STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- “COVID response” has many typical features of abuse (gaslighting, isolation, economic pressure)
- Other feature of the COVID response are the lack of logic and the ever-changing rules
- Interestingly, creating an ever-changing, unpredictable and irrational environment is listed in the CIA torture manual as a great way to break one’s resistance
- As it is the case with the victims of domestic abuse, it may be hard to get through, as fear of embarrassment serves as a “prison guard”
- The force that helps us resist and overcome the abuse is infinite self-love of the real kind
Howling From Behind the Mask
I’d like to start with a story of a man howling from behind his mask.
“The other day, as I was waiting for a subway train, I suddenly heard soul-piercing howling. I looked around, and there he was, a man in a winter hat howling like a wolf, from behind a mask covering most of his face, howling from the depth of his gut, again and again.
He was not saying anything, not asking for anything, not being violent, just standing still, bothered by whatever was bothering him, and howling like a wolf, from behind his mask. After a while, somebody else across the tracks, howled in response.”
People were making remarks like, “Oh, it’s New York, what do you want.” And I was thinking about how that scene was a mirror of what has become of us after three years of biological poisoning and psychological abuse. Howling from behind the mask while waiting to be taken away somewhere is where we are right now.
In Denial of Abuse
Many years ago, I married an abusive man. He was very sweet initially, and then — gradually-then-suddenly — he turned into an irrational maniac who was messing with my head, acting physically violent and then frantically apologizing, yelling with a red face, gaslighting me, making me feel crazy, then acting violent again, then begging me to please not tell anyone because he was so embarrassed, etc. etc.
Ironically, the marriage had a very presentable facade, good parents-in-law and all, and I was ashamed to tell the world about what was behind the facade, or even admit it to myself. I was just steadily fading into a shadow of my former curious self. I became afraid to do things like go to the store and buy a can of juice because I thought I would end up buying the “wrong kind.” I was only nominally alive.
But I was none the less in denial of abuse, and I stayed in denial of it until the rug was completely and dramatically pulled from underneath my feet in every way, and I had nothing else to hold on to except my soul.
That experience was so bizarre, and the abuse was so intense that it took me years to heal. Many times, I cried to the skies and wondered why I had to go through a horror like that. Many times, I asked myself what compelled me to stay even a minute after he disrespected me, and why I didn’t leave. Looking back, I had bright exit signs positioned all along my way — that signs I ignored because I was concerned about the reputation of my facade.
But in 2020, I realized why I had to go through that. It was a way to learn a skill. My mistakes of the past helped me see through the lies and stay even-headed when abuse arrived in the form of “COVID response.”
When the state and the media and the so called “medical experts” started behaving in ways that were similar to how my abusive ex acted years ago — gaslighting, limiting contact with others, dominating people in every way — I knew immediately to put my emotional shield up and not allow them in. Life works in mysterious ways!
COVID Response = Classic Abuse
For poignant giggles, let’s take a look at the cliché Wikipedia article on “abusive power and control:”
“Abusive power and control (also controlling behavior and coercive control) is behavior used by an abusive person to gain and/or maintain control over another person. Abusers are commonly motivated by devaluation, personal gain, personal gratification, psychological projection, or the enjoyment of exercising power and control.”
“Manipulators and abusers may control their victims with a range of tactics, including, but not limited to, positive reinforcement (such as praise, superficial charm, flattery, ingratiation, love bombing), negative reinforcement (taking away aversive tasks or items), intermittent or partial reinforcement, psychological punishment (such as silent treatment, threats, intimidation, emotional blackmail, guilt trips) and traumatic tactics (such as verbal abuse or explosive anger).”
“Traumatic bonding can occur between abusers and victims as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds (that are resistant to change) and a climate of fear. An attempt may be made to normalise, legitimise, rationalise, deny, or minimise the abusive behaviour, or to blame the victim for it.”
Sounds familiar? I wonder why … And here is a cliché list of signs of emotional abuse:
- Name-calling, demeaning, humiliating, shaming, and criticizing you in private or public
- Controlling and being possessive of you, your time, and actions, including what you wear, your job, and whom you hang out with
- Making you feel silly and dumb and dismissing how you really feel
- Questioning what you say and things that you say happened to you (called gaslighting)
- Acting extremely jealous of the time you spend with friends and family
- Punishing you by withholding attention or affection
- Threatening you and people you love, or threatening to hurt themselves to get what they want
- Wanting you to ask their permission before doing anything or going anywhere
- Monitoring where you go and what you’re doing at all times
- Constantly accusing or blaming you for their abusive behavior and making you feel guilty
- Overloading you with compliments or gifts in order to manipulate you later
Keeping all that in mind, here are two kids in Quebec saying on TV that the unvaccinated should probably be jailed, to the sound of cheering from the adults. Surely, those two kids didn’t come up with that idea themselves! (On a side note, I think that the parents of those kids have set themselves up for quite an old age. Their future might be less delightful than the future of the ones they gaslight.)
