COVID, Baptists, Bootleggers, and Orthodox Bishops

It may be hard to believe, but Baptists and bootleggers are natural allies in pursuit of a common goal. The Baptists believe that drinking alcohol any time is a sin, but doing so is twice as bad on Sunday. The Baptists want to use the law to restrict the legal purchase and consumption of alcohol any way they can. For them, this is a religious crusade. God is the only justification they need. Whether it is good public policy or bad is of no consequence to the true believer.

Bootleggers also want to restrict legal alcohol sales. They make more money when their product is illegal and when the law restricts their competition. Al Capone wasn’t on any kind of religious crusade. He just wanted to make more money, no matter what that required him to do.

The bootleggers hide behind the Baptists. The Baptists provide the moral cover for politicians to posture as upright servants of the people. All the while, the politicians are taking payoffs behind the scenes from the bootleggers, with whom they can’t afford to be publicly associated. But they don’t need to be. The politicians can pose with the Baptists for photo ops, while secretly doing the bidding of the bootleggers.

The best thing about this coalition between the Baptists and the bootleggers? Because the two sides normally can’t stand each other, no one even notices that God’s people and the criminals are working for the same legislative / regulatory outcome. Those that do notice mostly keep quiet about it. Usually, anyone pointing out the two sides are really working together is going to be labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”

How could Pastor Brown and those dastardly Rum Runners possibly be working together? Well, they aren’t. Not exactly. But then again, they are. There aren’t any meetings in back alleys or Sunday school rooms. They don’t form committees or issue joint press releases.  Publicly, there is seemingly no connection between them at all. Yet, by pursuing their own interests for their own reasons, such unlikely coalitions manage to control many legislative / regulatory outcomes. Frequently, we may add, outcomes that actually hurt the general population.

Never heard of this before? What we described above is actually a mainstream economic theory of regulation:

Bootleggers and Baptists is a specific idea in the subfield of regulatory economics that attempts to predict which interest groups will succeed in obtaining rules they favor. It holds that coalitions of opposing interests that can agree on a common rule will be more successful than one-sided groups.

Our current COVID “pandemic” is a classic example of this theory. There are many groups exploiting the official COVID narrative for their own reasons. Together, they have a vested interest in keeping the hysteria going. They have no interest in things returning to “normal.” The situation is not temporary. It is not by accident. It will not go away on its own. There are too many people benefitting for that to be allowed to happen.

The COVID Narrative – A Confluence of Interests Against the Common Good

The prevailing COVID narrative can be summed up this way:

COVID is highly contagious, novel, and very deadly. It has killed over 600,000 Americans. No one is safe. There are no medical preventions. There are no treatments for COVID. All we can do is save lives by “stopping the spread” through lockdowns, wearing masks, social distancing and getting vaccinated. Otherwise, our hospitals will be overwhelmed. Widespread testing is essential. Those who test positive must be quarantined along with those who have been in contact with them. The vaccines are highly effective and safe. If everyone got vaccinated, we could end COVID. But everyone still has to wear a mask, because masks stop the spread. The anti-vaxxers alone are responsible for extending the pandemic. Only selfish, stupid people refuse the vaccines which are the only way we can ever get back to normal. If you refuse to get vaccinated, then we have to make you for everyone’s protection. Even though the vaccines work, they don’t work well enough that we can allow 30% or more of the population to go unvaccinated. Everyone has to be, or the vaccinated are not protected. Booster shots are essential, because immunity wanes over time. Natural immunity from previous infection doesn’t exist.

The goal here is not to debunk that narrative. We have challenged it many times, and there is a wealth of resources available on our site and all over the Internet. On our own site, we have provided articles on the availability of effective treatments / prevention of COVID, the uselessness of masks and lockdowns, the dangers of the “vaccines” (here, here, and here), and the lack of efficacy for Pfizer and Moderna. This interview with an RN whistleblower is a newly available resource that really blows the lid off the conventional narrative. Take 15 minutes and listen. The meme below also provides a great summary of the problems with the “narrative.”

