that was ultimately successful during the premiership of Stephen Harper by means of a private member’s bill despite it lacking the support of the Prime Minister and even, as many of us thought at the time, with his tacit disapproval. This demonstrates that as recently as a decade and a half ago, Dean Steacy’s knee-jerk rejection of Canada’s traditional British liberty as “American” did not resonate with Canadians. Can the same be said today?
The last year has provided us with many reasons to doubt this. In March of 2020, after the media irresponsibly induced a panic over the spread of the Wuhan bat flu, most provincial governments, strongly encouraged to do so by the Dominion government, followed the example of governments around the world and imposed an unprecedented universal quarantine, at the time recommended by the World Health Organization, as an experiment in slowing the spread of the virus. This involved a radical and severe curtailing of our basic rights and freedoms. Indeed, the freedoms described as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter – these include, in addition to the one quoted two paragraphs ago, the freedoms of “conscience and religion”, “peaceful assembly” and “association” – were essentially suspended in their entirety as our governments forbade all in-person social interaction. Initially, as our governments handed over dictatorial powers to the public health officers we were told that this was a short-term measure to “flatten the curve”, to prevent the hospitals from being swamped while we learned more about this new virus and prepared for it. As several of us predicted at the time would happen, “mission creep” quickly set in and the newly empowered health officials became determined to keep these excessive rules and restrictions in place until some increasingly distant goal – the development of a vaccine, the vaccination of the population, the elimination of the virus – was achieved. Apart from a partial relaxation of the rules over the summer months, the lockdown experiment has remained in place to this day, and indeed, when full lockdown measures were re-imposed in the fall, they were even more severe than they had been last March and April. This despite the fact that the evidence is clearly against the lockdown experiment – the virus is less dangerous than was originally thought (and even last March we knew that it posed a serious threat mostly to those who were very old and already had other health complications), its spread rises and falls seasonally similar to the cold and flu, lockdowns and masks have minimal-to-zero effect on this because it has happened more-or-less the same in all jurisdictions regardless of whether they locked down or not or the severity of the lockdown, while lockdowns themselves inflict severe mental, physical, social, cultural and economic damage upon societies.
Polls last year regularly showed a majority – often a large majority – of Canadians in favour of these restrictions and lockdowns, or even wishing for them to be more severe than they actually were. If these polls were at all accurate – again, this is a big if – then this means far fewer Canadians today respect and value their traditional freedoms than has ever been the case in the past, even as recently as a decade ago. It means that far too many Canadians have bought the lie of the public health officers, politicians, and media commentators that valuing freedom is “selfish”, when, in reality, supporting restrictions, masks, and lockdowns means preferring that the government take away the rights and freedoms of all your neighbours over you taking responsibility for your own safety and those of your loved ones and exercising reasonable precautions. It means that far too many Canadians now value “safety” – which from the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution to this day has ever been the excuse totalitarians of every stripe, Communist, woke, whatever, have used to tyrannize people and take away their freedoms – over freedom.
Over the past week or so, the mainstream media have been reporting opinion poll results that seem to indicate that a similar lack of appreciation for an essential Canadian institution is growing. According to the media the poll shows that support for replacing our hereditary royal monarch with an elected head of state is higher than it has ever been before, although it is not near as high as the lockdown support discussed above and is still below having majority support. There is good reason to doubt the accuracy of such poll results in that they indicate growing support for a change the media itself seems to be trying to promote given the way it has used the scandal surrounding the recent vice-regal resignation to attack the office of the Queen’s representative, the Governor General, when the problem is obviously with the person who filled the office, and the way in which she was chosen, i.e., hand-picked by Captain Airhead in total disregard of the qualities the office calls for, selection procedures that worked well in the past such as with Payette’s immediate predecessor, or even the most basic vetting. There is also, of course, a question over whether these poll results indicate an actual growth in small-r republican preferences or merely disapproval of the next in line of succession, His Royal Highness Prince Charles.
