We have been discussing an article entitled, “A Heartfelt Plea to My Fellow Adventists,” which told the story of a potential convert to Adventism who kept encountering off-putting behavior at the churches she was visiting. In part 1, we discussed six of the issues; in the next installment, we focused on this issue:
“Discussions about the COVID-19 vaccine being the mark of the beast. Carrie’s husband is a doctor who recommends the COVID-19 vaccine to his patients, and comments to this effect left them both upset.”
We discussed the Covid pandemic and the response, which included: (1) the overhyping of the disease to terrify the populace, (2) the wide-ranging and epidemiologically pointless business and school closures, including shutting down houses of worship for many months, (3) the aggressive discouragement of early treatment, (4) the stampeding into an experimental vaccine, (5) the inefficacy and high adverse reaction rate of the vaccine, and (6) the widespread attempts to force people to take the vaccine, even though there was no public health rationale for mandates.
Add to this troubling scenario, (7) the planning for this pandemic represented by “event 201” and similar war-gaming sessions, (8) the high likelihood that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists had engineered it to make it more virulent, and (9) the unprecedented imposition of censorship and narrative control over every aspect of the virus, its origins, the epidemic, the vaccines, and the vaccine side-effects—censorship engaged in by all major media outlets both conventional and “social,” and prodded along by thousands of partisan government agents.
Put all this together and every sane, rational person should be wondering what the reaction to Covid was really about—because it certainly was not about science, medicine, or public health.
The Proving of the Concepts
A widely shared thesis is that what unfolded over the past three years was a “proof of concept,” a real-life test run, or beta test, of several methods and techniques of consolidating wealth and power in the hands of the global elites.
I call these elites the “Hive.” The Hive includes private sector actors—big pharma, big tech, big media, the Davos crowd (Klaus Schwab, George Soros, Bill Gates, and other billionaires who attend the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, each year), Wall Street, the City of London—as well as national and transnational governmental, quasi-governmental, and Non-Governmental organizations—the Chinese Communist Party, the UN, the World Health Organization, the permanent U.S. Government, especially its intelligence gathering (FBI, DOJ, CIA, etc.) and health-related (FDA, CDC, NIH, etc.) agencies, the Center-Left parties in all Western countries, especially the Democrats in the USA.
I use the term “hive” to indicate a group of many independent actors working toward a common purpose, but without an explicit “conspiracy.” Like a beehive or an ant colony, the Hive seems to work with remarkable coordination toward a common goal, without hierarchical control and often without explicit directives.
This is not to say there is no planning; Event 201, the 2019 meeting at which the Trusted News Initiative was formed, and the annual WEF conclaves are all planning and coordination sessions, and there are many others. But most of the actions are not pre-planned, yet a large group of institutions and actors can turn on dime all at once—like a school of fish—and work together toward their goals with astonishing speed and efficiency.
Broadly speaking, the Hive’s aims were to increase their own wealth and power while simultaneously undermining or destroying the rights and freedoms of common citizens, making us more subject to anti-democratic control and oppression. On both counts, the Hive succeeded, probably far better than they could have anticipated or imagined. Below are some of the concepts the Hive wanted to prove, and did prove, during the Covid pandemic.
The last three years revealed that most people were far too willing to give up fundamental rights in exchange for the promise of safety. The Hive needed only to mendaciously insist that we must forfeit our freedom if we would effectively fight the virus, and we all-too-eagerly surrendered our freedom. The Hive’s propaganda was mostly lies, but people swallowed the lies. Concept proved.
The Hive told us that, in order to beat the virus, we had to give up our freedom of speech and expression, especially our freedom to state facts and opinion on social media and elsewhere that went against the Hive’s “official” narrative. So we surrendered our freedom of speech. Concept proved.
The Hive told us that, in order to beat the virus, we had to give up our freedom to congregate for worship, our freedom to sing hymns together, and our freedom to eat together as Christians have been doing since the First Century. So we gave up our freedom of worship. Concept proved.
The Hive told us that, in order to beat the virus, we had to give up our freedom to work and earn a living to support our families, our freedom of movement, our freedom to keep our businesses open. So we surrendered our economic freedom and freedom of movement, and became prisoners in our own houses. Concept proved.
Many who began working from home during the pandemic will never go back to the city centers. The Hive will not be hurt, but owners of commercial real estate in downtown areas will lose; the coming crash in commercial real estate may rival or even surpass in severity the 2008 crash of residential real estate. Concept proved.