Rather, the goal here is to explain how such an obviously wrong narrative can persist because it is useful to so many different groups for different reasons. There is some overlapping membership between the groups covered below, and some do cooperate actively. But many are quite distinct from each other. There is no villainous “Bond” organization behind all this. If there were, it would be easier to beat. Instead we are up against a massive coalition of “Baptists and bootleggers” all pursuing a common policy – keeping the “pandemic” going as long as possible while radically changing society to suit their own goals.

COVIDian Progressives – These are the true believers, the “Baptists” in this coalition. They have always known they were smarter, better people than their rube neighbors. COVID gave them a way to show it. Masks are their emblem for now. Their dedication to masks is virtue-signaling at its finest. They double-mask alone, outside, and take selfies doing it. They harangue people in stores for not complying with COVID rules, and live stream the confrontations. They dox people on social media. They report their own pastors, friends, and neighbors for non-compliance. COVIDians are everywhere, even in your churches. They baptize their COVID rituals and make them about being virtuous people who care for others in the name of Christ.

COVID is their sense of purpose, their way to show everyone how superior they are. They brag about being vaxxed on their social media profiles. They decorate their posts with slogans like “We can do this!” COVID is their WWII, their Moon Landing – the war on the virus is their generational moment. COVIDian Progressives have a childish faith in government to keep society progressing towards a Utopian future. We can beat a virus. We can beat death. We can do it, as long as government leads the way. Everyone just has to comply. For them, “science” is not a method but a set of beliefs, an orthodoxy to which all good people subscribe. They don’t read research papers or ponder data. Instead true COVIDians live by the dictates of the “official” scientists. No matter how accomplished pre-COVID, any doctor or scientist deviating from the official narrative is a miserable science-denying quack. Such people should be stripped of their credentials and exiled from society.

COVIDian Progressives are authoritarians who enjoy the sense of power government coercion gives them. The endless rules offer them opportunities to lord it over their mentally inferior enemies. They believe in the vaccines as if they were the Holy Eucharist. The vaccines will solve everything, if only all of us take them by choice or force.

Never mind the doublethink here – the vaccines work but the unvaccinated are still a threat to the vaccinated? Even President Biden said that when outlining his new vaccine mandates. How is that possible? “Shut up you heretic!” is the essence of the reply. “No one can be allowed to question or refuse the vaccines.” The “common good” trumps any considerations of personal “free dumb.”

It is true that many COVIDian Progressives are completely terrified of death, and consequently see their devoted participation in the COVID cult as a means of warding of their own demise. Many of them are actually neurotic, “A 2020 Pew Research study reveals that over half of white, liberal women have been diagnosed with a mental health condition at some point.” All the data in the world will do little to calm the hysterical fears of the truly crazy.

But others only play up their fear of death. The more reasonable, less neurotic COVIDians realize that their chances of dying from COVID are really, really small. They also understand that the PCR tests used to authenticate the “pandemic” are wildly unreliable with massive numbers of false positives. For them, the constant obsessing over COVID case / death statistics is just so much theater. Their pretend fear inspires real fear in the neurotic and the easily influenced. Despite knowing better, they go along with everything, particularly the vaccines, as a means to their ends. One of which is the coveted prize of Vaccine Passportsthe ultimate virtue signal!

For people who grew up desperately dreaming of the sorting hat assigning them to Gryffindor, vaccine passports are the ultimate status symbol. Got the vax? Got the passport? Then welcome to Team COVIDian – the cool kids who are totally unlike those Muggles with their weird obsessions over crazy things like freedom and bodily autonomy. This is even better than double-masking as a way to prove you are a good, intelligent, totally non-domestic terroristic type person. The COVIDian elect can go places and do things that the uninitiated can’t! Even better – the vax passport is guaranteed to morph into a social credit system. Quite soon, all those with unapproved, conservative, unenlightened wrongthink ideas will be locked out of everywhere. The good people will be on the inside laughing at them.