To the extent that this poll is accurate, however, it indicates that many Canadians have traded the Canadian way of thinking for the American way of thinking. Americans think of the Westminster system as being inferior to their own republican constitution because they consider it to be less than democratic with a hereditary monarch as the head of state. The historic and traditional Canadian perspective is that the Westminster system is superior to a republican constitution because it is more than democratic, incorporating the monarchical principle along with the democratic. To trade the Canadian for the American perspective on this is to impoverish our thinking. That a constitution is better for including more than just democracy is a viewpoint with an ancient pedigree that can be traced back to ancient Greece. That democracy is the highest principle of government and that a constitution is therefore weaker for having a non-elected head of state is an entirely Modern perspective. It cannot even be traced back to ancient Rome, for while the Roman republic was like the American republic in being kingless, it was unlike the American republic in that it was openly and unabashedly aristocratic and made not the slightest pretense of being democratic. Some might consider an entirely Modern perspective to be superior to one with an ancient pedigree, but such are ludicrously wrong. Novelty is not a quality of truth – the truer an idea is, the more like it is that you will be able to find it throughout history, stretching back to the most ancient times, rather than merely in the present day.
Indeed, to think that an elected head of state is preferable to a hereditary monarch at this point in time, that is to say after the clownish mayhem of the fiascos that were the last two American presidential elections, is to embrace the Modern perspective at the worst possible moment, the moment in which it has been utterly discredited. It is bad enough that Canadians have lately allowed the American presidential election style to influence the way we regard our parliamentary elections so as to make the question of which personality cult leader we want as Prime Minister into the primary or even sole factor to be considered in voting for whom we want for our local constituency representative. We do not need to Americanize the office of head of state as well.
We are better off for having a hereditary royal monarch as our head of state and a constitution that is therefore more than, not less than, democratic. Historically and traditionally, the institution of the monarchy has been the symbol and safeguard of our traditional rights and freedoms. I have long said that in Canada the monarchy and freedom stand and fall together. Therefore, if the polls are correct about waning Canadian support for both, this speaks very poorly about the present generation of Canadians. Which is why if these trends continue, Canadians who still love their country with its traditional monarchy and freedoms will be increasingly tempted to individually love their countrymen with affection unspeakable, but collectively look upon them with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.
White Supremacy and Neo-Nazi Movements are a ‘Transnational Threat’Which Grows More Dangerous by the Day, Says UN Chief February 22, 2021
[Oppose the replacement of Europeans in Europe by elite-organized Third World invasion or the similar replacement of the European founding settler people of Canada, the U.S. Australia, New Zealand and you’re suddenly a “neo-Nazi” or White supremacist and must be crushed.}
The United Nations has warned that white supremacy and neo-Nazi movements are an increasing threat to the world we live in, adding that people in positions of responsibility are encouraging them in a way previously unthinkable.
“White supremacy and neo-Nazi movements are more than domestic terror threats. They are becoming a transnational threat,” United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the organization’s Human Rights Council on Monday.
“Today, these extremist movements represent the number one internal security threat in several countries,” Guterres stated, adding that we are increasingly seeing people in power cheer on these groups “in ways that were considered unimaginable not long ago.”
The UN secretary general called on people from around the world to help deliver “coordinated action” to overcome this threat which Guterres claims is “growing by the day.” Guterres stated that the UN needs to play a central role in defeating this “growing danger” and prevent “ethnically motivated terrorism.”
Guterres contended that these groups have used the pandemic to their advantage, through “social polarization and political and cultural manipulation,” adding that they have engaged in a “feeding frenzy of hate – fundraising, recruiting and communicating online both at home and overseas.”
The secretary general’s comments come six weeks after the US Capitol building was seized by angry protestors, buoyed on by outgoing President Donald Trump. President Joe Biden said the attack was carried out by “thugs, insurrectionists, political extremists and white supremacists.”
Trump denies that he acted inappropriately, adding that “these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away.”
Keane Bexte — A Report from One of Justin Trudeau’s COVID Detention CentresI have left the COVID jail, and I recorded the whole thing.
Despite having two days remaining on the room the government forced me to pay for — I got the story I came for, and will not be “enjoying” the rest of my stay.
