State power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. The state can train subjects, but it can never develop free people who take their affairs into their own hands, for independent thought is the greatest danger that it has to fear.
--Rudolf Rocker
Thursday, June 2, 2022
" 'Building Momentum in the Freedom Movement. Activism, Outreach & Strategy': Selected Transcripts" by Emily Garcia
'Building Momentum in the Freedom Movement. Activism, Outreach & Strategy': Selected Transcripts
A selection of transcripts from talks at the 2 April Left Lockdown Sceptics meeting in Manchester, ‘Building Momentum in the Freedom Movement: Activism, Outreach & Strategy.’On that day, we had contributions from the Freedom Alliance Party, Rebels on Roundabouts and Stop New Normal, a.k.a Let England Live.
Thank you for inviting me. I’ll just start by asking how many people have heard of The Freedom Alliance party? That’s a lot better than usually we usually get. Our biggest problem is that we are blocked and ignored at every turn, obviously by the mainstream media, but we’ve found that to be the case with a lot of the so called alternative media, with the exception of The Light newspaper who do cover us. That comes down to the issue of we are a political party being set up by and large by people who haven’t been involved in politics before, but saw that the opportunity to put candidates up for elections did provide one avenue to try to push back against the tyranny. Not to say that it’s *the* answer but its available and there aren’t that many routes available to fight this.
This talk will be a collection of my random thoughts because I’ve spent most of this week until about 9 or 10 o’clock most evenings, banging on doors trying to find people to nominate as candidates for the upcoming council elections, which is interesting because obviously last year, because of Covid, they reduced it down to 2 nominations, which most people could find themselves, so this does mean trawling the streets a little bit. But that’s been useful and valuable and we’ve had lots of interesting conversations. Just to pick up on one thing on the intro: any decades in the job makes me sound quite old, it was just about a few decades I think as a chartered accountant. I probably wrote the thing in the first place trying to impress someone.
Names are important. I don’t know whether the Freedom Alliance is the right name or not but it’s getting a little bit of traction obviously, people have heard of it. In terms of Left Lockdown Sceptics, interesting name, I don’t wish to be critical but it’s not just about lockdown for us, it’s about the whole agenda, it about the forced and criminal vaccination program. We are an anti-vaccine party and I am anti-vaccine, not just this vaccine. And we’re not just sceptical, we’re vehemently opposed to it to our dying breaths really. Whether we’re left wing or not is a more interesting question. The problem we’ve got with our name is that the word freedom has been captured and associated with the far right and has been helped in that process by the far right. We’ve got David Kurten and his homophobia claiming to be a freedom party, how can that be a freedom concept? And we’ve got Branson and the proper far right racist organisations calling themselves The Freedom Party now and you know the media do love to jump on this and people automatically associate the word freedom with being far right, whatever far right is. But as far as I’m concerned freedom is a concept that applies to everybody, regardless of sexual orientation, skin colour, religious belief, or whatever. And you can’t be not free on that and ‘free’ because you don’t like lockdown. So we have to disassociate ourselves from those groups categorically. But I don’t think we surrender the word ‘freedom’ I really don’t. I mean a lot of people said we should call ourselves the Truth Party or something else instead and I think that’s wrong. I think going back to the French Revolution and everything, freedom was right there, it’s a popular concept, it’s a concept for the people and one we have to fight to keep hold of. Begs the question, ‘what are we trying to be free from?’ and this is where we get onto the issue of whether we’re left wing or right wing or whatever. I’d like to ignore that and continue to regard myself as a localist rather than a globalist, but people do identify as left and right, and therefore it’s important.
For me the State is a problem. The State has been a force for good throughout much of the second half of the 20th century: we’ve had the NHS, we’ve had the Welfare State, we’ve had pushes for equality coming from the state, but it has become captured now. You know 2008 was an obvious clue to anybody that hadn’t woken up at that point. Bailing out banks that have failed, that isn’t capitalism, some people have called it Corporate Socialism, which I think is unfair as well, I think it’s just plain corruption to be honest. We’ve got a captured state that is not acting in the interests of the population. And I would imagine I’m talking to a converted audience on that point, but the problem is the left, as represented through the Labour Party and Green Party, seem to continue to see the State as a force for good. And that for me is the obstacle we’ve got to get over. We’re living in this debt based monetary system that is imploding, is collapsing and started to very obviously collapse in September 2019, which maybe or maybe not why they rushed the Covid agenda forward, and they’re running ahead of themselves with it, which is maybe why it’s not going quite to plan. But it is going to collapse and the cost of money is going to increase because there has been too much money creating chasing too little product and therefore it becomes worth less and ultimately completely worthless. And that at the minute is the globalist’s power, their ability to create that money and to use it for whatever means they want to use it for.