COVIDian Progressives are the foot soldiers for the pandemic on social media and in the streets. They are completely immune to facts, data, logic, or reason. Trying to convince them to end the pandemic is more difficult than convincing a Baptist preacher to open a microbrewery with rows of slot machines and burlesque dancers for entertainment. They will not look at your charts, read the papers you post, or respect dissident research. Whatever you offer as a challenge to “the narrative”, they will counter with repetitious talking points and links to articles from the CDC. Every. Single. Time.

They are the base of support for Biden’s vaccine mandates. No form of coercion is too extreme for their liking – withholding medical care from the unvaccinated, quarantines, fines, prison sentences. They are on board with it all. Heretics must be punished. COVIDian Progressives do not want “normal” to ever come back. Many of them didn’t like “normal” to begin with. They want everything to keep going, and even get worse.

We can pray for them. But we can’t reach them. In the end, if we want to move forward as a society, we have to decidedly beat them.

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Pharmaceutical Companies and Other Enterprises – Pfizer’s full year 2021 sales forecast for its COVID vaccine is $33.5 billion, substantially higher than the original estimate of $26 billion. That forecast included one booster shot, not one every 5 months the way Fauci and Biden want it. Every 5 months. Forever, by the way. Israel already has people getting a second booster, so be prepared that this is coming. Pfizer’s forecast also does not include injecting young children, which is likely to happen shortly. Expect Pfizer to make a lot more money once every single man, woman, and child will be vaxxed on a regular five month schedule.

What would you do for just a billion dollars, much less 34 billion of them? Would you lie? Cheat? Bribe? Falsify studies? Look away from an “acceptable” number of adverse reactions (even deaths)?

Let me ask it another way, what wouldn’t you do for that kind of money? For most people that is a very short list of things. There are people in church with you every Sunday that would kill you and hide your body for a lot less. So why would it be surprising that Pharmaceutical companies, who have sociopathic tendencies to begin with, would be willing to trample law and morality in pursuit of so much lucre?

Not only the companies are making money, but also investors and employees are getting rich(er) by the day. COVID-19 vaccines have created at least nine new billionaires after shares in companies producing the shots skyrocketed. They have a combined net wealth of $19.3 billion. Mega asset management firms Vanguard and BlackRock are the largest stockholders in Pfizer. COVID has been a bonanza for investors. Not only have their pharma investments increased, but COVID interventions also caused record low interest rates and a massive tsunami of money printing. The mega money firms who co-own the world economy never had it so good.

COVID is a gravy train on biscuit wheels. No one onboard wants it to stop rolling. They have money. They have power. They have unlimited greed. And they have millions of true believers providing a moral smokescreen to cover all that up. 

God help us trying to overcome just that much. But there’s more.

Media & Big Tech – The legacy media loves COVID. The Pharma industry spending on advertising topped $6.58 billion in 2020, including over $4.58 billion of spent on TV. But there is more of a financial connection than that. Vanguard and BlackRock (top 2 owners of Pfizer) are the top two owners of Time Warner, Comcast, Disney and News Corp, four of the six media companies that control more than 90% of the U.S. When the bosses are getting rich(er) off the pandemic, smart journalists and media personalities smile and cash checks. To do otherwise is to risk your job at a time when getting a new one could be difficult. The same mega-investors have stakes in all the Big Tech companies as well. That gives them unprecedented influence to censor anything that might derail the gravy train.

