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EDITOR’S NOTE: Below is the Afterword to “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” the new runaway bestseller by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense.

What I have described in the preceding chapters can seem overwhelming and dispiriting. The forced-vaccine campaign and other cruel actions by Dr. Fauci and his acolytes might seem “too big to fail.” But that is up to the citizens of our country.

We can bow down and comply — take the jabs, wear the face coverings, show our digital passports on demand, submit to the tests and salute our minders in the bio-surveillance state.

Or we can say no. We have a choice, and it is not too late.

COVID-19 is not the problem; it is a problem, one largely solvable with early treatments that are safe, effective and inexpensive.

The problem is endemic corruption in the medical-industrial complex, currently supported at every turn by mass-media companies. This cartel’s coup d’etat has already siphoned billions from taxpayers, already vacuumed up trillions from the global middle class, and created the excuse for massive propaganda, censorship and control worldwide.

Along with its captured regulators, this cartel has ushered in the global war on freedom and democracy. Playwright and essayist C. J. Hopkins describes the moment all too well:

“There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one ‘reality’ and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their ‘realities.’ We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what’s required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … you know, a deadly global pandemic.

“During the changeover from the old ‘reality’ to the new ‘reality,’ the society is torn apart. The old ‘reality’ is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two ‘realities’ battle it out for dominance. ‘Reality’ being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one ‘reality’ can prevail.

“This is the crucial period for the totalitarian movement. It needs to negate the old ‘reality’ in order to implement the new one, and it cannot do that with reason and facts, so it has to do it with fear and brute force. It needs to terrorize the majority of society into a state of mindless mass hysteria that can be turned against those resisting the new ‘reality.’

“It is not a matter of persuading or convincing people to accept the new ‘reality.’ It’s more like how you drive a herd of cattle. You scare them enough to get them moving, then you steer them wherever you want them to go. The cattle do not know or understand where they are going. They are simply reacting to a physical stimulus. Facts and reason have nothing to do with it.”

As we consider the unprecedented bludgeoning of our Constitution over the past two years, it’s worth pausing to remember the smallpox epidemic that stalled Washington’s army during the Revolution and the malaria contagion that culled the Army of Virginia.

Though both alerted the framers to the deadly and disruptive potential of infectious disease epidemics, the framers nevertheless opted to include no pandemic exception to the U.S. Constitution.

Yet today, the pandemic is being used to create a string of new exceptions to our Constitution. We are given just one rationale to explain everything that is happening: COVID.

For just a brief moment, let’s look away from the ostensible reason things are happening and focus instead on what is happening.

Those controlling the levers of power vilify dissenters and punish every attempt at questioning, skepticism and debate. Like all tyrants in history, they ban books, silence artists, condemn writers, poets and intellectuals who question the new ortho-doxies.

They have outlawed gatherings and forced citizens to wear masks that instill fear and divide communities, and atomized any sense of solidarity by preventing the most subtle and eloquent nonverbal communication for which God and evolution gave humans forty-two facial muscles.

Predictably, the pandemic became a pretense for expanded tyranny across the globe — making changes that have nothing to do with a virus. Hungary clamped down on free speech and banned public depictions of homosexuality. China shuttered Hong Kong’s last pro-democracy newspaper and jailed its executives, editors and journalists.

In Belarus, President Lukashenko subdued protests with mass arrests and even hijacked a passenger plane to arrest a dissident journalist. Cambodia abolished due process and arrested political opponents. Poland’s government abolished rights for women and gays and effectively banned abortion.

India’s Prime Minister arrested journalists and ordered Twitter to remove critical posts.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin used the pandemic as (another) pretext for jailing powerful opponents and banning mass gatherings.

And democracies were not much different: France required its citizens to show a signed declaration to travel more than 1 kilometer from home. Australia was more liberal, allowing citizens to venture up to 5 kilometers from home — but then again, Australia also built new detention centers. Britain banned its citizens from traveling abroad.

Many similar things happened in the U.S., including New York’s Senate passing a law to allow for the forcible and indefinite detention of residents deemed to be a threat to “public health.” But for America, freedom of speech has been the biggest casualty of the emerging tyranny.

The now-popular term “misinformation” has come to mean any expression that departs from official orthodoxies. Social media and news media companies serve as stenographer and defender of any position pronounced by government.

The intentional failure of journalistic inquiry, curiosity and investigation, the failure to probe, to ask tough questions (or any questions) of those in power — has enabled the madness and the sadness of 2020 and 2021.

There is a web of motives at work, but I’ll cite a simple one: Big pharmaceutical companies are the biggest advertisers on news and television outlets. Their $9.6 billion annual advertising budget buys more than commercials — it buys obeisance. (In 2014, network president Roger Ailes told me he would fire any of his news show hosts who allowed me to talk about vaccine safety on air. “Our news division,” he explained, “gets up to 70% of ad revenues from pharma in non-election years.”)

I know the role of the news media is not news to you, so I’ll cite just one example:

Vaccine mandates are ostensibly based upon the idea that vaccines will prevent transmission of COVID-19. If they don’t prevent transmission, if both the vaccinated and unvaccinated can spread the virus, then there is no relevant difference between the two groups — other than that one group is not complying with government commands.

Forcing an entire population to accept an arbitrary and risky medical intervention is the most intrusive and demeaning action ever imposed by the U.S. government, and perhaps any government.

And it is based upon a lie.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Fauci and the World Health Organization have all had to reluctantly acknowledge the vaccines cannot stop transmission.

When Israel’s director of public health addressed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Advisory Panel, she left no doubt about the vaccines’ inability to stop transmission of the virus, or stop sickness or stop death. Describing Israel’s situation as of Sept. 17, she said:

“Sixty percent of the people in severe and critical condition were, um, were immunized, doubly immunized, fully vaccinated. Forty-five percent of the people who died in this fourth wave were doubly vaccinated.”

Even so, three weeks later, on Oct. 7 — just days before this book went to press — the president of the U.S. announced that he was ensuring healthcare workers are vaccinated, “because if you seek care at a healthcare facility, you should have the certainty that the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you.”

The president just told Americans that being vaccinated provides “certainty” that vaccinated people are “protected from COVID and cannot pass it to you.”

Not one question was posed to the president about this stunning disconnect, about the obvious untruth — and that speech gives us a stark example of what’s going on.

A televised image of an unchallenged leader mouthing untrue pronouncements to mislead and control the population — that is the world of George Orwell’s sadly prophetic novel, “1984.”

It is a hopeful sign that halfway into 2021, Orwell’s 70-year-old book suddenly became a top-20 bestseller in the U.S. Apparently, more people are aware of what’s going on than the powerful give them credit for.

That awareness, that basic common sense, reminds us that democracies can reassert legislative control over rogue dictators — whether mayors, governors, presidents or prime ministers.

Rational legislatures can choke off funding that supports few and harms many. They can initiate investigations, spur criminal prosecutions and restore freedom.

Even without government engagement, it is ordinary people who can rescue us from tyranny.

We can say no to compliance with jabs for work, no to sending children to school with forced testing and masking, no to censored social media platforms, no to buying products from the companies bankrupting and seeking to control us.

These actions are not easy, but living with the consequences of inaction would be far harder. By calling on our moral courage, we can stop this march towards a global police state.

As I was writing this book, I reread Martin Luther King, Jr.’s majestic “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Reverend King reaches out to us through all these years:

“But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom, and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”

Join with us to take back our democracy and our freedom. I’ll see you on the barricades.