And here is the “wheel of abuse,” a chart that is often used in corporate environments when lecturing about domestic violence. Disclaimer: I do not endorse the “male privilege” part of the chart, this “privilege” talk is meant to “divide and conquer” and is probably designed by the alphabets — but the wheel is rather telling if you keep the “COVID response” in mind.
When it comes to the COVID response:
- Did our masters tell us what to wear?
- Where to go?
- Whom to spend time with?
- Did they gaslight us?
- Did they try to make us feel dumb and dismiss how we really felt?
- Did they force isolation on us?
- Did they use economic abuse?
- Did they constantly blame us for their behavior?
Any more questions? I have none.
A Blast From the Past
As a bonus exhibit, here is an LA Progressive article (originally posted by Common Dreams in August 2021). The author makes a case for vaccine mandates and for ostracizing the people who didn’t get the shot: “If libertarians wish to maintain their self-centered fixation on their own freedoms without considering others, let them do so — in indefinite quarantine from the rest of us.”
And what a classy image they chose to illustrate their point! There is nothing Nazi-like at all about this image!
The Role of Manufactured Unpredictability
Remember how all throughout the pandemic, it often felt like they just couldn’t make up their mind?
“Don’t wear mask. Wear a mask. Don’t touch other people. Don’t kiss when having sex, and don’t forget your mask. Don’t leave the house. But leave the house for the right kind of protest. But don’t leave the house otherwise. Wait for the you-know-what. But the you-know-what is actually not going to be that effective so you’ll have to continue to social-distance and cover your face.
For how long? Oh I don’t know. A couple of years? An eternity? You don’t want to kill the grandma, do you?”
And while there is no lack of irrationality in human thinking at large, it is interesting to put the constant change in the context of the classic torture manual, and just ponder that.
“Little is gained if confinement merely replaces one routine with another. Prisoners who lead monotonously unvaried lives … become dull, apathetic, and depressed. And apathy can be a very effective defense against interrogation. Control of the source’s environment permits the interrogator to determine his diet, sleep patterns, and other fundamentals.
Manipulating these into irregularities, so that the subject becomes disoriented, is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness … in short, the prisoner should not be provided a routine to which he can adapt and from which he can draw some comfort – or at least a sense of identity.”
The Role of Embarrassment in Denying Abuse
I can speak for myself here. When I was in an abusive marriage many years ago, what kept me in denial was the embarrassment I felt over just how bizarre my life situation was. I had no explanation for that situation, a situation that was new to me, that would allow me to remain “respectable” and “successful.” And because it was important to me to remain “respectable” and “successful,” I just blanked out and rewrote the “rules of engagement” so as not to feel stupid.
I believe it applies to today’s situation. Those who went for the mainstream narrative with fervor will only snap out of it on their good will if they can do it without losing their face. Remember the tweets by those who got sick, presumably with COVID, for the third and the fourth and the fifth time — and they were still “grateful for being vaccinated and boosted”? Case in point.
In the absence of genuine respect for the soul in our world, ego is many people’s closest “proxy” for feeling respected. That fact also explains why the “educated people” are the hardest ones to get through. “Educated people” have big egos and oftentimes don’t know any other methods of feeling respected — and seeking respect is an instinct.
The abuser exploits that feature and stealth-swaps respect with “lip service,” telling them that they will be superior to others — and thus “respected” — by being good boys and girls and complying with whatever the abuser says they should comply with.
And if we want to break the spell in their heads, if we have that goal, we can only achieve some success (if we are lucky, and if they are ready) when we do it with love and genuine care for their own well-being, with minimal anguish. Being limited to doing things with love is a feature of being on the “good side.” We have to do things with love and respect people’s free will, or else we swap sides.
The Importance of Self-Love
We are taught from an early age to externalize our and self-perception and the sense of self-worth — and even as young children, we learn to “value” ourselves not on the basis of on the integrity of our character and choices — but on the basis of opinions of “others.” And, yes, other people’s opinions can be precious when they those people mean well and simultaneously are spiritually grounded and know what they are talking about.
But a person who has all that would never make another person feel worthless — and yet, there are plenty of people (including abusers and various servants of the system of domination) that will gladly make us feel worthless and guilt-ridden unless we comply with their wishes and their opinions about what we should be like.
Through trial, error, and ongoing soul-searching, I came to the following important conclusion: the foundational emotion that helps us stand up to abuse — and not shrink in the face of threats — is self-love of the real kind. It’s that feeling where, when the world is rough on us, we can honor ourselves and bask in the loving warmth of our relationship with the spiritual powers who are protecting us all through the trials.
When we recognizing the sanctity of our own soul, the importance of our life’s mission, and the legitimacy of our existence and our right to dignity, even the abusers can’t compel us to commit self-betrayal.
About the Author
To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.