What’s coming next is you know, the blockchain exists, the technology exists and that is where we’re going. But there’s two routes we can go down. We can go down a very centralized controlled programmed UBI, you know it’s up to us how you spend your money, you don’t get to spend any money if you’ve been naughty on social media or whatever. We can go down that very centralized state controlled (globalist controlled, the State is just a front for the globalist parasites) or we can go down a much fairer route, a much freer route, which is going to be a very sort of decentralised model where you know individuals and small collectives of individuals are able to use the blockchain and use the technology for the benefit of society as a whole. I can’t exactly describe what that’s going to look like but we have to resist the state, which is really the global banks capturing and taking control of the next stage of the monetary history/ monetary experiment if you like. Because that’s what they’re pushing now. That’s where we’re going. We’re going to digital ID and a programmable society where you basically comply with whatever they tell you. So if that makes us a left wing or a right wing party, I don’t know. I don’t personally know whether I’m left wing or right wing as I say because it’s never meant that much to me. I’m pro small, anti big bank, anti big government, anti big business and corporations and pro the smaller versions of all of those, which is not to say every small company is wonderful. It just gives us this opportunity to have some element of continuing personal freedom, which is exactly what they want to get rid of.
To come back to Freedom Alliance as a party, we’re a genuine grassroots membership led party, unlike many others who are claiming to be. I don’t wish to compete with other parties but a point does have to be made, talking about the claims of other big freedom parties. We’re a genuine membership led party, most of us not being involved in politics before, doing it on a shoe string just funded by memberships and we will continue to keep standing candidates in council and parliamentary by elections. I stood in the Batley by election. We stood in, I think 5 of the 8 by elections since the pantomime started. We’re going to have something like 45/46 council candidates nominated by next week, which is less than we had last year but we have the 10 nominations not the 2 (required). For me one of the reasons for doing the politics is that it’s something we can do. We haven’t got that many avenues: we’ve got the protest marches, we’ve got the legal challenges, we’ve got the mass non compliance, which I think is absolutely vital. The fact that we held the line on the vaccines has been extremely powerful and is one of the best things we’ve done. But there aren’t that many things you can do, so for me politics is one route we can try and break through.
We will win this, what they’re trying to do is so absurd, so obscene that we ARE going to win this. But I can’t sit here and tell you how we’re going to win it, so what we have to do is try every possible avenue available, which politics is one. We’ll get some press coverage by virtue of being council candidates, they give us the bare minimum but they do give us some. It gives us a little veneer of legitimacy, people go, ‘oh you are a registered party,’ so that helps us a little bit. I think you know potentially if we do move into a stage before tyrannical fascism, there might be a stage in which, you’re allowed to do things as a political party, which you couldn’t do as an individual, so maybe there’s a sort of legitimacy there. But we’ll keep fighting, we’ll keep campaigning as long as we’ve got candidates basically.
When you all came upstairs, did everyone see the slogan on the wall? What did it say? ‘What cannot be morally right, cannot be politically wrong.’ And I want to talk a little bit about tribal politics and then Steven and Sue will take on the initiative of Rebels on Roundabouts. We’ve been standing on the roundabout for over a year now and I’ve been called so many names, I’ve been told I need to get a job, ‘you dirty Tory bastard,’ and last night, stood next to a sign which said, ‘digital IDs destroy freedom,’ I was called a fascist.
Can we do a quickly show of hands before I move on? Two political ideologies. The first one being ‘freedom’ and the second one being ‘for the greater good.’ Who believes ‘freedom’ is the greater ideology, who believes ‘for the greater good’ could be the greater ideology. The next question is: are they both mutually exclusive?
They’re not are they?
They’re not mutually exclusive, they can be together. I think together as people because Rebels on Roundabouts has people from both sides of the political divide. We have people on the left and people on the right. I don’t deal with people on the extremities of those, that’s where I believe the problems really are. What I think over these last 2 years, we’ve seen the coming together of people both on the left and on the right and we might need to overcome, you know our prejudices against some people, to be able to move forward. And that’s really the point I want to make.
