This article was originally published by Brandon Smith at Alt-Market.us. 

Sometimes it’s important to step away from a problem in order to better understand it. I recently went on a trip across the Pacific Northwest to revisit some old stomping grounds and to take a break from the often disconcerting developments of today’s world, at least for a little while. We all need a vacation from the information war at times, and though I was happy for the rest, I am also happy to be back. After traveling on the road across four states I was able to gauge the general condition of the US in terms of the social and economic effects of the pandemic mandates and covid propaganda. I have some good news and some bad news…

The good news is that the propaganda has not been all that effective in most places. The overall picture looks something like this:

In the majority of rural and semi-rural areas, as well as cities in red counties regardless of the state, the majority of people were NOT wearing masks and the bulk of businesses were not demanding that people wear them. The vaccine ads and propaganda were also at a minimum. This includes Washington State and Oregon, which have been notorious lately for their draconian restrictions. While Washington has technically lifted mandates (starting only a couple of days ago), the pressure to vaccinate is ever-present there. Oregon was the worst state I passed through in terms of business pressure and mob pressure, but even in most towns I visited the ratio of masked cultists to normal unmasked people was around 50/50.

Most of the businesses I entered said nothing to me about not wearing a mask. And, so far there doesn’t seem to be any major push for vaccine passports, though, I suspect this will come soon enough.

It was only in or near progressive-run cities like Portland and Seattle that covid controls were clearly present and oppressive. Near Portland, I saw numerous people wearing their masks outside and even in their own cars. It was truly bizarre, considering that it is almost impossible to catch a virus outside in open air and in sunlight (which is scientifically proven to kill microorganisms). Clearly, the leftists in these places are operating within their own little bubbles of ignorance and collectivism. Needless to say, I kept my time in Oregon to a bare minimum.

The strangest aspect of the whole mess is that WA and OR have relatively high rates of “vaccination”. The people religiously wearing masks have no doubt been vaccinated by now, so, either they must not actually believe in the effectiveness of the vaccines, or, they are wearing their masks anyway as a tool for virtue signaling. Luckily, this insane mentality has not spread much beyond the boundaries of metropolitan areas.

After all, covid infections and fatality rates have been plunging. They were plunging in red states which struck down mandates well before vaccines were released to the public. Why continue the charade?

My trip confirmed some of my biggest suspicions – For one, it proved to me that the mainstream media vision of public submission to the covid mandates was in fact false. The only places where the mandates are obeyed are in or near major cities. I also noted that Indian Reservations were decidedly aggressive in mandate enforcement. These were actually the few places where people tried to demand I wear a mask (though it was usually some white lady working for minimum wage); and frankly, I find it odd that Native American communities would be so quick to enforce federal government recommendations or trust federal medical analysis. It’s sad to say but they seem to be drinking the Kool-Aid by the gallons.

The internet is in many ways a fake world. Propagandists use manufactured consensus on the web to make it seem as if the majority of people are on board with medical tyranny, but it is simply not so. From my observations, people are tired of the restrictions. They are fed up. Whenever I walked into a hotel or at most retailers, the people at the front desk or the register would usually notice that I was not wearing a mask, and their eyes would light up and they would pull their mask down to talk to me. They were just happy to be acting like humans again.

I relate my experiences here because I realize that many in the liberty movement are apt to assume the worst possible scenarios for every event. I know because I do it myself on occasion. Three major LIES that some liberty activists believe when it comes to the pandemic are:

1) Most people have been conned into taking experimental vaccines.

2) The majority of the US is submitting to the mandates.

3) Leftists are relocating in droves to swarm red states and red counties and they are bringing their covid politics with them. (For some reason conservatives are still clinging to fears of liberal relocation even though that mostly died out after the 2006 – 2008 housing crash, and today all the data shows that when leftists move, they move from their favorite city to the suburbs right outside their favorite city).

Sorry, but I can say with authority that none of these three looming threats is happening. It is nonsense. In fact, it’s the opposite in every case. The people who claim otherwise are frightened, and they are factually wrong. And I derive this position not just from my travels, but also from hundreds of thousands of my readers across the country that I deal with regularly. The propagandists want conservatives to live in fear just as much as they want leftists to live in fear, and they know which lies affect conservatives the most. Dispelling disinformation allows us to then deal with the real threats at hand.

Okay, now that the good news is out of the way, I have to get to the bad news: Economically, the US has been gutted by the government pandemic response, and I am certain now more than ever that there is not much time left to rectify the situation. At this point, fixing things might be impossible. Our only chance is to prepare to survive the fallout.

Here’s what I have noticed so far – Almost every place I have traveled through was desperate for working staff. The heatwave that hit the area this past week was brutal, but it should have been manageable. I’ve lived through worse heatwaves and I can’t remember a time when half of the businesses shut down in an area because they couldn’t handle the customer volume. But this was the case in every single town. Finding access to services was incredibly difficult because most places were closed.