The conditions Canadians are being forced into in these quarantine facilities are abhorrent. In some cases, citizens are not even given water, or the food provided is barely edible. There have also been allegations of sexual assault in these facilities. Locks have been ripped off of the room doors, meaning that any government or hotel agent could walk into your supposedly private quarters at any time.
The situation is entirely unconstitutional and is a violation of Canadians’ rights on multiple fronts — the most obvious of which is our freedom of mobility. Canadians have a right to enter, leave or stay in Canada at any time for any reason, and the Government of Canada is not allowed to restrict this.
The food and water situations are just the icing on the cake, a cake that Trudeau is going to have to answer for, come the next federal election. The vast majority of the people being forced into these COVID jails are the very individuals who helped Trudeau ride into office, including dual citizens and members of minority groups who have family outside of the country. These people make up a huge segment of the population, and a large part of Trudeau’s voting constituency.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1365638519344025602&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rebelnews.com%2Fwhats_really_happening_inside_a_quarantine_hotel&siteScreenName=RebelNewsOnline&theme=light&widgetsVersion=e1ffbdb%3A1614796141937&width=550px
Remember when the state media knowingly lied to you, and called any mention of these government sites “misinformation”? They hoped that Rebel News would not continue covering this story. Well, we did, and we blew the top off of it.
No other journalist in the country bothered to look inside these government-occupied compounds — why do you think that is?
If you found our coverage of this massive scandal informative and useful, please consider helping us cover the costs of the $1,000 mandatory jail bill.
have left the COVID jail, and I recorded the whole thing.
Despite having two days remaining on the room the government forced me to pay for — I got the story I came for, and will not be “enjoying” the rest of my stay.
The conditions Canadians are being forced into in these quarantine facilities are abhorrent. In some cases, citizens are not even given water, or the food provided is barely edible. There have also been allegations of sexual assault in these facilities. Locks have been ripped off of the room doors, meaning that any government or hotel agent could walk into your supposedly private quarters at any time.
The situation is entirely unconstitutional and is a violation of Canadians’ rights on multiple fronts — the most obvious of which is our freedom of mobility. Canadians have a right to enter, leave or stay in Canada at any time for any reason, and the Government of Canada is not allowed to restrict this.
The food and water situations are just the icing on the cake, a cake that Trudeau is going to have to answer for, come the next federal election. The vast majority of the people being forced into these COVID jails are the very individuals who helped Trudeau ride into office, including dual citizens and members of minority groups who have family outside of the country. These people make up a huge segment of the population, and a large part of Trudeau’s voting constituency.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1365638519344025602&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rebelnews.com%2Fwhats_really_happening_inside_a_quarantine_hotel&siteScreenName=RebelNewsOnline&theme=light&widgetsVersion=e1ffbdb%3A1614796141937&width=550px
Remember when the state media knowingly lied to you, and called any mention of these government sites “misinformation”? They hoped that Rebel News would not continue covering this story. Well, we did, and we blew the top off of it.
No other journalist in the country bothered to look inside these government-occupied compounds — why do you think that is?
If you found our coverage of this massive scandal informative and useful, please consider helping us cover the costs of the $1,000 mandatory jail bill.
The Medico-Stalinist Tyranny in Toronto: Toronto police target protesters holding signs, megaphones at anti-lockdown rally
\When I visit Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square or Queen’s Park these days, I can only think of nature films. You know, those videos that document a pride of lions on the African Serengeti, stalking a massive herd of wildebeest. But even for the king of the jungle, a wildebeest makes for a formidable opponent, and so it is that these big cats patiently observe the herd, looking for the old, the young, the sick and the injured. Easy pickings.
And that’s kind of what we’re seeing in Hogtown these days when it comes to anti-lockdown protests, with the demonstrators playing the role of the prey, and the rank and file of the Toronto Police Service in the role of the predators. Except the cops aren’t looking for the sick and the weak — they are cherry-picking those who have big mouths — you know, people carrying signs or barking into megaphones. Those are the demonstrators who tend to get arrested and tossed in paddy wagons, because apparently, being a “big mouth” is strictly verboten in Tyrant Tory’s Toronto, even though it is a Charter right to be vocal.
