What happened at the worldwide freedom rally yesterday
NYC edition
Yesterday was a worldwide freedom demonstration to protest vaccine mandates. I went to the one in NYC.
Here’s some footage from the march:
Some context: what’s been going on in NYC
There are vaccine mandates for teachers, healthcare workers, police, firefighters, and other city workers. I don’t know the exact details of what is being mandated and how, but more here:
Mayor de Blasio Announces Vaccine Mandate for New York City Workforce
and here:
NYC announces vaccine mandate for NYPD, FDNY, city workers
These mandates apply even to those who have already gained immunity from infection.
This, despite the fact that the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission. And now, apparently, they don’t even seem to reliably prevent hospitalization or death (hear Fauci on that here).
People have to show their vaccine cards to eat inside restaurants in NYC. And there’s this truly pointless thing that happens in restaurants where people put on masks to enter a restaurant, but take them off when they sit down. People often then put the masks back on when they get up from their seats to go to the restroom.
The whole thing is utterly pointless.
Everyone also wears masks inside most stores, though I occasionally see people without them. The stores have inconsistent standards: some have signs that say everyone needs to be masked, others say you should wear a mask if you’re unvaccinated, which ignores all the evidence that the vaccinated can transmit as much virus as the unvaccinated (here and here). Some stores don’t have a sign about masks at all, but people wear masks anyway.
People have just accepted that this is the new normal.
Almost everyone wears masks on the subway. I took the subway to the rally and on the way there noticed that I was the only one not wearing one, until one maskless lady got on about halfway through my 30 min trip (she sat next to me).
One thing that has improved is that fewer people wear masks outdoors compared to last year. I’d say about 20-25% of the people you see outdoors are wearing masks at any given time. Interestingly this percentage is a lot higher in neighborhoods like Chinatown.
Things I liked or didn’t like, about the rally
Things I liked:
The energy and emotion there was palpable. People are pissed at what’s been going on.
People were there for all different reasons. Some were there because they, or people they knew, were fired for not wanting to take the vaccine. Others were there because they believed that adverse events from the vaccines were being censored or grossly underreported. Others had been vaccinated, but opposed medical segregation, mandates, and/or vaccine passports, on principal.
So far as I know this protest was peaceful, and I don’t mean “mostly peaceful” in the CNN sense, but that in actuality, there were no fights or burning buildings, etc.
There were some great speakers (more on that later).
Things I could have done without:
There was a lady with no shirt on. She just had a pair of stickers covering her nipples. I think that sort of thing deters from being taken seriously.
There were a few flags that were either for or against certain presidents. Now, I think people should be free to express how they feel about presidents or former presidents, but it’s polarizing, and having a pro-Trump or “Fuck Joe Biden” flag alienates a lot of people, especially in NYC. It also makes people think that the rally is about Red vs Blue, which is not what it was supposed to be about.
This brings me to:
“White supremacists”
I haven’t been able to find much coverage on this rally from large media outlets, but if they did, I wouldn’t be surprised if it painted a picture of mostly MAGA types or white supremacists or fascists.
This is what leads to ridiculous comments like these:
I don’t think this person saw the rally first hand, because what I saw was a very diverse group of people of all different racial and political backgrounds.
I’m sure I don’t agree with everything that everyone thought there, but I think that what united us was that we were vehemently opposed to mandates, and fed up with all the lies we’d been told about COVID and the vaccines.
There were some Proud Boys members at the rally; their flags are the yellow and black ones in the picture above.
I actually never knew what they stood for, so I went up to a group of them and asked.
They told me that they were not at all how the media presented them and that they were about protecting freedom, and protecting Americans of any race, orientation, or creed.
One of them handed me a glossy double-printed card:
They also told me that there were worldwide chapters and that the head of their local chapter was a Korean guy.
Last year, I had learned that the head of one of the Florida chapters was a black Cuban, which had introduced some cognitive dissonance at the time.
There were a few questions I had about what was on the card and they graciously answered them.
In the card above, 1a and 2a refer to the constitutional amendments.