Plus, crisis is great for ratings. Nothing attracts eyeballs more than scary fear porn, which explains the prevalence of “click-bait” headlines promising mass death. Even when a reporter risks his employment and dares to ask legitimate questions, the COVIDian mob is quick to come for him. Consider the case of Robert Peston. He wondered on Twitter why the latest vaccine data from Public Health England (PHE) was not getting more attention. The data show that reported infection rates have been higher in the double vaccinated than in the unvaccinated for those aged 40-79 – up to 38% higher in some age bands. Peston probably noticed this trend because he had just come through a COVID infection, despite being double vaccinated. He noted in his Tweet, “And according to leading scientists at least part of the explanation is that vaccine efficacy is not as good as we would like for the Delta variant.”

For daring to report information that cast the vaccines in a negative light, the Twitter COVIDians soon had him reduced to groveling. This episode, and many like it, will not be lost on journalists. Even if the boss doesn’t get you, the mob will. So why not just keep shoveling the COVID narrative indefinitely?

Public Health Bureaucracies and Politicians – Before the pandemic, did you know your county health director? Bet you know ’em now, don’t you? How prominent were the NIH and the CDC in our lives before the “pandemic?” Did you realize that “health orders” could shut down our entire economy? How about your school board? Did you really pay any attention to them before they shuttered the schools and/or put your kids in disgusting, wet masks all year? Did you know the CDC could stop property owners from evicting non-paying tenants? Or that OSHA can make taking a vaccine a condition of employment? Or that state governors could claim a “health crisis” essentially gave them unlimited powers? Or that mayors could close businesses and churches while making you wear a mask just to buy groceries? Heck, COVID has even given Joe Biden the power to threaten governors. COVID is, evidently, way more powerful than federalism.

Our entire system of law and government has been upended. Petty bureaucrats have turned into celebrities whose words are now laws. Politicians have increased the powers of their offices beyond any constitutional boundaries. We measure “THE SCIENCE” by what words fly out of Fauci’s mouth on a given day.

Do you think any of these newly minted tin-pot dictators are anxious for “normal?” Do you think any of them want to see actual “science” see the light of day that might challenge the COVID narrative that is the font of all their power and prestige? Further, politicians love to be seen “doing something” about any given crisis. Their bold and decisive “action” fires up their respective bases. Who wants to go back to boring budget meetings after you have, literally, saved the lives of your voters?

There is also, not surprisingly, money at stake. Many public health bureaucrats leave “public” service and go on to lucrative careers as lobbyists, board members, executives, consultants, etc. There were 1,502 pharmaceutical lobbyists in 2020, 63.58% of whom were former government employees (including former members of Congress). Former FDA Chief under the Trump Administration, Scott Gottlieb, now serves on Pfizer’s Board of Directors. It is even legal for government scientists to collect royalties from vaccines they have worked on, while still remaining in government employ. The whole system is deeply, deeply corrupt.

Which government employees are going to choose telling the public the truth over boarding the gravy train? If you answer “not many,” you would be correct.

Hospitals and Doctors – The more COVID cases and COVID deaths, the more money the hospitals make. Hospitals report adverse vaccine reactions as new COVID cases and rely on inaccurate PCR tests to inflate case numbers as well. These are ways hospitals are maximizing their profits. Hospitals are also refusing to treat COVID, even if attending physicians wish to prescribe a course of treatment. Despite their successful use, monoclonal antibodies, Ivermectin, HCQ and many other treatments are denied to preserve the narrative – only vaccines help. If there are treatments, then there can’t be a justification for the emergency use of experimental vaccines.

RN’s and doctors who speak out about the situation are fired and threatened with loss of license. For the medical establishment, COVID is working. At least as far as the administrators are concerned, and until resignations among the RNs start to shut down facilities. In many hospitals, over 50% of the nursing staff is still unvaccinated. When they leave under pressure to take the jabs, expect hospitals to enter a crisis of Biblical proportions.

