Ronnie's Blog
Van Morrison, the Irish bard, one of my longstanding musical favorites, put things in perspective in a protest song he wrote in the middle of the Pandemic and the Lockdown. At this time Morrison and Eric Clapton were being vilified and censored by the Hollywood elite and famous (once rebellious) rock n’ rollers for deviating from the Establishment narrative on COVID-19.
OCA, myself personally, and other COVID investigators were being slandered and censored at the same time as Morrison and Clapton. In 2020 the internet monopolies including Google, Facebook, and YouTube had begun “shadow banning” OCA and Millions Against Monsanto’s postings and videos to our two million social media followers and threatening to de-platform us entirely.
So-called “progressive” media that had carried our articles and interviews for more than a decade (Common Dreams, Truthout, Counterpunch, Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio) censored and slandered us, calling us and our fellow COVID researchers and truth-tellers racists, “Trumpers,” or “conspiracy theorists” for exposing the obvious fact that the genetically engineered SARS-CoV-2 virus, a reckless joint venture of U.S. and Chinese scientists, governments, and the military, obviously came out of a Wuhan Lab, where it was accidentally or deliberately released.
OCA often talks about our long term goal: making organic and regenerative food, farming, and land use (and natural health) the norm, rather than just the alternative. As our longtime ally Vandana Shiva points out, this would be “the solution to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the climate crisis, and the crisis of democracy.”
OCA and its allies worldwide are dedicated to addressing critical issues of climate change, soil health, biodiversity, water pollution and scarcity, nutrition, environmental contamination, deteriorating public health, forced migration, economic justice, and rural economic development. But what do we need to do to make this goal a practical reality? What would an “Organic Greater Reset” look like.
We need to stop corrupt politicians and the global elite from subsidizing chemical and fossil fuel-intensive agriculture, GMOs, lab food, and factory farms. We need to pay organic farmers and ranchers, not only a fair price for the food and products they produce, but we need to pay them for sequestering excess atmospheric carbon in soils and above ground plants and trees, as well as providing other key environmental services such as preserving clean water, improving soil fertility, protecting biodiversity, wetlands, and wildlife habitat, and rehydrating and reforesting parched landscapes.
It’s a tragedy that all of us who knew about the dangers of GMOs, genetically engineered bioweapons, Big Pharma criminality, and the threat of out-of-control corporations and the national security state were not organized into a more powerful, united, and militant resistance several years ago. At the crucial moment when dangerous, experimental gene-therapy drugs were forced onto the market, and injected into the bodies of a fearful and coerced population, under the guise that they were harmless and effective COVID “vaccines,” we should have been able to stop them. Unfortunately, we didn’t. The major reason we couldn’t stop this massive assault on the body politic and our children is because the America we live in today is not really a democracy, but rather an oligarchy, a 21st Century corporate, technocratic, bio-medical, national security state.
Because we were threatened by what they said was an unprecedented public health emergency, Anthony Fauci, Big Pharma, and the Trump administration, followed by the Biden Administration, told us that the COVID mRNA “vaccines” needed to be rushed to market, at “Warp Speed,” with no liability for injury or death on the part of the manufacturers. They said that these mRNA shots needed to be injected into everyone, even healthy adults, those who already had acquired natural immunity, and youth and children, who faced little or no threat from SARS-CoV-2. For those who refused the jabs, you could lose your job, your schooling, your livelihood, your freedom to travel, or even your right to attend religious services. In China, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada the lockdowns were even more severe than the U.S.
The main issue that radicalized me when I first became a student activist in the 1960s was war, the actual bloody war going on in Viet-Nam, and the always pending war, permanently etched into the back of my mind, the threat of nuclear war between Russia and the United States. I became a draft resister in 1967, like hundreds of thousands of others, and refused to go to Viet-Nam, opting to become a non-violent warrior for peace and justice instead.
The nuclear standoff that traumatized me and a whole generation of anti-war and civil rights activists arose during the Cuban missile crisis of October 16-28, 1962—60 years ago.
Years later I learned that a global catastrophe in October 1962 was averted only because a Soviet submarine commander, off the coast of Cuba, disobeyed orders to fire his nuclear missiles, after a U.S. naval vessel dropped explosive depth-charges, trying to force the Russian submarine to the surface. The 1962 nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, eerily reminiscent of the current nuclear standoff in Ukraine, was precipitated by American deployment of nuclear missiles in Turkey, adjacent to the borders of the USSR, prompting Soviet deployment of intermediate atomic missiles in Cuba.
Over the past 30 years OCA and our allies across the world have fought hard against gene-spliced GMO foods and crops and the toxic pesticides and chemicals that always accompany them, exposing their dangers, limiting their market share, and in some countries bringing about mandatory bans (Mexico) and/or labeling and safety-testing. (USA and Europe)
But now Bill Gates, the gene-engineers, the World Economic Forum, and the Davos “Great Reset” technocrats and authoritarians, the folks who anticipated and profited off of COVID and the lockdowns, have a bold new plan to shove down our throats: get rid of animal agriculture, ranching, and small farms entirely. Make lab-engineered fake meat, fake milk, and fake cheese the new normal. Pretend they’re not genetically engineered and therefore they don’t have to be properly safety-tested and labeled. Divide and conquer vegans and carnivores, urban consumers and rural communities. Drive into bankruptcy and off the land the billion ranchers, small farmers, and herdsmen/women around the world, who depend on raising animals and livestock for their survival.