I wasn’t sure what was meant by “Venerate the housewife” on the postcard so I looked it up on their website:
This is not a mandate to women on how they should live their lives. Rather, we acknowledge, appreciate, and exalt any woman who would choose to stay at home, raise her children, tend her hearth, and be her husband’s first and most ardent ally. She creates human life, shapes it, and builds the communities in which we live.
The part about being “her husband’s first and most ardent ally” irks me a tad because it’s a bit too reminiscent of Eve being the sidekick of Adam, but I can get behind the general sentiment that there’s nothing wrong with a woman choosing to be a housewife.
Here’s what their site says about the “Reinstate the spirit of Western Chauvinism” part:
We adopt the blatant and unapologetic promotion of Western Civilization, which is characterized by a secular government whose legal code is informed by Judeo-Christian ethics and whose origins lie in the Greco-Roman tradition of the Republic. The primary values of the West are personal liberty, self-determination, the sovereignty of the individual, and the sanctity of life.
It seems to me that having the word “chauvinism” was a bad PR move, but maybe it was intentional because they’re anti-PC.
Whatever your thoughts on their beliefs, they didn’t seem at all like what the media made them out to be.
None of this surprises me at this point, after seeing how the media blatantly lies, like how they handled the Rittenhouse trial, as well as many other things.
Words from dissidents
Before the ~7 mile march, there were some really great speakers.
These included:
Naomi Wolf, a prominent feminist who served as a political advisor to the Bill Clinton and Al Gore presidential campaigns
Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU
Chris Masterjohn, PhD in Nutritional Sciences and former Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College
Kevin Jenkins, a health disparities activist
A healthcare worker who was fired for not taking the jab
A firefighter who was fired for not taking the jab
And many others
Here are excerpts from Naomi Wolf’s speech:
I wrote an essay and a book twelve years ago, that said that there is a map to tyranny, and that tyrants always do the same ten things… We’ve seen that, step after step after step, escalating in the last two years.
And now I cannot believe, but I also do believe because I warned you, that I’m standing in a city, in which I can’t even go indoors with my children to have a meal, a city in which the first responders, our police, our firefighters, our healthcare workers, are facing illegal violations of their bodily integrity that history will look back on and say, this is a crime, of national and global proportions.
Everything about the medical mandates is a crime. It’s against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to divide people, the way we are divided in this city. It’s against the Nurenberg code, to experiment on human beings medically, against their will. It’s against the Americans with Disabilities Act, that I even have to disclose my medical status to anyone.
It’s crime after crime, and the courts are starting to say so.
But we need you to keep speaking up, and reminding us what it means to be Americans.
And to uphold the rule of law and the constitution.
Excerpts from Chris Masterjohn’s speech:
What does it mean to bring light into the world?
Number 1. It means to speak with honesty when the world around us is telling lies.
Number 2. It means to love one another, when those who have power over us want us to fear and hate and shame one another.
When they say this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, this is darkness. It’s darkness because it’s a lie, and it’s darkness because it feeds division.
Speaking the truth is light, and the truth is that the most recent UK COVID-19 vaccine reports says that there are three times more people in the UK dying of COVID who are fully vaccinated, than who are unvaccinated.
Telling this truth is light. But we don’t have this national data in the USA because the CDC won’t release it. This is darkness.
But… when scientists and lawyers come together to join forces and submit Freedom of Information Act requests to demand the data, this brings light into the world.
The FDA has 329,000 pages of documents that it used to approve the Pfizer vaccine.
This Monday it asked a federal judge in Texas to allow it to release the documents 500 pages per month.
At that rate, the full data would come out in the year 2076. Hiding this data for fifty five years is darkness.
He continued:
We have an idea what they’re hiding already. Because we know that Maddie de Garay was a child in the Pfizer covid vaccine trial who is in a wheelchair for life eating out of a feeding tube, and Pfizer reported it as a stomach ache! Calling this a stomach ache is darkness. But telling the truth about this story, and speaking her name, Maddie de Garay, brings light into the world.