The Democratic Party – In early 2020, President Trump was trying to troll China and the Democrats. Talking about the “China virus” fired up his base, had a shot at distracting from impeachment, and boxed the Democrats into their tired habit of shouting “racism.” At first, it seemed to work. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi toured San Francisco’s Chinatown and said there was no reason for anyone to stay away from the area because of coronavirus concerns. For Trump, it must have seemed like a major victory was within his grasp. But then the Democrats flipped the script and became founding members of Team Apocalypse. Some smart person or persons among the Democrats realized that COVID was an opportunity to completely change our voting laws and get away with it.

The result was a less secure election that seems to have enabled voter fraud on a massive scale in some areas via the mail-in balloting system. Also important, mail-in balloting enabled the Democratic base (noted for low enthusiasm) to effortlessly vote from home. The Democrats face an even tougher electoral situation going forward. Joe Biden, and most signature policies of the Democratic Party, are extremely unpopular with the American electorate. The Democratic Machine needs to keep the pandemic going in the hopes COVID can be leveraged to keep themselves in power.

Book - the great resetGlobalists and Global Institutions – There is no doubt that an influential group of globalists, centered around the World Economic Forum and other elite institutions, would like very much to transform the world. The current project for a New World Order goes by the name The Great Reset. The initiative has a book, a web presence, and a following among global politicians that parrot its slogans such as “Build Back Better.” While The Great Reset has some lofty sounding goals, the major purpose among the Global Elite is to make sure that super wealthy people remain so and end up with even more control over everyone and everything – “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.”

Klaus Schwab

COVID has been integral in the endeavor to turn the world into a police state. We covered the basics in this article, which has a lot of supporting links to more information. Here is how Roman Catholic Archbishop Vigano, former Apostolic Nuncio, summed up the goals of The Great Reset and the globalist agenda:

A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their agenda.

The Global Elite would prefer to use Climate Change to drive their agenda, but that failed to be sufficiently scary to serve as cover for transforming society. COVID fit the bill, and they will continue to milk it for all that it is worth. Even if the “vaccines” worked perfectly, the globalists would try to keep the crisis going. They will not let go of COVID unless forced to.

And There’s More – The previous list is not exhaustive. You could find more groups with an interest in the persistence of the “pandemic” with all the various vaccines and “interventions.”

Orthodox Bishops and the Orthodox Church

Prior to COVID, most of us did not realize how uneducated the majority of our bishops are about the modern world. Most have little to no understanding of political and economic concepts such as regulatory capture, inflation, the interlocking nature of global corporate ownership, or even the concept of Baptists and bootleggers that we are talking about here. The bishops (many priests and parish councils as well) accepted all things COVID at face value. If the CDC says something, they lend it moral credence and enforce it on their churches. Further, many bishops routinely denounce as “conspiracy theories” facts which are true. Public cooperation between many of the groups we talked about in this article is not a conspiracy. It can’t be a “conspiracy” if everyone knows about it.

Bishops more than anyone should understand just how dark the heart of man is when corrupted by power and money. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten that lesson when someone is clamoring on about the “common good.” Worse, bishops (even Patriarchs) have used their offices to encourage vaccine uptake and other measures to “get back to normal.” There is a lot of power and money riding on “normal” not returning. So far, our Orthodox leadership seems content to just play along.

You might say that the bishops should ignore politics and economics and instead focus on spiritual matters. You would be wrong. Our churches have been closed by secular dictates. Many are still constrained in their operations. Our ability to practice the Orthodox Faith, as it was handed to us, is in peril. The Orthodox Church embraces voluntary, informed consent for medical procedures, but the ability of unvaccinated Christians to feed their families is in real jeopardy. How long until our freedom of conscience is constrained in other ways? Australia is already building quarantine facilities. New Zealand is living in a permanent lockdown to “slow the spread.” These were once English-speaking democracies with a respect for the rule of law. It is clear that this creeping totalitarianism is threatening to spread here.

The Church is a natural focal point for resistance to the COVID narrative, but only if our bishops (and other leaders) are willing to analyze, understand, and acknowledge what is truly happening.

Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America

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