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The Right to Bodily Integrity: Nobody Wins and We All Lose in the COVID-19 Showdown

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Freedom is never free.

There is always a price—always a sacrifice—that must be made in order to safeguard one’s freedoms.

Where that transaction becomes more complicated is when one has to balance the rights of the individual with the needs of the community.

Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau envisioned the social contract between the individual and a nation’s rulers as a means of finding that balance. Invariably, however, those in power grow greedy, and what was intended to be a symbiotic relationship with both sides benefitting inevitably turns into a parasitic one, with a clear winner and a clear loser.

We have seen this vicious cycle play out over and over again throughout the nation’s history.

Just look at this COVID-19 pandemic: the whole sorry mess has been so overtly politicized, propagandized, and used to expand the government’s powers (and Corporate America’s bank balance) that it’s difficult at times to distinguish between what may be legitimate health concerns and government power grabs.

After all, the government has a history of shamelessly exploiting national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes. Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, civil unrest, economic instability, pandemics, natural disasters: the government has been taking advantage of such crises for years now in order to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.

This COVID-19 pandemic is no different.

Yet be warned: we will all lose if this pandemic becomes a showdown between COVID-19 vaccine mandates and the right to bodily integrity.

It doesn’t matter what your trigger issue is—whether it’s vaccines, abortion, crime, religion, immigration, terrorism or some other overtly politicized touchstone used by politicians as a rallying cry for votes—we should all be concerned when governments and businesses (i.e., the Corporate State) join forces to compel individuals to sacrifice their right to bodily integrity (which goes hand in hand with the right to conscience and religious freedom) on the altar of so-called safety and national security.

That’s exactly what’s unfolding right now, with public and private employers using the threat of termination to force employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Unfortunately, legal protections in this area are limited.

While the Americans with Disabilities Act protects those who can prove they have medical conditions that make receiving a vaccination dangerous, employees must be able to prove they have a sensitivity to vaccines.

Beyond that, employees with a religious objection to the vaccine mandate can try to request an exemption, but even those who succeed in gaining an exemption to a vaccine mandate may have to submit to routine COVID testing and mask requirements, especially if their job involves contact with other individuals.

Under the First Amendment and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, individuals have a right of conscience and/or religious freedom to ask that their sincere religious beliefs against receiving vaccinations be accommodated. To this end, The Rutherford Institute has issued guidance and an in-depth fact sheet and model letter for those seeking a religious exemption to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate in the workplace. The Rutherford Institute’s policy paper, “Know Your Rights: How To Request a Religious Accommodation for COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates in the Workplace,” goes into the details of how and why and in which forums one can request such accommodation, but there is no win-win scenario.

As with all power plays of this kind, the ramifications of empowering the government and its corporate partners to force individuals to choose between individual liberty and economic survival during a so-called state of “emergency” can lead to terrifying results.

At a minimum, it’s a slippery slope that justifies all manner of violations in the name of national security, the interest of the state and the so-called greater good.

If the government—be it the President, Congress, the courts or any federal, state or local agent or agency—can willfully disregard the rights of any particular person or group of persons, then that person becomes less than a citizen, less than human, less than deserving of respect, dignity, civility and bodily integrity. He or she becomes an “it,” a faceless number that can be tallied and tracked, a quantifiable mass of cells that can be discarded without conscience, an expendable cost that can be written off without a second thought, or an animal that can be bought, sold, branded, chained, caged, bred, neutered and euthanized at will.

That’s exactly where we find ourselves now: caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state.

All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.

Our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs. MORE.

Bank of Amerika’s Racial Reeducation Program

By Christopher Rufo/City Journal

The financial giant teaches that the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work.”

Bank of America Corporation has implemented a racial reeducation program that claims the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work,” instructing white employees in particular to “decolonize [their] mind[s]” and “cede power to people of color.”

Earlier this year, Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte market president Charles Bowman announced a new “equity” initiative called United in Action, in partnership with the United Way of Central Carolinas. According to documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, BOA executives launched the initiative by encouraging employees to participate in their “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge,” a race-training program funded in part by the bank and built on the principles of critical race theory, including intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.

On the program’s first day, Bank of America teaches employees that the United States is a “racialized society” that “use[s] race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression,” which “give[s] privileges to white people resulting in disadvantages to people of color.” According to the training program, all whites—“regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages”—are “living a life with white skin privileges.” Even children are implicated in the system of white supremacy: according to the program materials, white toddlers “develop racial biases by ages three to five” and “should be actively taught to recognize and reject the ‘smog’ of white privilege.”

Over the next three days, Bank of America teaches employees about intersectionality, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and systemic racism. “Racism in America idolizes White physical features and White values as supreme over those of others,” the program asserts. As a result of being part of the “dominant culture,” whites are more likely to “have more limited imagination,” “experience fear, anxiety, guilt, or shame,” “contribute to racial tension, hatred, and violence in our homes, communities, and world,” and, subsequently, “react in broken ways as a result.” People of color, on the other hand, cannot be racist, because “racism is used to justify the position of the dominant group . . . and to uphold white supremacy and superiority.” Therefore, the discussion guide claims, “reverse racism and discrimination are not possible.”