Because of arbitrary and epidemiologically irrelevant business closures, people shopped online, and the tech lords—Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg—raked in many extra billions of dollars, even as their remaining brick-and-mortar competition was all but destroyed. The tech lords are of the Hive, whereas local business owners are middle class and typically political opponents of the Hive. Concept proved.
The Hive shut down gyms, health clubs, and local restaurants, causing people to eat junk food at home, packing on pounds and making themselves more vulnerable to Covid, creating a feed-back loop of isolation, fear, dysphoria, illness and death, and further enriching the tech lords and big pharma. Concept proved.
The Hive terrorized people into believing that Covid had a high death rate and that there was no treatment for it other than expensive, organ-destroying drugs like “run-death-is-near,” and that only a vaccine could effectively fight Covid. Sure enough, most people submitted to an inadequately tested, experimental “vaccine” that hijacks your body’s genetic machinery to make copies of a part of the virus—the spike protein—that, by itself, causes serious harm. Concept proved.
For decades it has been suspected, because of the revolving door between government and big business, and the possibility of lucrative employment with the latter after serving in the former, that the FDA really works for the drug companies it is supposed to be policing. This is known as “regulatory capture,” meaning that the industry has effectively taken over the government agency and suborned its regulatory function. No one who has observed the FDA’s actions with regard to the Covid vaccines could ever again think of the FDA as anything other than a subsidiary of Pfizer. The FDA failed us—it failed us abjectly, utterly, and completely—in the hour of our greatest need for it. Concept proved.
It wasn’t just the FDA, but also the CDC, NIH, HHS, and every other part of the government connected with health that failed us. It was the medical profession as a whole. The Left has long since taken over the professional associations, e.g., the AMA, ABA, ALA, etc. The Covid saga was a test of just how top-down the professions have become. The Hive controls the top of all professions, and bet that if doctors were threatened with disciplinary actions and de-licensure, they would fall in line behind refusing to treat Covid and ignoring the horrific adverse reaction profile of the Covid “vaccines” which is several orders of magnitude worse than any vaccine in the history of vaccination. They were right. Concept proved.
Most medical research is funded by the government, mainly through the NIH which has a budget for Fiscal Year 2023 of almost $50 billion. With that enormous war chest, those—Anthony Fauci and others—who control the money and dole it out to researchers can largely control the research and publishing agenda. Additionally, the drug companies spend about $40 billion a year on advertising and promotion, a chunk of which goes to publications of various types. The Hive figured that because it pays for almost everything published in “peer reviewed” medical and scientific journals, it could either keep counter-narrative studies from being published at all, or delay publication until their goals for the vaccine were achieved. They were largely, although not completely, successful. Concept proved.
One of the biggest scandals of the Covid saga was that Covid-19 is man-made, a genetically engineered virus, effectively a bioweapon. It was a Hive project from first to last, funded by the NIH, DARPA, the CCP, and probably other Hive elements we do not yet know about. The NIH’s Anthony Fauci was able to use his control of the research-funding purse-strings to suppress and cover up—for the critical first couple of years—the human origins of Covid-19. He was aided in the cover-up by Hive media.
The Hive bet that, with the owners and titans of both legacy media and social media firmly ensconced in the Hive, they could nullify the West’s traditional and (in the U.S.) constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press. They figured that although there were other social media platforms, FaceBook, Twitter, and Google/Youtube had an effective monopoly, and that if dissenting voices could be throttled on these platforms, the counter-narrative could be strangled in the cradle and the “official” narrative would be protected. (They banned President Trump from Twitter and then, just to play it safe, they de-platformed Parler.) Concept proved.
The Hive knew what most Americans do not yet know, which is that the social media companies, although owned by private citizens through large, publicly traded corporations, are in a covert partnership with the intelligence community (IC). The IC subsidizes social media because it incorporates the data social media generates into the IC’s panopticon surveillance operation which, since the “Patriot Act” was passed after 9/11, has been aimed inwardly at the American people. They figured that, since there was already a covert partnership between the IC and social media, they could, with impunity, task thousands of federal agents to monitor our posts, and notify the tech companies to censor anything counter-narrative. So far the plan has succeeded spectacularly, First Amendment notwithstanding. Concept proved.
The Hive used their control of the media and censorship apparatus to cover up the fact that Covid is less dangerous to children than seasonal flu, and imply that children and youth were seriously at risk, and, sure enough, many allowed their children to be given a clot shot that might kill them, whereas Covid by itself never would. Concept proved.
