Who Rules Us? -- Guest piece by Dave Wiebe

Is it our governments, is it the world economic forum, is it the world health organization or the United Nations?

This is a guest post (the first here at LooFWIRED). I suspect most of you will find that his story resonates with your own.

Post by Dave Wiebe: Married with kids, life long farmer, interested in outcomes, not intentions.

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I don’t believe anyone rules us because of their power, I believe it is we who beg to be ruled out of our fear.

Fear is the greatest disabler of both individual man and society as a whole, it has never been more obvious to me just how destructive it is since 2020. Most of us will lie to ourselves, giving a variety of reasons as to why we aren’t fearful, and that the fear isn’t what is determining our actions, it is instead x.

A summary of the my covid years.

I live in an area of North America that differs from that of many of the experts: we are rural, lots of very small towns and villages. People here traditionally have never really bought in to some of the city way of thinking. We complain a lot about government screw ups, incompetence, overreach, costing money and production, making things less efficient and forcing us to end up using more energy and money to accomplish the same things. Very few believed government

were competent at all other than maybe sometimes at the municipal level. Most don’t believe in the official narrative of man made climate change, the one that states all the scientists we didn’t censor agree. Overall it is a pretty conservative area by today’s standards.

The years before the pandemic I had family, friends, business associates and acquaintances listen to each other’s opinions, respect and believe that we were both wanting to help each other and were truthful with our opinions and honest with our intentions.

When the pandemic was first broadcast in the media some of us were skeptical but also hadn’t jumped to any conclusion on either side of how serious it was, and of course some jumped. I have been in farming my whole life and I have seen diseases in animals cause a lot of death and financial devastation. But I also knew the answer wasn’t to hide or lockdown because those interventions would cause much more long term pain than any virus ever could. (Plus we have these things called human rights which include the right to make a living.)

But I listened to the government say “two weeks to flatten the curve” and mostly stayed home since all businesses near me were closed and, being on a farm, this is where most of my work was anyway. During that time I looked at some facts on coronaviruses, read some stats on deaths in Italy since that was one of the first places in the west to get hit with death from and with covid, and I read John Ioannidis analysis of IFR.

My background is in farming animals and although not a trained doctor or expert, it was pretty obvious to even a layman like me that this was an illness of the old and already weak. Although it was quite infectious, it had an IFR similar to flu or less severe for the majority of ages and of average health. (Even the “great” Bill Gates acknowledged that eventually, fun fact on Bill Gates and I, we both have the same medical degree.)

So by the time the first two weeks were up, I went back to my life as normal other than no longer entering stores that were locked. I started my own gathering breakfast place for the locals who didn’t want to stay home and encouraged all I knew to do the same. I even gave everyone I could data to show them this was not something to worry about, and if you weren’t worried about flu you should go back to living your life.

Some did but many who did not want to go out told me they thought it was too dangerous because they heard people are dying on tv and hospitals were full or going to be full.

This made me think their reasoning for them not wanting to resume life was that they had logically processed limited information from the tv and come to their own logical conclusion.

So I showed them government data from Italy, IFR calculations and age of deaths.

To my shock, the people who had believed and trusted me for years often responded in anger, often accusing those of us not hiding inside of not caring about people and saying that we must want to kill grandma.

I would explain the stats and data again thinking they must not be understanding me clearly. After a few weeks of the only response being anger, I decided it can’t be the data holding these people back. There must be something else.

I thought it must be the compassion side of these people that was holding them back, they must truly believe they were saving others by staying home. They often claimed they were so worried about others and thinking if they continued to support lockdowns that they would be preventing deaths.

So I tried a different approach. I showed them stats of what happens to children who get less education and how that can affect generations in health outcomes and poverty. I showed them how a first world nation shutting down an economy would kill millions of people, many of them being women and children in third world nations. I showed them that closing and bankrupting businesses would cause depression and drug and alcohol abuse as well as increase suicide, destroying families. I showed them that the government’s version of helping by printing money and handing that out would cause inflation and poverty in our own country and problems with people becoming reliant on government handouts.

I wanted to show them that their compassion was misplaced and they would be harming more people than they could imagine plus by them “helping” grandma they were forcing her to live her last years in isolation and fear.

I tried this over and over again with almost no success. If I would get someone to process this information logically, often by the next time I would see them they would be back to where they were before we had talked previously.

I tried these two tactics for most of 2020 thinking that I would eventually break through to them on the emotional argument of compassion for those being crushed by closures.

Apparently I am both an optimist and a slow learner, it didn’t work.

Then by the end of 2020 they were talking about a vaccine that would solve a problem that didn’t exist for most age groups. Again I was skeptical but not quick to voice my opinion other than to question who it was for since anyone healthy and young didn’t need it, and very old and unhealthy often don’t respond well to vaccines. I had seen vaccines work in animals and I had seen other vaccines fail miserably and cause more problems then they solved. Not all vaccines are equal and I had firsthand experience with that. I knew for myself I wouldn’t take any vaccine because I wasn’t in a vulnerable age group, plus I had already had covid according to an antibody test.