The problem was that the heatwave was incidental. The real obstacle was that many businesses have been without a full crew of employees for a year now and this is taking a toll on their operations. The heatwave gave them an excuse to close because they don’t have the people to stay open.

We can thank the federal government and multiple state governments for this situation because right now it is actually MORE profitable for workers to stay at home and collect covid boosted unemployment than it is to actually work. This is not hurting the major retailers and corporate big box stores that much, but it is destroying small businesses that simply cannot raise wages high enough to compete with government juiced unemployment checks and stimulus.

McDonald’s can hike their wages up to $15+ an hour and give new workers a $500 signing bonus, but the mom-and-pop restaurants down the street can’t. What this system is doing is quietly eliminating the small business sector, the same sector that employs around half of all Americans.

On top of this, corporations have been given an endless windfall of stimulus dollars while small businesses have received almost nothing. I have been saying for some time now that this is actually part of the plan; that the GOAL is to erase small businesses from the economy leaving only the corporate behemoths behind. The ongoing government rewards given to people for refusing to work only supports my theory.

And, even though the vaccination agenda in the US has mostly failed, do not expect that elites like Anthony Fauci are going to give up on their dreams of conquest. Fauci has recently asserted that there are now “two Americas”: The vaccinated and the unvaccinated. He must be blind because that is not what I see.

I see the people who blindly follow government demands in vaccination and the people who actually “listen to the science”. I see idiots vs. skeptics. I see cultism vs. logic. I see people who want to control others vs. people who just want to be free to live their lives as they see fit. I see agenda vs. truth. This is not about people being vaccinated, and it’s not about public health or saving lives. Rather, covid is a tool for subjugation of the public. That is all it is and that is all it ever will be.

If America is divided, it is because there are people who want to enslave, there are people who enjoy their enslavement, and, there are people who want nothing to do with enslavement.

Fauci is also notorious for being a terrible scientist, but he is a loyal technocrat. He has a habit of dismissing any science that does not support his preconceived conclusions. The science shows that people who have already had covid are unlikely to be reinfected. In fact, there is no evidence that covid reinfection is a concern for the vast majority of people. Yet, Fauci does not count people who have had covid and have built up immunity as safe.

Fauci’s position is that if you are not vaccinated with the experimental mRNA cocktails, then you are a risk to others. Yet, if this is the case then that means the vaccines are useless. If unvaccinated people are a threat to vaccinated people, then what use are the vaccines in the first place?

The US Surgeon General (the same guy that originally claimed that Americans should not bother buying masks because the masks would be useless for them) is echoing Fauci’s propaganda, adding that the new “Delta Variant” will strike unvaccinated people the hardest.

There is still no evidence that the supposed “delta variant” is any more of a threat than the original iteration of covid, but this is not stopping governments from rolling out the fear campaign once again. With assertions that the delta variant may still infect vaccinated people, governments are suggesting that lockdowns, masks, and social distancing stay in place for the foreseeable future. One has to ask that burning question: Why become a guinea pig for an untested mRNA vaccine when it is no guarantee of freedom, nor a guarantee of health safety?

Hell, why take an untested vaccine when the death rate of covid is so small it affects less than 0.26% of the population outside of nursing homes?

I also have to say that I called this outcome well in advance.

The globalists are becoming incredibly predictable as they scramble to salvage their flailing Reset agenda in the US. As I have noted for the past year, the covid restrictions are never meant to end. There will always be another “mutation” of covid, and so the mandates will be perpetual. They are meant to continue for all eternity, or at least until the entire population submits to government control of every micro aspect of their daily lives.

That said, I don’t think the covid cult needs to keep mandates in place in the US for much longer, because if they can’t con the majority of the population into compliance, they will instead use the confusion of the pandemic to undermine the economy.

Consider this for a moment – The instant response of many businesses in the Northwest during the heatwave was to shut down or cut hours in half, rather than adapt and overcome. Would this have ever happened before the covid lockdowns? I think not. The go-to solution to any real or perceived crisis in America is now to close down and hide. The response is to reduce standards and give up, or, it is to print money and throw it at the system without any real strategy to use that stimulus effectively. The stimulus itself is doing more damage than covid ever could.

This is a poisonous philosophy that could destabilize the very foundations of the nation, and it is happening right in front of our eyes. I saw it on the road this past week. It is everywhere. Conservative states are working to counter these developments, and I hope it is not too late. The covid cult has been feeding like termites on the pillars of our economy for many months now and though the mandates are being rightfully abandoned the consequences of collapse are far-reaching. We may not know the true extent of the damage for months to come.