And so it was that we returned to the snow-covered lawns of Queen’s Park to see which members of the herd would get arrested by those predators wearing police badges. And true to form, those with flags or signs, or who were simply voicing their opinions, were the ones the police descended upon and ticketed and arrested and tossed in paddy wagons.
It was, in a word, disgraceful. Especially considering these very same police officers took part in Black Lives Matter demonstrations last summer by bending the knee in solidarity with the demonstrators. Same place, same virus, same police. But apparently if one espouses a different political mindset, the ‘new normal’ rules when it comes to the Wuhan virus safety protocols do not apply.
Thus, welcome to the hypocritical double standard that now thrives in John Tory’s Toronto in 2021. But please, folks, never forget: “We’re all in this together.”
Travis Patron, Party Leader, Held As Political Prisoner for Over 48 Hours by Gov’t of Saskatchewan
Canadian political leader, Travis Patron, who was arrested on February 15, 2021 allegedly for “hate speech,” has released an official statement about his ordeal. We have transcribed it here for ease of reading. The original statement can be seen below.
Patron Held As Political Prisoner For Over 48 Hours By Government Of Saskatchewan
Thursday, February 18th, 2021
Fellow citizens,
On Monday, February 15th, I was abducted from my place of residence, pulled away from my loved ones, and subjected to conditions of arbitrary containment. I was told I was being arrested for so-called “hate speech”. Yet, I have received no satisfactory response to my objection that the Provincial Government of Saskatchewan has no right to police my speech. Indeed, they lack the jurisdiction to do so and to proceed in these matters as they did was entirely unlawful and perhaps even criminal.
I was held in custody for over 48 hours at the Carlyle RCMP detachment without any ability to communication outside the administration who was responsible for holding me against my will. I, a federal party leader, was denied by my abductors all requests for a pen and paper to write a message in the name of diplomacy. After I specifically asked for the lights to be kept off in my cell so that I could sleep comfortably, the exact opposite was done, and I was shrouded in bright light with a camera pointed at me the entire time. I was told that if I did not agree to their release conditions, I could be held in custody (without trial) for a years time as well as transferred to other locations. Their release conditions included a ridiculously-broad and unjustified stipulation that I cannot “publish anything, directly or indirectly, online.” Obviously, I did not sign anything.
I made it clear that I did not understand why I was being held in custody and against my will. I made it clear that I do not believe I have done anything wrong. I also demanded to someone the Provincial Government Of Saskatchewan considers a Judge, that I be released from unlawful custody immediately. The Provincial Government of Saskatchewan lacks jurisdiction to proceed on these matters and has no right to police our speech.
Interestingly, some of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers seemed to be uncomfortable with this whole affair and uncertain as to what offense I had committed or why I was in custody to begin with. It seems there may yet be a remnant of integrity and critical thought left in the force, but it is currently under the heel of a reckless and unconstitutional administration backed by a media propaganda machine that twists the truth and deceives the public in a malicious way.
The mask has now slipped in Canadian society. We clearly do not live in a “free and democratic society.” Let this be a wake up call to many of you who seem unable to see past the lies of your culture. If you do not take a stance now these conditions will quite likely get worse. Fortunately for us, and by the Grace of God, the ability for the satanic Government of Canada to exercise their will against us is limited because we have been granted a degree of jurisdictional independence. Those who think hiding and complying with each new demand is the answer are in for a very rude wake up call and when that time comes (and it quite likely will) our constituency will not act favorably toward those who have neglected our struggle this entire time. Those who watch these developments with apathy should not be surprised when they are judged harshly.
It is my hope that anyone reading this message how understands how dire this situation is for the sake of our freedom. Although I am rather shell-shocked at this whole ordeal, I ultimately recognize it for what it is: a test. This is a test of willpower, faithfulness, and discipline. If I may say so myself, I think I fared quite well.
As far as I understand, no charges have been lawfully made in the matter. We reserve the right to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law those who falsely claim otherwise.