On days five and six, Bank of America encourages white employees to confront their “white privilege” and “white fragility,” in order to “discover where [they] are on the privilege spectrum” and “if [they] exhibit ‘white fragility’ traits.” As part of the program, Bank of America employees take a series of diagnostic tests, in which they assess their racial and sexual identities, check a series of boxes to identify their “white privilege,” and probe racist attitudes that could contribute to their “white fragility.” MORE.

The Soviet Union Is Gone, But The Young Yearn For Socialism

Via Zero Hedge

American and British Young Know No History and Want Socialism

Fast forward to today, thirty years later. It is as if the last hundred years of the socialist chamber of horrors, not only in the Soviet Union but in all other places around the world in which governments have widely nationalized the means of production and imposed forms of centralized planning, has practically never happened. The brutality and barbarity of the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Hitler’s Germany has been rightly highlighted in many movies and documentaries in the decades since the end of the Second World War. But compare these with the paucity of similar films and documentaries about the Soviet Union and similar socialist regimes and their disastrous central planning systems, with all their tyranny, cruelty, mass murder, corruption and gradations of privileges and perks for the huge network of Party members and elite bureaucrats who ran all facets of the command and control economy.

Recent opinion surveys by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in the United States on, “U.S. Attitudes Toward Socialism, Communism, and Collectivism,” (October 2020) and by the Institute of Economic Affairs in the United Kingdom in a report, Left Turn Ahead? Surveying Attitudes of Young People Towards Capitalism and Socialism (July 2021) about people’s views about the socialist and capitalist systems, especially among the younger segments of the population, make it clear that knowledge and understanding about what socialist reality has been like has gone down an Orwellian memory hole.

In the United States, a quarter of those surveyed, 26 percent, said that they would like to see the end of the capitalist system and its replacement with a socialist economy. Among those under 40 years of age, the number preferring a socialist society rose to between 31 and 35 percent. Ten percent in this age group consider the ideas in Marx’s Communist Manifesto to be a better guarantor of a free and equitable society than the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. About 30 percent of those below 40 said that Marxism is a “positive” movement against injustice and for management of the economy for the good of all.

When asked, “What is a socialist system?” 31 percent said it involves government ownership of the means of production, while another 32 percent said private enterprise plus government regulation and the welfare state. Six percent said that socialism is a “new system” that has never been tried.

In the United Kingdom, 67 percent of those in the younger categories of the British population said they would like to live under a socialist economic system, and identified socialism with the words, “workers,” “public,” “equal,” and “fair.” Capitalism was identified by 75 percent in the survey with global warming, destruction of the planet, and racism, and 73 percent said that capitalism fosters “greed,” “selfishness,” and “materialism,” compared to socialism, which cultivates “compassion, cooperation, and solidarity.” A large majority said that socialism had never really been tried and that places like Venezuela have been instances in which the socialist idea was simply poorly implemented and therefore not a real test of a socialist system.

These attitudes and beliefs among the younger generations on both sides of the Atlantic do not bode well for the future of freedom. The ideas of one generation often become the implemented policies of the next one. If neither knowledge of, nor appropriate lessons from the reality of socialism-in-practice over the last one hundred years are learned, we may very well be condemned to repeat the past with all of its social, economic, and politically damaging consequences. (See my article, “Socialism: Marking a Century of Death and Destruction”.) MORE.

Top Google Engineer Abandons Company, Reveals Big Tech Rewrote Algos To Target Trump

Via Zero Hedge

A Big Tech whistleblower said Google altered its algorithm in order to ensure that negative stories from the establishment media about former Present Donald Trump were what people saw when using the highest-trafficked website on the internet.

Zach Vorhies, who previously worked for Google, said in an interview with The Epoch Times that the tech titan specifically tailored its news algorithm to harm the former president.

Vorhies has written a book about his experience working at Google. He said he wanted to “take conspiracy theory and turn it into conspiracy fact” by sharing the practices he saw as a longtime former employee, working on both Google and YouTube projects.

“People kind of suspect this is happening. That certain keywords trigger things within the algorithm … That is actually happening,” he told the Times, noting that newly written stories about Trump were digitally married with older ones to ensure they remained at the top of search results.

“They actually have that. They show like a graph, a tree, and they say actually this forms a super-story that spans eight days,” he said.

“So, with the Trump/[former FBI Director James] Comey thing, they’re able to keep the stories boosted all the way at the top because the algorithm was able to fold a news story into the stories that were preceding it in the last five days,” Vorhies added.

“They allowed the mainstream media to structure their stories so that they could remain at the top of their search index, of their news index,” he continued.

Vorhies’ new book is called “Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Exposé of Big Tech Censorship.” The book dropped earlier this month.

“The madness of Big Tech and their attempt to mold our reality into a version compatible with their globalist view of the world has never been portrayed better than in this chilling account by Google whistleblower,” the book’s listing on Amazon states.

“As a senior engineer at Google for many years, Zach was aware of their bias, but watched in horror as the 2016 election of Donald Trump seemed to drive them into dangerous territory. The American ideal of an honest, hard-fought battle of ideas — when the contest is over, shaking hands and working together to solve problems — was replaced by a different, darker ethic alien to this country’s history,” the description adds.

Vorhies said he left Google in 2019 with 950 pages of internal documents and gave them to the Justice Department.

It is unclear what, if anything, the DOJ did with those documents. MORE.

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