In 2020, Hive operatives (Marc Elias and his team of “Lawfare” attorneys) convinced courts and/or legislatures in many states, including the key swing states that, because of Covid, voters could not be expected to risk going to the polls where their identity and eligibility to vote could be verified. So ballots were printed by the millions and mailed out, where they were harvested by paid agents and deposited in unmonitored drop boxes by the bunches, usually in the dead of night. In such a system, there is no way to verify anything, and the potential for fraud is almost unlimited. Thus were the 2020 and 2022 general elections rigged and stolen. Concept proved.
Given the ballot-harvesting system, candidates do not matter. With a good ballot-harvesting machine in place, a badly brain-damaged stroke victim can win a statewide senate race over a charismatic heart surgeon. Going forward, elections will have nothing to do with candidates, debates, political advertising, issues, or party platforms. They will not measure voter sentiment, but will indicate only who has the best ballot-harvesting operation. Given their decade-long head start (including perfecting ballot-harvesting machines in California, Oregon and Washington), that will likely be the Democrats for quite a while. Thanks to Covid and its planned over-hyping, the Hive has swept away, for the time being, any electoral obstacles to the implementation of its political program. Concept proved.
The Vaccine Passport
One of the concepts the Hive desperately wanted to prove was a vaccine passport, which is a form of proof—preferably digital, preferably a smart phone app—that the holder has tested negative for, or been vaccinated against, a disease. Such proof would be required before entering a building, boarding a plane, eating at a restaurant, going to a movie theater, or working out at a gym. There would be a central, official registry of the vaccinated, and the registry would communicate with your phone app.
The World Health Organization issued a hundred-page document discussing the technical and legal aspects of a vaccine passport, and an American coalition consisting of Bill Gates, Oracle, and the Mayo Clinic began developing another vaccine passport concept.
Long after it could be argued with a straight face that they had any relationship to public health, the “Biden Administration” kept vaccine mandates and entry restrictions in place, because they wanted to prove the concept of a vaccine passport. You do not need a vaccine passport if vaccination is not mandatory, so the mandates had to stay in place.
Vaccine passports by themselves are an obnoxious imposition on a free people, but when combined with other systems, including (1) a social credit score and (2) a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), they would give government frightening power over everyone, all but extinguishing personal liberty. Such a joint system is now technically feasible.
The Social Credit System
It is no secret that our Western ruling elites envy and idolize the Chinese Communist Party’s extremely thorough, carefully thought-out totalitarian control over the vast population of China. The Hive would love to exercise that same level of control over the citizens of Western countries.
One of the CCP’s means of control is the social credit system it has been developing for about a decade. The system monitors each individual’s support for the communist regime, as well as other indicia of good behavior and good citizenship. Each person has a running score, just like people in the West have a credit score that is tracked and monitored by the three credit bureaus.
The ranking system is controlled by the CCP’s economics planning team, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the People's Bank of China, and the Chinese court system. The system scores companies, non-profits, NGOs, and government organizations as well as individuals, and is being imposed in a piecemeal fashion, with pilot programs in many urban areas. It will soon be universal in China.
Infractions include bad driving, smoking in non-smoking zones, buying items the government deems “frivolous,” buying too many video games, and spending too much time playing video games. But most of the infractions are related to speech and communications. Posting “fake news” is an infraction; posting unapproved comments on social media platforms is an infraction.
Parenthetically, I note that during the past three years, those of us who post to social media such as Facebook or YouTube have a gotten a preview of the social credit system, as the censors at those sites (as well as the FBI agents who also monitor social media) have repeatedly struck our content, and given us various “warnings” “fact checks” “time outs,” etc. (The Leftists reading this won’t have any idea what I’m talking about, because the Left is seldom censored on social media, but many of you will understand from first-hand experience.)
What happens when your “social credit score” falls too low? You are not allowed to travel. By the end of 2018, communist officials had banned people 17.5 million people from purchasing flights. The CCP also denies people luxury options, like business-class train tickets and high-end hotels.
They will also prevent you, or your children, from going to college. In 2017, Seventeen people who refused to serve in the military were barred from enrolling in higher education or even continuing studies in high school. In July of 2018, a Chinese university denied a slot to an incoming freshman, because his father had a bad social credit score. The negative sanctions only get worse from there, and likely include imprisonment, slavery in a work camp, and becoming an involuntary organ donor.
The Coming Digital Currency
The World Economic Forum, and hence many Western governments including Great Britain under Rishi Sunak and the “Biden Administration,” are strongly pushing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). All money would be digital; cash would be outlawed. There would be only one bank with deposits, the central bank, which, in the United States is the Federal Reserve, the “Creature from Jekyll Island.”