In 1987, Augsburg Publishing House, the publishing arm of the American Lutheran Church which the following year would join with Fortress Press, the publisher of the Lutheran Church in America as part of the merger of the Lutheran bodies into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, published a book entitled Television and Religion: The Shaping of Faith, Values and Culture. The release of such a book could hardly have been more timely – it went to print just as the various scandals surrounding Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were breaking. The author of the book was the Reverend William F. Fore, who was the acknowledged expert at the time on the matter of religious broadcasting. For the next couple of years he was a guest on pretty much every major radio and television talk show discussing the scandal and his book. Rev. Fore, who passed away last July, was a minister of the United Methodist Church, and served as the Executive Director of the Communications Department of the National Council of Churches in Christ for a quarter of a century, retiring from this position shortly after his aforementioned book came out. The fifth and sixth chapters of the book address the message and audience respectively of what he called “the electronic church”. He had already been sounding the alarm about this “electronic church” for over a decade.
Indeed, in August of 1978 Fore gave an address by that very title – “The Electronic Church” – to a meeting of the Seventh Day Adventist Broadcasters Council in Oxnard, California, which was published in that denomination’s MinistryMagazine in its January, 1979 issue. In that address he noted some interesting statistics. Gallup had just conducted a survey of the religious views of both the “churched” and the “unchurched” in the United States. “Surprisingly”, Fore commented, “religious beliefs and practices have undergone remarkably little change during the past 25 years.” What made these findings surprising was that while beliefs in doctrines like the deity of Jesus Christ and practices such as daily prayer did not appear to be declining among Americans, even among the “unchurched”, the self-evaluated importance of organized religion in their lives was. Fore suggested that the incongruity between these two things could be, at least partly, explained by the growth of religious broadcasting and that this was cause for concern. He said:
What worries me is whether this electronic church is in fact pulling people away from the local church. Is it substituting an anonymous (and therefore undemanding) commitment for the kind of person-to-person involvement and group commitment that is the essence of the local church?
As we shall shortly see, this was a legitimate concern and there is far more cause for alarm on this front today than there was back then. First, it needs to be noted that there was another, far more obvious, reason why steady belief in such basic Christian truths as the deity of Jesus Christ might coincide with a decline in confidence in organized religion – and a decline in church attendance, for when Fore was speaking and writing about the danger of “the electronic church” we were already several decades into a period of drastic decline in church attendance, one which began shortly after the Second World War and which continues to this day.
That reason was simply this – that in this same period of time, a great many of the churches had stopped preaching and teaching the basic Christian truths. For everyone who could still truthfully recite everything in the Apostles’ Creed from “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” to “The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen”, churches whose ministers taught that Jesus was God’s Son only in the sense that He exemplified the way in which we are all children of God and that He rose again from the dead only in the sense that He lived on in the memory of His disciples, and who similarly explained away everything else in the Creed so as to make its opening “I believe” into an “I don’t believe”, were rapidly losing their appeal. Nor did they have much of an appeal to anybody else. Anybody out there who actually wanted to hear a lecture every week about racial and gender equity, recycling and reducing our carbon footprint, and other such trendy codswallop had plenty of opportunity to do so that did not involve getting up early on Sunday morning. Others have certainly noticed the contribution of this factor to the decline in church attendance and affiliation. Here in the Dominion of Canada, where the decline had been much larger than in the United States, two Anglican priests, George R. Eves, Two Religions: One Church (1998) and Marney Patterson, Suicide – The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada (1999), attempted, to little avail, at least with regards to the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to warn the Anglican Church of Canada that this kind of liberalism was killing the church. Others, such as the eminent Canadian sociologist of religion Reginald W. Bibby, have addressed this factor in a more detached manner. Now, the United Methodist Church and the NCCC were both noted bastions of liberalism. The late Dr. Thomas C. Oden had been well within the mainstream of the United Methodist Church prior to his journey back from theological liberalism and political radicalism to “paleo-orthodoxy” through a study of the great theologians of the Christian tradition beginning with the Church Fathers prompted by a challenge from his Drew University colleague, Will Herberg, who had had to make a similar return to the roots of his own Jewish tradition in the Talmud and Midrash after his own break with his early radicalism. The National Council of Churches in Christ is the American organized expression of ecumenism which, as Joseph Pearce has recently observed, “appears to be the willingness to dilute or delete doctrine in pursuit of a perceived unity among disparate groups of believers (irrespective of what they actually believe)” and thus the opposite of what it originally meant when applied in the early centuries to the General Councils that defined orthodoxy and excluded heresy for the entire church throughout the “whole inhabited world”. My point in bringing this up is not to cast aspersions on the personal orthodoxy of the late William F. Fore but to show that for someone in his position, unless he wished to make waves, he had strong personal reasons to turn a blind eye to the connection between liberalism and declining church attendance and to tie the latter to religious broadcasters who, whatever else they might be legitimately accused of – aggressive and dishonest fundraising, the sacrilege of reducing religion to popular entertainment, etc. – were seldom if ever liberals.
