COVID-19
‘River of Freedom’ documentary exposes the brutal COVID tyranny of New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
From LifeSiteNews
By David James
What emerges from the film is a political class without conscience. It turns out the Ardern government’s COVID advisory group knew early on about the vaccine side effects and advised the cabinet against the mandates. But the government went ahead anyway.
The documentary River of Freedom is a filmic record of the protests in New Zealand against the COVID lockdown policies and the mandating of vaccines. It has made its mark locally. Despite being ignored by the mainstream media, and only playing on a few screens, it reached number 10 in the box office.
The film documents the objections against then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s mandatory “No Jab, No Job” vaccination regime. It shows how the New Zealand politicians, when confronted by the protestors, hid in the building; all 120 parliamentarians refused to communicate with them. Two ex-members of parliament did visit and were later served with trespass notices.
The protestors seemed neither organized nor threatening; most of them talked repeatedly about the need to love one other. The mood was rather one of confusion and trauma as people who had mostly trusted their government saw their politicians turn into bureaucratic tyrants.
Many of them had lost their jobs and suffered the accompanying distress. There were photos of the vaccinated, often young, who had either died or been seriously injured. There was an especially sad story from a woman who had to undergo four rounds of chemotherapy after getting jabbed because of the extreme inflammation.
It is another chapter in the bleak history of what will come to be seen as the greatest medical crime in history. Yet strangely it is clear that both sides thought they were in the right.
The film starts with a truck convoy similar to the famous Canadian event. They arrived in the capital city Wellington as a diverse group, coming from many different walks of life. Their claims were simple. People should have the right to make choices about what goes into their body and should not be forced by the state. They should have the right to air their views and be involved in public discussion without being censored, demonized, abused, and ignored, including by the mainstream press.
This would once have been a statement of the extremely obvious. As one unjabbed policeman, who lost his job, pointed out, whenever he detained someone, he was required to inform them of the New Zealand Bill of Rights. Yet those rights were completely ignored by the NZ government.
The politicians, meanwhile, displayed a smug certainty that only managerialist functionaries can achieve. They had their deliverables (get everyone vaccinated) and, my goodness, they were going to deliver them. It is another demonstration that imposing a management discipline inevitably impedes peoples’ conscience, the ability to reflect on one’s own actions.
Manipulative techniques, especially spin, were on full display. There was absurd marketing messaging to persuade the citizenry to, in effect, take a risk with their health. There were extreme efforts to depict the protestors as extremists. Ardern ridiculously described them as “pure evil,” adding that the vaxxed had every right to see the unvaxxed as a threat.
In parliament Michael Wood, the minister for Workplace Relations and Safety said, after pretending to have some understanding of the protestors’ fears, that underneath it all was “a river of filth, a river of violence and menace, a river of anti-semitism, and … a river of Islamophobia”. What the latter two claims were about is anyone’s guess. Oh, and I nearly forgot. There was also a “river of genuine fascism”.
The legal sophistry was provided by the Attorney General David Parker, who burbled on about “collective rights” versus individual rights. He opined that in communist and fascist countries collective rights are taken too far – a better description would be that rights are largely removed from people – and then warned against “an extreme version of individual liberties trumping community rights”.
Apart from slipping between “rights” and “liberties,” which have different definitions, it is hard to see how what the protestors wanted was in any way “extreme.” It is indisputable that freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest or detention, the right to be free from discrimination, and the right to work are foundational in New Zealand. Yet free speech was attacked as “spreading disinformation,” discrimination against the unvaccinated was vicious, and the right to work was removed for anyone who did not comply.
The right to freedom of religion was also compromised. An unjabbed Catholic man said he was locked out of his church, and a Hare Krishna practitioner said could not go to his temple.
The film shows the protestors engaging in many “extreme” activities such as singing songs, having sausage sizzles, and talking about love a lot. When the politicians refused to meet them – with the exception of New Zealand First leader Winston Peters – they doubled down by having more sausage sizzles, singing more songs, and passionately speaking of the need for people to treat each other well.
Enraged, the politicians unleashed the police who looked very much like the “river of violence and menace” that Wood mentioned. Except it was the state sending it, not the protestors. Even then, the reaction was mostly peaceful despite a number of the protestors being hurt.