In addition to highlighting positive solutions, it is important to keep in mind that people’s situations and perspectives are different. We all have different passions or priorities. One size or one approach does not fit all. Therefore, we need to integrate our green justice and Regeneration messages with the specific issues and concerns that are most important to grassroots constituencies, and then lay out, in everyday language, a strategy that makes people understand that we can actually solve the problems they care about the most, while also solving a host of other pressing problems at the same time. Only by starting from where people are at, and then connecting the dots, can we capture the attention and imagination of a critical mass of the global grassroots and get them to start thinking about how they can participate in our new Movement and new economy.
Objective and subjective conditions for change are different in every country in the world, and to some extent differ as well in the sub-regions and local communities of these 195 countries. Everyday people everywhere, including the most impoverished and vulnerable communities, have their burning issues as well as their secondary issues, and an inherent desire to alleviate and, if possible, solve the problems that are pressing down on them, in many cases threatening their very survival. In the activist community, major focus areas, in most cases reflecting the concerns of everyday people, include inflation and the high cost of living, freedom of choice and Constitutional liberties, climate change, environmental pollution, health, social justice, jobs and economic justice, peace, and democracy. Unfortunately, campaigners, both on the local and national/international levels, often work in isolation from other sectors, each in their own separate silos. This perpetuates tunnel vision in the body politic, parochial or sectarian attitudes, political polarization, and an overall weakness in global civil society.
Regenerators, young and old, given our current situation, need to operate on the old adage that “the darkest hour is right before the dawn.” Instead of just dwelling on the negative, on the things that divide or frighten us, we need to search out and highlight today’s positive trends, best practices, and solutions. For the OCA and Regeneration International community this means not just focusing on the latest corruption and criminality of the ruling class and the technocrats, not just the delusions and self-destructive behavior of those brainwashed by the Establishment narrative, but on finding, highlighting, and scaling up real life regenerative alternatives.
As we inform ourselves and resist the Great Reset, the Big Pharma power grab, Silicon Valley programming and censorship, the Ukraine war and endless conflict, the reckless science, the pollution of our food, the destruction of the environment and climate, and the mass confusion, fear, and psychosis that has debilitated much of the body politic; we must also search out and highlight the positive trends in grassroots insurgency and creativity. We must seek out, highlight, and participate in the best practices of organic and regenerative food, farming, and land use, as well as the holistic natural health practices, food and dietary changes, and lifestyle transformations that are regenerating people’s health, mental and physical. For a full dose of positive information, go to the internal search engine on the upper right hand side of the OCA homepage and type in the words Regenerative Food and Farming.
Growing up on the Gulf of Mexico and living through several intense hurricanes, I became familiar with the term “eye of the storm.” The “eye” refers to the interlude or relative calm between the two phases of a hurricane, when the center of the storm is passing directly overhead. I was warned as a child not to go outside as the “eye” passed over, even though it seemed like the storm was winding down, because more intense wind, tidal surges, and torrential rains would surely follow.
We are now all living in the eye of the storm. Most of us survived the engineered release (whether accidental or deliberate) and transmission, death, and mayhem of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its spike protein.
But the storm and the coordinated assault on our mental and physical health, civil rights, and constitutional liberties is not over. Big Pharma and government bureaucrats are still trying to pretend that the latest variants (more akin to the common cold or a mild season flu) of COVID-19 are dangerous, even for children and infants. They are also still trying to tell us that the experimental, rushed to market, blockbuster COVID-19 vaccines work, and that they are safe, which they are not. As our ally, Millions Against Medical Mandates, warn us “wake the hell up, they are coming for our children.”
Like most of you, we at OCA and Regeneration International are sick and tired of gloom and doom, false promises, and authoritarian/technocratic schemes. We’ve had enough of the mad science, genetic engineering, war-mongering, fear-mongering, political corruption, corporate greed, cancel culture, and media censorship. We’re tired of political posturing and sectarianism (“my issue or my constituency is more important than your issue or your constituency”). We’re done with name-calling and yelling at one another instead of sitting down and figuring out how we, the 99%, can move forward on real solutions for the U.S. and the world’s most pressing and dangerous crises—while agreeing to disagree on many of the secondary issues that will likely still divide us for the foreseeable future.
I like to call this ecumenical approach '21st Century Populism,' even though the liberal and conservative Establishment want us to believe that grassroots populism is a dirty word, a synonym for intolerance and unlettered ignorance. But as Thomas Frank points out in his 2020 book, The People No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, nearly everything we hear about populism in the mass media is wrong. For many, "populism" is seen as a frightening thing, a term pundits use to describe the racist statements of politicians such as Donald Trump and European extremists.
Last Friday (Sept. 23) I talked on the phone with our friends and fellow activists at the Mercola.com headquarters in Florida, where a sophisticated and damaging cyberattack, no doubt orchestrated by the COVID/Pharma/Deep State, has temporarily brought down Mercola’s website servers, forcing them to rely on Substack for distribution of their daily newsletter and shutting down their ability to sell nutritional supplements and organic food directly over the internet. (Note: As of now, Mercola products are once again available for purchase over the internet.).
The most recent attacks on Mercola, OCA, Children’s Health Defense, and other COVID/Ukraine truth-tellers, following three years of Establishment lies, censorship, de-platforming, slander, and direct economic sanctions/sabotage, are perhaps a sign that our grassroots networks and educational efforts are starting to seriously undermine the US and transcontinental power grab, the so-called Great Rest, of the global economic elite.
A growing number of independent scientists and analysts and the overwhelming majority of the American public have now “pierced the veil” of lies, fear-mongering, and propaganda. A critical mass of the body politic understand that the release or escape of SARS CoV-2 was not an act of nature, a so-called zoonotic spillover event, but rather a highly predictable and anticipated release or escape of a genetically engineered military/medical “dual-use” coronavirus.