All of that having been said, Fore’s concern that for many people “the electronic church” was taking the place of local churches was a legitimate and valid one. In his address to the Seventh Day Adventists in 1978 he said the following:
Radio and TV – especially TV – tend to produce a substitute for reality that eventually can begin to take the place of reality itself.
He illustrated this point by referring to an article in Broadcasting Magazine that described a television program entitled “Summer Camp” that purported to give kids the “summer camp” experience “without leaving home”, a particularly poignant example as it is difficult to conceive of an experience further removed from that of watching television than summer camp or a greater exercise in missing the point than trying to translate that experience into the television medium. He went on to say:
My point is that exposure to the media tends to separate us from the world of reality, creating for us, in fact, a new reality…The situation, I predict, is going to get worse.
Before we take a look at just how true that prediction has become, let us consider the contrast he drew between the local and the electronic church. He said:
[The purveyors of the electronic church] are building huge audiences that bring them fame, wealth, and power, but which in doing so substitute a phantom, a non-people, an electronic church, for the church of real people, with real needs and real gospel to share in the midst of their real lives.
It is no accident that the local church, the koinonia or community of believers, is such a central part of our Christian faith and life. This is where we find Christ; this is where we confess our sins and find forgiveness and regeneration; this is where we act out our faith and where we shore up one another when we slide back in the faith.
The years since 1978 and now have seen an explosion in the development of electronic communications technology. Personal computers and cellular phones have become more compact and affordable and therefore ubiquitous and, indeed, have now merged into smart phones that place the internet, which itself has evolved rapidly and exponentially in this period, at one’s fingertips wherever one happens to be. The “electronic church” has evolved along with these media and in 2021 the “online church” – services viewed over the internet either while they are occurring through livestream or later if, as is usually the case, recordings of the stream remain available – has become a much larger part of it than the services broadcast on radio and television forty years ago. Indeed, for almost a year now, the “online church” has been the only “church” available throughout most of the world as governments everywhere have used the pretext of the spread of a coronavirus notable more for its novelty than its severity to throw off the shackles of constitutional restraints and protected rights and liberties and conduct an insane social experiment in which they forbade in-person social interaction in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to contain the spread of the virus. The leaders of the churches have, for the most part, opted to obey man rather than God and support this vile experiment by closing their doors and making services available to their parishioners only via the internet. Thus, for the last year, the “electronic church” has more fully and completely replaced the real church, than Rev. Fore would have imagined possible in his worst nightmares back in the eighties.