The other factor was that as a child I was stopped from taking vaccines after complications from my first ones. My family doctor told my parents no more vaccines for this kid. I was reminded every year at the start of school that I was not to take any vaccines if the school was giving them.

So that was my background going into vaccines, which I still have a hard time calling them because at best these are therapeutics not vaccines but that is a different topic.

I decided to read most of the early release by Pfizer in January 2021. I knew too many of my friends, family and acquaintances would likely line up for them since they were still in the delusion that covid itself was greater risk then the current data suggested. (We also have no long term data on exposure to covid so that is also an unknown).

In the Pfizer report there seemed to be almost no evidence that these injections were overly effective. They ran a trial of just over 42,000 participants, with it split about evenly between the placebo group and the Pfizer group. To my surprise the Pfizer group had 12 deaths from or with covid, which to me, showed it definitely hadn’t prevented infection or death entirely. It was also very comparable to the 14 that died in the placebo group from or with covid. They also listed total deaths in the Pfizer group at 21 and 17 in the placebo group with no explanation of what caused those deaths. It could have been accidents or it could have been side effects, there was no way of knowing with the report provided.

Again I was a layman, but I can read and nothing in that report gave me any assurances to either the effectiveness or the safety of Pfizer.

So again I decided I would relay this data to those I knew and still cared for. I was again greeted with anger and told I needed to trust real experts like the ones on tv (even by my own family who knew my vaccine history as a child). I tried to explain to people what happened with Marek’s disease in chickens and the vaccines that made things worse. I reminded my family who had previously farmed with me that our own experience with a porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome vaccine that had been promised to not shed and cause death in unvaccinated animals had done the opposite and ended in a lawsuit settlement with that manufacturer. I was back to again using both data to show that maybe we don’t know how safe this product is, and we know it isn’t as effective as they are saying, as well arguing that taking a product that may shed and cause death or cause the virus to mutate unnaturally would be the opposite of what they had been saying, which was that the reason they locked down was to save lives. We couldn’t know ahead of time what these vaccines would do and cause over time with the data Pfizer had made public.

But I was still met with anger and threats.

Later that year my wife was fired from her job of 23 years by someone on the board who was our neighbor.

My son was kicked out of junior hockey by a coach that had known him since he was young, a sport that had looked like it would provide a scholarship route to D1.

(Both of these things happened after Rochelle Walensky had come on CNN on August 6, 2021 to admit that these vaccines didn’t prevent infection or transmission.)

My daughter had long been asked to leave her dance school since we weren’t clean. And, as we knew that masks don’t work for viruses and it wasn’t advised to restrict your breathing for long periods of hard exercise, she refused to wear one. (Even Canadian courts had made that decision pre-covid twice on behalf of the Ontario nurses association who argued wearing masks for flus were pointless.)

It was strange to me how angry everyone was at us simply because I could read and even though I still don’t think anyone should attempt to control others by force or coercion, this clearly was also a time when there wasn’t even a logical reason why you would attempt to do so. I continued to state my case for awhile with those who listened but I did eventually quit talking to most of them.

…even as they participated and encouraged the discrimination of all those they didn’t agree with. They watched and participated as people got fired, were unable to be a part of society because restaurants and travel required vaccine passports and saw kids have their lives changed forever with school interruptions and recreational activity restrictions.

I realized at some point they have only one thing that rules over their lives and that is fear. Most feared the virus, a few feared being punished by authorities or social outcasts. Their fear is (still) so strong that no amount communication on either a logical data or emotional caring level for those they are actively harming, even from someone they knew well and trusted, could ever overcome it.

Many in my area would have professed to be Christian but for too many of them, their response was no different than the non-Christians around them. Their fear was not just stronger than my relationship with them, it was also stronger than their relationship with their faith. Most stopped going to church, closed their churches, they stopped helping others, they stopped caring for the elderly in care homes, they closed down youth programs, and even when they eventually reopened they often demanded masks, and some even demanded evidence of vaccines.

I have now realized that although a lot of people may be logical or have some ability to reason, they are completely incapacitated to logic or reason when they allow fear to be their ruler.

The next quest will be to understand what it is in today’s society that has made so many people I know be so fearful of so many things (not just covid), and why they seem to want to live in that fear rather than be freed from it.

Because until they can be freed from their fear, there will be those who will manipulate it to cause them to hurt themselves and others.

Many times though they are actually asking for government or other authorities to hurt others so that they themselves feel more safe or virtuous while never being able to see the actual true harms they are causing.

In the end it is us who put ourselves under rulers to help us alleviate our fear.

Create courageous fearless people and they will stop asking for authoritarians and experts to save them, and will no longer need them.

Written January 2023