An Introduction to Vaccine Passport Defiance
The other night I went and looked up some video footage of the massive demonstrations that are currently happening in Europe, against the introduction of vaccine passports—the protests I watched were happening in London, Paris, and Athens, but there were plenty of others. And the fact that events of this magnitude are happening all over, and yet may as well not be happening as far as our news media are concerned, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about our current situation. We are being led by the nose, all the time. We are being lied to, all the time.
I mean, think about it. When I say lied to “all the time,” I mean incessantly, constantly, endlessly, perpetually—like your neighbor’s dog, barking away at midnight the way it does.
I want you to imagine something with me. Let’s do a little thought experiment, you and I. Suppose the CDC had some research scientist in a back room somewhere, and he was a “think-outside-the-vax” kind of guy. We don’t know how he got hired, but somehow he did, and he was back there in the back room, just a-researchin’. After exhaustive study, sleepless nights, and endless experiments, he discovered that COVID could be effectively treated by putting Mentholatum on your upper lip for seven successive nights running. It was astoundingly effective, immediately available, readily affordable, and our long national nightmare was over. He ran down the hallways there at the CDC, yelling that it was over! over! over!
No, actually. It would be more like his long nightmare was just starting. He is about to have a huge non grata dropped on his persona. Does anybody seriously think that the people managing this pandemic would let it end like that? Please note. I am not saying that Mentholatum heals COVID. I am saying that if it did, the chances of you ever finding out about it would be very low.
And that is because all of this is about control. This is not about disease control, but rather about people control. And anything that disrupts or retards those efforts of theirs at their people control is more or less fine with me.
This is because our diseased establishment resembles nothing so much as a sickly yellow custard that is a little green around the edges. It is time to clean out the fridge. Since it is becoming apparent that our ruling elites are neither one, not knowing how to rule, and not being at all elite, it is time for us to acknowledge the obvious, fill up the streets, and just say no.
The Timing of Pushback
My father-in-law was an Air Force officer in Germany when the Berlin Wall was first starting to go up. The bad guys would build a bit, and wait to see what happened. Nothing happened, so a little more went up. My father-in-law’s take on the situation then was that we could have saved ourselves a whole lot of grief if we had just sent bulldozers in at the very first sign of a wall. But if you wait until after the wall is built, with concertina wire all along the top, and all their guards posted, then there is no way to send the bulldozers in without starting a war.
I have commented on this principle before. The second crime scene is worse than the first crime scene. So as soon as you encounter a scene, make a scene.
How much more should this be the case when you see people all over the world making a scene. As the saying goes, ”If not us, who? And if not now, when?” If the Aussies are starting to kick, it must be pretty bad.
And I Didn’t Even Know That Absurdity Had a Pinnacle
And yet, here we all are, rocking back and forth on the top of it. Because of an irrational panic, how many millions of healthy people were sentenced to house arrest for a year? What did “fifteen days to flatten the curve” turn into? It morphed into “until the vaccine,” and then when the vaccines arrived, and a bunch of people got the vaccine, it turned into “you’re going to have to mask up again this fall” even if you have had the vaccine. I tell you what. Why don’t you get all the vaccines, and then double mask, and go down into your basement. Just to be sure.
Anecdotal stories of healthy people dying from the vaccine are in wide (underground) circulation, and the point here is not that we should believe anecdotal stories about vaccines in a population of hundreds of millions. But the issue is not my trust in anecdotal stories. It is not that I believe them. It is that I don’t believe the official narrative, not at all, not even a little bit. How many times should they get to lie and still maintain credibility. I am not sure because the car I am in passed that point a couple of days ago.
And while we are here, where did the flu go? Why isn’t the flu around any more? Is it like professional wrestling, where one virus has to go out of the ring if the other virus comes in? Are those the rules now? Maybe so, because the public health establishment is currently as realistic as professional wrestling is. Or maybe it is because the testing we have been using cannot distinguish the two, and so all the flu cases have been promoted up to COVID. I wonder if somebody should look into that.
So, confronted with an establishment that wants to triple down on all this stuff, what should the Christian response be? They are calling for more lockdowns, more masking, required vaccinations, vaccine passports, and all the rest of it. They will use various verbal tricks in order to spook the populace—which is showing signs of becoming surly—into conformity again.