What is most troubling about this, apart from the whole submitting to godless totalitarianism aspect of it, is that whereas forty years ago, church leaders whether orthodox or liberal, would have largely shared Fore’s concern that for many people the “electronic church” was becoming a substitute for actual churches in which real people meet and worship and fellowship together and would have agreed with him that this was not a good thing, today, the church leaders who are saying “Amen” to the government officials who insist that we must sacrifice the mental and social wellbeing of all members of our communities, and the economic wellbeing of all except the most wealthy, in order to prevent people who are already at the end of their natural lifespans from dying a natural death a very short time earlier than would otherwise be the case, are now developing theological arguments for why the “electronic church” is a real church after all. While the idea of a spiritual fellowship existing between all believers in different places is neither new nor unsound – this is a part of the meaning of “the communion of the saints” in the Creed – it is a different matter entirely to treat the act of praying and singing along, from your own home, while you watch a service that is taking place elsewhere through your computer screen, as if you and those actually participating in the service were somehow together in some virtual “place” that the internet has generated. Doing the latter is far closer to living in the kind of artificial “reality” from which in the movies a “red pill” is required in order to escape than it is to the orthodox doctrine of the “communion of the saints”.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia a year after the Bolsheviks, a murderous gang of criminal revolutionaries, fanatically devoted to building what they believed would be an ideal society based upon collective ownership, materialism, science, and atheism regardless of whatever cost in human lives and suffering had to be paid in order to bring this about, seized control of that country, murdered the Tsar and the rest of the royal family, and began its long, but mercifully unsuccessful, war of extirpation against the Russian Orthodox Church. His mother raised him, as best she could, in the Orthodox faith, while the Bolshevik state did its worst to indoctrinate him in its ideology. Ultimately, after Solzhenistyn was arrested while serving in the Red Army in World War II for criticism of Stalin, and sentenced by a secret tribunal of the NKVD to the work camps administered by GULAG, his Orthodox rearing won out, and in his writings he became a fierce critic of the oppression of the Soviet system. While his writings were initially well-received in his home country while Khrushchev was repudiating the legacy of Stalin, when he turned his pen against the Communist system and underlying ideology as a whole, he became persona non grata, and soon his writings had to be published by samizdat in Russian, or smuggled out and published in translation in the West where they helped remove the blinders from the eyes of many who still thought of the Soviet experiment in romantic, idealistic, terms. Eventually, the Soviet regime tired of him and on the twelfth of February, 1974, he was arrested again and sent into exile.
On the day of his arrest he released a notable essay, advising that in the face of a violent, oppressive, totalitarian ideology such as that which then ruled in Russia, the least that people could do was refuse to participate in the lies by which the totalitarian ideology of the state covered its violence.
“And this is the way”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist”.
The title of Solzhenitsyn’s essay, “Live not by Lies”, was borrowed last year by Rod Dreher, for a book advising Christians about how to live in the face of a new soft totalitarianism. While Dreher admirably strained out many of the totalitarian gnats of “woke” ideology, he swallowed in its entirety the camel of masks and lockdowns and public health orders.
We can and must do better than that.
Sadly, I expect that very few of our church leaders will be willing to show the same faith and obedience to God rather than man as Pastor James Coates of GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Alberta, who was arrested by the RCMP last week for holding regular church services and remains in police custody as of the time of this writing, or Pastor Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary, who held a service last weekend in solidarity with Pastor Coates. While Coates’ arrest demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that I have been right in everything I have been saying since last March about how these public health orders are the latest manifestation of the anti-Christian, anti-freedom, atheistic and materialistic, spirit of Communist oppression and are utterly out of place in a Commonwealth Realm in which the basic rights and freedoms these orders treat as inconsequential are supposed to be the guaranteed Common Law property of citizens as Her Majesty’s free subjects, this is not really my point here. If most Christian leaders can’t find the balls to do what Pastors Coates and Stephens have done, a rather predictable consequence of the widespread ordination of women due to a previous generation’s departure from the clear teachings of the Scriptures and church tradition on that subject, then the least they can do, to borrow Solzhenitsyn’s language, is to refuse to participate in the lies covering up the totalitarian violence and oppression of the lockdown measures. Specifically, they can reject the lie that the “electronic church” of today is somehow different and better than the “electronic church” of forty years ago, because it is online rather than on television. This lie rests upon the underlying notion that the internet is an actual space where people can really meet and actively participate in something together rather than the mere passive viewing which is all that the voyeurism of television makes available. I am inclined to say that this notion, too, is a lie, although it contains the element of truth that the internet has an interactional element that was not there in television. Along with that element of truth, however, it contains the assumption that this is an improvement rather than something that moves us closer to the dystopia of the Matrix. That assumption, I would say, is at the very least, highly dubious. Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 5:55 AM Labels: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, COVID-19, Electronic Church, George R. Eves, James Coates, Joseph Pearce, Marney Patterson, Reginald W. Bibby, Rod Dreher, Thomas C. Oden, Tim Stephens, Will Herberg, William F. Fore