New Zealand did not experience the highly suspicious involvement of its military, as occurred in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. And the country turned out to have a functioning judiciary, which definitely was not the case in Australia, where judges discovered new meanings for the word “cowardice” (they were exempted from the jab).
Some sacked New Zealand police and defence force personnel challenged the vaccine mandate in the High Court and won. It is the point at which the documentary ends.
The Covid disaster showed that, when put under pressure, most Western countries do not have an effective judicial branch of government, an independent rule of law. So New Zealand’s High Court victory was not trivial. At least some of country’s institutions were willing to protect democracy.
What emerges from the film is a political class without conscience. It turns out the government’s COVID advisory group knew early on about the vaccine side effects and advised the cabinet against the mandates. But the government went ahead anyway.
Why? Managers are required to produce measurable outcomes, and the outcome was to get everyone jabbed. Anything else, such as listening to peoples’ objections, considering possible risks, abiding by the principles of democracy, or even remembering what it is to be human, were ignored. That icy callousness of the politicians makes quite a contrast with the heartfelt outbursts of the protestors.
armed forces
Judge dismisses Canadian military personnel’s lawsuit against COVID shot mandate
From LifeSiteNews
Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan rejected a lawsuit from more than 300 past and current members of the Canadian military who lost their jobs or were put on leave for not taking the experimental, dangerous COVID shots.
A Canadian federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed on behalf of some 330 past and current members of the nation’s military who lost their jobs or were placed on leave for refusing the experimental COVID shots, because she alleged that their lawsuit lacked “evidence” that the jabs were harmful.
The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members had sought some $1.3 million in damages from the government for having their charter rights violated due to the military’s 2021 COVID mandates, according to their lawsuit.
In a November 13 ruling, Edmonton-based Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan ruled in favor of the Trudeau government, and thus military’s COVID jab mandate, to strike down the case. Coughlan remarked that the plaintiffs’ case lacked “material facts” along with “evidence” and was filled with “vexatious language.”
READ: Canadian father files $35 million lawsuit against Pfizer over son’s jab-related death
“The only indications of bad faith are found when the pleadings baldly assert that, among other claims, Canada failed to carry out safety and efficacy testing for the vaccines, and that the Directives were premature and ‘promoted the fraudulent use of the biologics’,” she wrote, overlooking reports of thousands of injuries due to the shots in Canada alone.
As a result of the lawsuit being tossed, all plaintiffs are now on the hook to pay some $5,040 out of pocket in legal costs.
As reported by LifeSiteNews in June, documents obtained by LifeSiteNews show that the number of jab injuries in the CAF rose over 800 percent in 2021, with the most being credited to Moderna’s experimental COVID shot.
The CAF members’ lawsuit was filed in June of 2023 and overall sought some $1 million in damages, along with an extra $350,000 in general damages. The lawsuit also had a condition that there be a declaration made that mandating the COVID shots for military members was a violation of their charter rights.
READ: Israeli boy featured in COVID vaccine campaign dies of heart attack at age 8
LifeSiteNews reported in July that a member of Canada’s military who was injured after taking the experimental mRNA COVID jabs has been denied compensation from the nation’s Veterans Affairs department.
Under the CAF’s mandate, hundreds of military members were fired, or one could say, purged for not getting the COVID shots. This is in addition to the thousands of public servants fired for not agreeing to take the COVID shots.
The CAF eventually ended its COVID mandate in October 2022, which was months after the federal mandate was lifted, but members are still “strongly encouraged” to take the experimental shot.
The federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that its federal COVID shot workplace mandate would be dropped in June 2022, as would the mandate requiring domestic travelers have the shot to board planes and trains.
In November of 2023, a CAF member who spoke to LifeSiteNews under the condition of anonymity observed that the military considers members who refuse the COVID jab “a piece of garbage.”
READ: COVID shots have 200-times higher risk of brain clots than other jabs: new report
In March, LifeSiteNews reported on large personnel losses causing the CAF to consider dropping its remaining requirements altogether.
Although Canada has a Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) program, active members of the CAF, as well as veterans, are not eligible for the civilian program. According to Christensen, this leaves many COVID jab-injured CAF members and veterans with no recourse other than Veterans Affairs Canada.
COVID shot mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of Trudeau’s federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects, such as heart diseases, stroke, and death, including in children.
The shots also have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies. As a result, many Catholics and other Christians refused to take them.
Brownstone Institute
The Most Devastating Report So Far
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
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