They will appeal to this thing called “a spike,” which might work on people who don’t know enough to ask to see the whole graph. They will appeal to this thing called “the Delta variant,” which will also have a 99% survival rate among those who catch it. Among those who don’t catch it, the survival rate is a little bit better than that. My prediction is that we will know that they are desperate to be believed when they finally come out with the Sasquatch variant.
The Nature of Religious Exemption
There are a number of Christians out there who know they don’t like what is going on, and who know that they don’t want to take the vaccine, and yet who have not worked through the arguments yet. They know they would need to work through them if called upon by their employer, or county health official, or one of Biden’s door-to-door men, to give an account for their refusal to get the vaccine.
There is a strong case to be made by those Christians who want to make an appeal for a religious exemption. Now having a strong argument is not the same thing as having an argument that can get through to a bureaucrat, but at least this is a place to begin. The thing that will get through to a bureaucrat is a sufficient number of people making this kind of argument.
Suppose the president, or whoever it is behind him these days, issued an executive order mandating that we all wear blue ball caps every Tuesday. There is a valid and quite strong religious objection to such a decree, and it runs like this. “I am not your slave.”
We have to recognize the difference between people who have been slaves for generations, and who are on the brink of being liberated, like the Israelites in Egypt, and a people who have been free for generations, and who are on the brink of being enslaved, like Americans in 2021. The strategies employed by these two different kinds of people are going to be different, of necessity, and the first thing to do is not to confound the two scenarios.
And so we resist, as we ought to resist, and we claim the liberties that pertain to us as free men. In Christ, we are free men. And as we make this claim, One of the things we have to come to grips with is the fact that Caesar is not in charge of what constitutes a valid religious exemption. Jesus is Lord, not Caesar, and this means that Caesar does not get to determine what Christ has decided to give to us. If Caesar wants to be blessed, he should recognize it, but he is not the source of it. I should say that again. Caesar is not the source of our liberties, Christ is.
But our secular Caesar wants to set up the terms and conditions under which he will magnanimously grant you that exemption. And what they will probably want from you is a certain measure of irrationality—something like “I belong to a sect that has every strict laws against wearing the color blue under any conditions.”
If your sect had a rule against wearing blue ball caps on Tuesday, this would be too focused and specific. It would look like you were trying to evade something. Hmmm?
No. They will say that in order for it to be a true religious scruple, it has to be arbitrary and make no sense, and all your fellow Presbyterians (or whatever) have to share your scruples about the same thing, and in the very same way. If you have an intelligent religious conviction that says that people who are not slaves should not be ordered around like they were slaves, they will say something like “Ha, ha, DENIED!” You have no inherent problem with wearing blue, or blue ball caps, or blue ball caps on Tuesday, but when the president picks up his pen and orders you to do something he has no authority to order, then you should invite everyone to watch you—in accordance with the laws of your religion—walk all the way through Tuesday without a blue ball cap anywhere in sight.
But they will say it is not a true religious conviction unless it operates like an irrational taboo, or like some religious phobia. If it comes to them that way, they can afford to be magnanimous (sometimes), pat on you the head, and send you on your merry little exempted way. Thus the Amish don’t get drafted, the JWs don’t get blood transfusions, and so on. But they don’t know what to do with a comprehensive faith—like the Christian faith—that shapes and molds slaves into free men.
Here is another story from Cold War Berlin. In the late forties, the Soviets cut off supply lines to West Berlin, in an effort to force the Allies to stop using the Deutsche Mark there. We responded by airlifting supplies into the city, a relief effort which continued for about fifteen months. That whole episode was a real embarrassment to the Soviets, and they eventually lifted their blockade. But one of the things they tried to do during the showdown was to define a corridor in which all the planes had to remain while flying to and from Berlin. The American response was to put our pilots under strict orders—they were to fly anywhere but that corridor.
One of the things I would encourage Christians to do, whenever possible, is to fly outside the corridor.
They want to be in charge of every detail of human existence. They have a lust for control and power. They are totalitarians in spirit, and the fact that they want it to be a Brave New World totalitarianism, and not a 1984 totalitarianism, shouldn’t change anything as far as we are concerned. It is going to wind up as an amalgam of Brave New World and 1984 anyhow.
And so they will want you to come to them, hat in hand, and to ask for an exemption because you belong to a bizarre sect that is running its own little clown show—telling its members to touch not, taste not, handle not. They will not know what to do with a faith that teaches its adherents not to cede authority to their clown show. That is a sane religious conviction, and we commend it to them.
All for now. More on how Christians can resist in weeks to come.