We know that on Nov 2nd, the British Medical Journal reported a whistleblower who was a regional director for the Pfizer vaccine trial, who had evidence they were falsifying data. This was done by a contractor…
She told the FDA, later that day she got fired, the FDA did nothing and turned a blind eye. Turning a blind eye to falsified data is darkness. But telling this story brings light into the world.
Here are excerpts from the speech by Prof. Mark Crispin Miller, who by the way, teaches a very interesting sounding course at NYU called Mass Persuasion and Propaganda.
He started his speech with a joke:
“Wow look at all these Nazis.”
He continued:
I’ve always identified as being on the left. Well I don’t even recognize the left anymore.
Later:
When I was on the left, we championed the working class. What calls itself the left now hates the working class… They detest, they despise, the working class. They call them deplorables…
What calls itself the left is on the wrong side in this struggle. They support the bio-fascist world order. They call those who object to it far right. What is this? We’re talking about a globalist order that has mandated the forcible injection of 5-11 year old children. 82,000 have so far been injected in New York City.
He compared the present day to what he saw happening during the Vietnam war:
So we were against the war. I’m still against the war, I’m against the big war, and I think the people now are against the big war, just as the people came to be against the war in Vietnam.
You know why they turned against it? It was not because of people like me marching on the streets… The reason why the people came to oppose the war in Vietnam was that the casualty rate was so high. So many people had lost somebody to that war, in one way or another… Everybody knew somebody.
The story that they were hearing from the media, that it was going well, that there was a light at the end of the tunnel- they stopped believing it, because it was a lie. And they could see with their own eyes it was a lie.
The same thing is happening now… So many people have been injured by these shots, and it’s been happening all around us. It’s impossible to believe. This unprecedented falsehood machine that we call the media.
More on the left:
When I was on the left we were in favor of civil rights. Remember that?
They’re all stoutly supporting, sometimes violently, and maliciously supporting, segregation, all over the country and the world, as the vaccinated and unvaccinated are kept completely separate.
This is Jim Crow squared. This is absolutely wrong.
Lastly:
What calls itself the left, is actually far right.
We the people are right because we read the science. We are right because we believe the evidence of our own senses.
We are right because we will be on the right side of history.
And we are right because we no longer see social and political reality through the deceptive prism of left vs right. Screw that, it’s over.
We will win.
If you want to see more of the speeches, you can watch them on Chris Masterjohn’s youtube channel.
[UPDATE 11/21/21: Actually he just posted edited clips here, which might be more manageable than the raw footage]
“But they’re conspiracy theorists”
By the way, if you google Miller or some of the other people who spoke, you’ll probably come across articles saying that they are “conspiracy theorists,” with the implication that these people are “beyond the pale,” so we shouldn’t listen to anything they have to say.
Even if some of them were “conspiracy theorists,” does that mean that we can’t agree with some of the things they have to say?
Also do we think that people in power never collude to do bad things for their own gain? Cause if you think that sometimes they do, you’re saying that sometimes, people conspire. I guess that makes you a conspiracy theorist?
I just don’t take these kinds of accusations from stupid media articles seriously anymore. I’ve seen too many cases where (1) they’ve either flat-out lied about or misrepresented what a person thinks, or (2) the so-called conspiracy theorist was later proven to be right.
You'll recall that last year, anyone who said that SARS-CoV-2 might have leaked from a lab, was labelled a conspiracy theorist. Today, the lab leak hypothesis is very much taken seriously.
So, do not outright believe media articles when they say someone is a conspiracy theorist.
You need to look into it yourself.
And yes, that will mean that you’ll probably need to listen to what the purported conspiracy theorist said, in his or her own words.
Don’t worry, it won’t pollute your mind. Just because you hear what they have to say, won’t mean you’ll become “one of them.” You might just learn something.
Scenes
Here are some more photos and videos, starting with some signs that I liked:
Scenes from the rally in Rome, Italy:
From Zagreb, Croatia:
From Perth, Australia:
From Japan:
From Austria:
Thanks for reading.