The advantage of a CBDC is that there would be no bank failures. The Fed can create money at will by pushing a button; they could create as much money as they would need to bail themselves out (it might cause inflation, but the Fed is causing rapid inflation now by creating so much money). A CBDC would also eliminate bank runs, because (a) see above, there would be no bank failures, (b) there would be nowhere else for depositors to put their money, there being no other institutions accepting demand deposits, and (c) no one could withdraw cash because there will be no cash, just digits, ones and zeros in cyberspace.
The disadvantage (from my point of view, not the government’s) would be complete and total loss of freedom and privacy. The government would be able to monitor or track every penny you spent, where you spent it, and what you spent it on. They could prevent you giving money to disapproved persons like Canadian truckers, and, if you are a disapproved person (say, a Sabbath-keeper), prevent you getting any money.
Forget going on the lam; that would be a thing of the past. Even if there were a device on which you could store your digital currency that is not location-tracked 24/7 as your cell phone is, every time you bought gasoline or a bag of potato chips, your location would pop up on the Fed’s computer, and government agents would be dispatched to collect you. If you don’t want the government to know where you are, you must throw away your device, and beg, borrow, barter, or steal everything you need.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has called digital currency a “high priority project,” and the “Biden Administration” issued an Executive Order in March, 2022, elevating creation of a CBDC to “the highest urgency.”
Why is there such a push for central bank digital currency? To answer that question, we need to review something that happened in Canada just over a year ago.
The Great Canadian Bank Heist
Last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (or Justin Castro, if you respect the patriarchal convention of giving a child his father’s surname) was concept-proving an unnecessary vaccine mandate; any truckers who hauled to and from the United States had to be vaccinated before they were allowed to cross the U.S./Canada border in either direction. But this time there was substantial resistance; the truckers did not want to be injected with a useless, dangerous clot shot just to be able to work and provide for their families. They went on strike and shut down several strategic bridges and border-crossings.
Their protest was entirely peaceful and reasonable. Nevertheless, on Monday, February 14, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act (formerly the War Measures Act) by unilateral decree. Soon thereafter he began using brutal violence to break up the truckers’ protest.
But Trudeau and his enforcer Chrystia Freeland (a former WEF “young global leader,” as are half Trudeau’s cabinet) did something beyond ordering the Mounties to ride roughshod over peaceful protesters. They started freezing bank accounts.
Canadians who had not been charged with or convicted of any crime, much less judicially sentenced to any fine or asset forfeiture, awoke to find their bank accounts frozen; they had no ability to access and spend their own money.
The seizures were nakedly partisan. On February 17, David Lametti, the “justice minister” in Trudeau’s government, said—on television—that if you hold the wrong political views, you should be worried about your bank account:
“If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars, to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried.”
Watching this on Tucker Carlson’s show, I said, “this is going to start a bank run.”
It had already started, and by February 16, less than two days after the account seizures began, Canada’s banks shut down online access to accounts. The banks whose customers lost online access included the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the Bank of Montreal (BOM), Scotiabank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC).
From then on, you had to get into your car and drive to the bank to withdraw or transfer money. But obviously people did just that, because on Wednesday, February 23rd, nine days after he invoked emergency powers—and just two after he won a vote in the Canadian House of Commons affirming his use of those powers—Trudeau pulled the plug on himself. He announced that the state of emergency was over.
"The situation is no longer an emergency, therefore the federal government will be ending the use of the emergencies act. We are confident that existing laws and bylaws are sufficient to keep people safe."
Again, Trudeau had gone to the trouble to secure legislative approval for his emergency powers just two days before. Why the sudden change of course? What happened?
What happened is that Trudeau’s bank heist had caused a bank run. Realizing that their money was no longer protected from Leftist thuggery from the likes of Fidel Castro, Jr., thousands of Canadians moved their money outside of Canada, or just withdrew cash and carried the paper money out of the bank.
Because the fractional reserve banking system operates on narrow margins, a loss of even ten percent of funds on deposit would ruin the Canadian banking system and cause widespread bank failures. What Trudeau was doing threatened to devastate the entire Canadian economy.
Some very powerful people took Trudeau aside and said, “You’ve got to stop this. Now!”
And he did.
The lesson of this episode is that there is freedom—and an important check on governmental power—in cash and in a multiplicity of banks.
By contrast, when a CBDC is established, and one institution monopolizes all demand deposits, there will be no freedom and no check on state oppression.