And I want to just make that [point] with a short story before I hand the microphone over. At the start of the Covid saga, I was a fire-fighter, I was a Union member. I’d been a fire fighter for 20 years, and I’ve been paying my Union fees for 20 years, because when I joined they said they would look after me, they would look after my Terms and Conditions of service. And I thought, you know I’m a working class guy and that was the political ideology that I believed in.
So press fast forward now to 2020 when the Covid pandemic started and we worked all the way through that. But what I saw was that the fire service was adopting the mainstream narrative. It was adopting this ideology, posters going up everywhere, we were following the mainstream narrative. And I thought, ‘there’s something not quite right here.’ We worked all the way through the pandemic, the summer went, the narrative changed from deaths to cases based on fraudulent PCR tests. And I said to my manager, ‘I can see what’s happening here, something is going to change and you’re going to mandate wearing masks at work in the fire service. And he said, ‘don’t be stupid Steve, we’ve worked all the way through the pandemic, how could they possibly justify us wearing masks?’ And I said, ‘do you know what, one day, you will send me home for refusing to wear a face mask.’ And he said, ‘don’t be stupid Steve, that will never happen.’
Fast forward to the Winter and the 2nd lockdown in October, remember that? In October, I was standing at the roundabout on my own, dressed in a Scooby Doo suit saying, ‘they’re taking away our freedoms, 99% false positives.’ I didn’t want to show my face because I thought they would sack me. They tried to sack me later anyway. So, they mandated wearing face masks in the fire service. Just as I said. But, strangely enough, we could NOT wear face masks whilst sat in the fire station but as soon as you got in the fire engine, you had to put a face mask on.
This scenario I’m going to tell you now actually happened. We were sat down doing a training package-they actually mandated face masks that day-the bells went at the fire station. We ran to the fire engine. I was the driver of the fire engine. I jumped in the front seat, the crew jumped in the back seat and donned their face masks, I watched my manager come up to me, I was at in the front seat, he was stood down there, and he said, ‘Steve put a face mask on’ and I turned round to him and said, ‘I told you I’m not going to do it, it’s not going to happen.’ I said, ‘jump in the front of the fire engine, we’ve got a fire to go to.’ He turned around, he walked to the telephone, he rung up the control centre and he said, ‘you need to send another fire engine to this fire because the driver is not going to wear a face mask.’
I’ve not worked in the fire service since that day. They thought I was psychologically messed up in my head. They sent me to have a psychiatric assessment. I agreed to it actually because I was trying to kick the can down the road a little bit. I didn’t want them to sack me. And they said-I was diagnosed with-over valued ideas regarding Covid 19. That means you somehow have abnormal thoughts. So I was kicking the can down the road thinking that they would drop the mask mandates, but they never did. They’ve only just literally done it now. So basically my position in the fire service had become untenable. I had to make a really difficult decision.
They were trying to sack me. I worked 20 years in the fire service, 10 yrs in the military. I was close to retirement, they could have sacked me and I’d have lost everything. I took an early retirement which meant I lost the majority of the money that I’d been putting it for 18 years. I lost £80,000 for not wearing a face mask basically.
And the point I want to make is that the Union did not support me. That’s the thing. I’d been paying £30 a month for 20 years, I think if I round it up it was about £7000 and this is the political ideology, ‘for the greater good.’ The thing is, the elites do not care what the prevailing ideology is. As long as we’re divided along those lines.
We need to come together, there might be people that you didn’t agree with politically. I’ve lost people that I used to look up to on the left. And I look more to people that supported me on the right, and I never wanted to be somebody political that was on the right, but we need to overcome our differences and come together because what is morally right cannot be politically wrong. Thank you.
So I’m a former ambassador but don’t hold that against me, hear me out. But first I have a confession to make. I’m not sure I should be here, this being a Left Lockdown Sceptics meeting. Actually on lockdowns I’m more than skeptical. But am I ‘left?’ Actually I’m suffering from dysphoria. Not gender dysphoria, political dysphoria. I was born leftist. I identified as leftist until about 2 years ago, and then my leftist friends got into fetishism and mask wearing and maschochism and locking themselves up and self abuse, you know- the injection. It made me confused about my political identity and I found myself doing something worse than reading pornography and this is to read The Daily Telegraph. Shocking, unbelievable! But anyway this is just by way of prologue.