With cash, you have privacy; the government does not know what you’re spending your money on, or with whom you are transacting business. The ruling elites hate that; they want absolute control. Said Augustin Carstens, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements:
“We don’t know who’s using a $100 bill today and we don’t know who’s using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that… and that makes a huge difference.”
Our rulers lust for absolute control over our finances. The Trudeaus of the world (and our American politicians are no better) covet the power to freeze us out of the economy with just a mouse-click, and they will move heaven and earth to get that power.
The Ultimate Tool of Totalitarian Control
A vaccine passport, a social credit system, and a Central Bank Digital Currency—put these three together and you have the ultimate tool of totalitarian control. You also, at long last, have the means to make Revelation 13:16-17 a reality:
“[the 2nd beast] also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.”
Just about every biblically literate person understands this. On a Church of God blog it was written of the vaccine mandates:
“We can only wonder if this potential mandate is a precursor to what will take place in the Tribulation. God’s prophetic word tells us the false prophet will cause “all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name” (Rev. 13:16-17).”
* * *
“All of these technologies will merge at the intersection of Big Data, big banks, Big Tech and big government. Your social credit score will now be tied in not only to your Internet activity but to your bank account and your vaccine status. Welcome to the Great Reset, a/k/a New World Order.
“Add in advances in AI [artificial intelligence] and facial recognition and millions of surveillance cameras and you are talking about a lockdown slave state that makes George Orwell’s 1984 look like a picnic in the park.
* * *
“The type of controls prophesied in Revelation 13:16-18 were not possible when Jesus inspired the Apostle John to pen the above. But it is possible now with digital technology. Digital passports and/or some type of national identity card may well be tools of the Beast of the Sea (the man of sin) and the Beast from the Earth (the final Antichrist).
“The time of 666 control of nearly all aspects of buying and selling is coming.”
The Church of God gets it. Why don’t we get it?
Rod Dreher, who was raised a Methodist, converted to Catholicism in his 20s, and about ten years later converted to Orthodox Christianity, gets it, too. In the context of a discussion about CBDCs, he writes:
“This is happening, right now. I remember when I was a kid, reading a Christian End Times book, and wondering how they could ever come up with a system in which you could not buy or sell unless you had the ‘mark of the Beast’ — meaning, symbolically, that you were a slave to a global system (in the Roman Empire, slaves had tattoos on their foreheads or hands, to mark them as property). Well, now I know. And so do you.”
With all due respect to Janel Tasker and her friend, if we are not talking about the mark of the beast in connection with the Covid saga and the resulting push toward vaccine passports and a CBDC, we are not really Adventists. This is what we should be talking about, because this is happening right now, and it is fulfilling Bible prophecy. Talking about Bible prophecies fulfilled is what Adventists do.
We Must Destroy the Unvaccinated!
There is a final connection between the Covid saga and the mark of the beast: the Hive needed to gin up hatred for those of us who would not take the vaccine, so that the public would consent to making us second-class citizens, with no right to work or hold a job, or serve in the military, no freedom of movement, no right to travel, no right to shop or eat in restaurants, or go to moves, etc. There was even discussion—and limited implementation—of making the non-vaccinated wear an identifying marker such as a badge, wristband, or armband (although not a star of David).
The Hive-controlled media dutifully began the “othering” of those of us who did not want to take the clot shot. The media, all those conspirators who joined the Orwellianly named “Trusted News Initiative,” carried on a campaign of demonization against anyone who was “vaccine hesitant” stating that we were endangering our own families, children, neighbors, and friends. We were the undesirables, the untouchables.
Prominent Adventist voices joined in, with one Andrews professor writing, in an official church publication, that Adventists who resisted vaccination should be treated as second-class citizens:
“I'm not arguing for mandatory vaccination. But I am saying that your choice not to be vaccinated will appropriately come with limitations on community participation, work and travel.”
Ironically, the “othering” and demonization was done in the name of the public good, in the name of kindness, thoughtfulness, and consideration for others. As Naomi Wolf expressed it:
“You know, ‘You’ve got to exclude those people for the good of the community,’ or ‘You’ve got to mask yourself and your child to save your child.’ This really brilliantly upended American culture because it cast freedom as selfish.”
It was all propaganda, of course; the unvaccinated were no more likely to spread the Wuhan Flu than the vaccinated. But the demonization of those who resisted was part of the plan. Another concept proved.
We can expect this same type of media-wide campaign of demonization to go hand in hand with all futures attempts to impose Revelation 13 economic and banking controls on the populace.
“. . . in the future the problem of buying and selling will be a very serious one.” Last Day Events, p. 99.