I’m here I suppose as an ambassador, if you will allow me, an ambassador for Piers Corbyn because I’ve been a foot soldier in Pier’s ‘barmy army,’ the groups that Piers leads, ‘Stop New Normal’ and ‘Let England Live.’ One main point to make, and it is that we encapsulated, as it were, the provisional wing of the movement for in your face activism, for calibrated disruption, for courting publicity, invariably bad publicity. We were a bit like the French Gillets Jaune. We were there before the truckers were there. And we were pilloried for this. Demonised. Especially Piers himself. I think Piers holds the record for serial arrests. He’s been arrested more than a dozen times. Our group paid a price for its principles and for being active on the streets. In a way that courted publicity, this is the key point. In terms of column inches, media coverage, we were up there, particularly Piers personally, he was a Saint of Protest, which our movement generally lacks in my personal opinion. But we filled a big part of that gap.
We were the difficult anti vaxxers that the Daily Mail could give two pages to, and we revelled in it quite frankly. We had fun too. We carried out disruptive fun actions like this one for the shopaholics-if we have to go this again I recommend this one-we love bombed Tesco. When they were carrying those adverts with Santa, presenting his vaccine passport, we said, ‘right we’re going for Tesco.’ So, groups of us descended on our local Tesco’s, filled up our trolleys with £400/£500 worth of perishable fruit stuff, as though we were going to have a good party, then we left them at checkouts. Within days the ads had been pulled from the telly and we got publicity for it.
We carried out protests in the London tube. Piers famously was videoed and filmed stripping the signs from the windows about Covid restrictions, and we protested outside theatres that were imposing vaccine mandates. It’s a long, long list and perhaps members of the group can provide examples later on in our open discussion but the point is that our activities posed a question of whether we, the lunatic fringe of the movement, were toxic generally, as we were accused by some. People like Peter Hitchens-who I generally like-thought that we were harmful to the general movement. I would argue the opposite because what we brought, as part of a wider orchestra of course, amongst all these other important players, was a particular intensity. We brought passion, we put our liberty on the line and we courted controversy. The other side didn’t have any intensity. Today the level of alleged Covid infection has never been higher. People down Piccadilly Gardens clamouring, protesting against the government for not inroducing restrictions, they couldn’t get past a dozen people! We had the intensity, and this communicated itself to others, including the 100 plus MPS who in the end made a big difference in getting us out of this pantomine earlier than most.
It was that intensity which was out main thing, and which going forward we have to try and sustain and be ready to do again if it all kicks off again as before. Meanwhile we need to adapt and diversify. Our group is already quite diversified because we’re all so big on ‘climatism’ and in London we’ve got the Ulez, the Ulez campaign restriction. This is another topic on which we could make common cause with other cities. So we looked for the oxygen of publicity and we got it.
A few random thoughts now to finish. As we move forward, one new focus for activity is vaccination for children. Just beginning their campaign today I believe. Parents as from Monday can abuse their kids, book a vaccination, so we will I’m sure be carrying activities, along with many others outside schools, and those early on in our campaign got a lot of publicity. Teachers hated us. Another random thought. The enquiry. Personally I think we should focus much of our effort in undermining the official enquiry that the government has set up. It’s quite clear that it’s already a stitch up. That collaborating with it would be a total strategic error. What we need, and this isn’t my idea, is a People’s Enquiry. A Parallel People’s Enquiry.
The first I heard this was from Alan Miller the leader of the Together group. I don’t know if they’re taking that idea forward, but it’s a brilliant suggestion. And its liable to get a lot of legitimacy if we go for it. And finally just a thought on Ukraine.
For us, Ukraine is a bear trap, we could make a mis-step it seems to me if we went for example down the route of high visibility action questioning government policy: protest marches and anything in the streets. Because I think we would then be toxic for the ‘pro peace’ movement. We would be ultra demonized to a level never seen before. But we should campaign in the traditional way the left used to be for peace and we should embarrass the Labour Party on this. They’re vulnerable to being embarrassed on it. A couple of nights ago I attended the equivalent to what the Americans call a town hall meeting. It was just a meeting of 200/300 parents in a school, in the format of a BBC Question Time. I was amazed at the positive response that I got on the Ukraine question while the MPs and Lords sitting next to me were booed.
So there is, despite the impression the media gives, a groundswell of scepticism on what’s happening around Ukraine and our backfiring sanctions, so I’ll just leave you with that final ambassador’s thought.
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