Video: Cheryl Chumley on ‘The Impact of COVID Lockdowns’ at the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend

Journalist Cheryl Chumley, author of Lockdown: The Socialist Plan to Take Away Your Freedom, spoke recently at the Freedom Center’s annual Restoration Weekend, held November 10-13, 2022 at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, AZ. She addressed the devastating impact of COVID lockdowns during the manufactured pandemic.

Don’t miss her very personal and passionate speech below:

Cheryl Chumley – “The Impact of COVID Lockdowns” from DHFC on Vimeo.

Transcript:

Cheryl Chumley:  On April 30, 2008, I was at work, a local newspaper, typing up a budget story, and my cell phone rang, and it was my husband’s boss, who told me that Doug was on his way to the hospital, my husband, because he had a heart attack at work. So I wrapped up my things, I said goodbye to my editor, and I raced to the hospital to find out what was going on. When I got there, Doug was awake but in distress. The doctor said that they were going to fly him to Fairfax; I live in Northern Virginia. So I said goodbye to him on the helicopter, rushed home to get our four kids, ages 13, 12, 6 and one and a half, and raced to meet him at the hospital. I thought he was going to be fine.

When I got there, the doctor came out, and he had a very worried expression, and he said Doug had fallen into a coma on the flight and they couldn’t get his heart started. He was worried. He predicted death. So as the night wore on, I sat with my kids, I called our pastor, I called my family, and we waited. And I listened as one doctor after another came into the emergency room and predicted death.

The next morning, I took our kids home, sent them back to their regular schedule, and then went back to the hospital to be with my husband, still in a coma. The doctors still predicted death. In a Hail Mary, they decided to insert a balloon pump into his leg in hopes of getting his heart pumping and keeping it pumping. They did. The balloon pump had an issue and the blood stopped flowing through his leg, so another doctor came to me and said they would have to do an amputation. But not to worry, because he was going to die anyhow. So they did a guillotine cut because they saw no sense in doing the normal nerve wrapping and so far. A cut they hadn’t used since battlefield days when they used to have to amputate on the war field. But he was going to die, so it didn’t matter.

So the days wore on. He was still in a coma. We went about our normal routine as best possible. And then they told me that they were going to take him off the equipment and see what would happen, to see if he could breathe on his own, to see if he could live. And they gave him about a 1% chance at best. And then another doctor came over and said, if by some chance he does survive, he will be vegetable, because he died on the operating table for too many minutes. So the prognosis was death or a vegetable status. And on top of that, if he lived, I had the cheerful news of telling him that I had to sign off on the paperwork to have his leg amputated.

So let me fast-forward and tell you that right over there is my husband, with one leg. Mental facilities in full, intact. Happy, cheerful to be alive.

The reason I tell you this story is because there’s not a person in this room who hasn’t had a doctor at some point in your life tell you or someone you know something that turned out to be wrong. So why did we shut down our entire nation for two-plus years based on, largely, the recommendation of Dr. Anthony Fauci? I’ll tell you why in a word: fear. Completely fear.

So I want to briefly run down where we were with the coronavirus, where we are now and, more importantly, where we’re headed. Go back in time, December 2019, and remember the reports coming out from China about a new virus, about fatalities due to a new virus. Soon these fatalities spread to Thailand, Japan, South Korea, ultimately hitting America’s land in Washington State, where a 30-year-old man, or a man in his 30s, tested positive for this new virus, coincidently, after he just returned from China. We were told not to worry; no big deal, go about your life. Then a man in his 60s, also in Washington, tested positive for this new virus and died. Panic started to set in. The governor of Washington declared an emergency. Other states started taking notice. Out in Washington, DC, President Donald Trump sprung into action. He asked Congress for $2.5 billion to fight this new virus. He shut down travel from China. He shut down travel from 26 European nations. He got Vice President Mike Pence to start a coronavirus task force.

Everything Donald Trump did, and I’m a big Donald Trump fan — everything he did — I don’t agree with everything, but everything he did, he did out of love and care and concern for America and for the American people. Then came the Democrats and pounced because they saw crisis, and in that crisis, they saw opportunity for political gains. Governors around the nation started declaring health emergency orders in their respective states, started issuing executive orders that the hospitals within their states could no longer perform elective surgeries, had to clear the bed space for the predicted gloom and doom coronavirus patient numbers.

Then you had Anthony Fauci making the rounds of the media, giving his particular brand of science to all of America that goes like this: If one face mask is good, two face masks are better. But he didn’t have to wear them; not when he was at the ball park. That was for the peon class. Then you had Bill Gates fanning the flames, telling America that we need to be more like China. Then you had Deborah Birx, whom we found out after the coronavirus chaos, when she was making the rounds of media with her new book, that she had formed a secret partnership that, if Donald Trump had let go Anthony Fauci, she and her band of merry scientists in the White House Administration would all leave. That’s like saying that they work for themselves, not for the American people who pay their tax-paid salaries.

Then you had the media, and this is my particular nag with the media. The media constantly, daily and utterly hyped the hysteria and the fear. How many times have you turned on or did you turn on cable news and see, in the bottom corner, the running case count number in real time? There’s another test positive. There’s another. There’s another. It was like everybody around us was dying. Except when it comes to case counts and tests positives, the media never did bother to explain that those numbers are completely meaningless. The only thing that matters is the percentage or the numbers of those who died compared to the numbers of those who tested positive.

So the media carried the water for the Democrats, who wanted to use the coronavirus to ding Donald Trump, whatever he did. We lost a lot of data. We lost a lot of truthful data during this timeframe, because since governors around the nation shut down hospitals by executive orders to doing elective surgeries, their funds dried up. Their money flow dried up. So here came Congress, helpfully giving billions of dollars to hospitals that had to deal with coronavirus patients. Talk about incentive as a hospital administrator. You have no money coming in for your normal elective surgeries; you have a forced closure from your governor on most of your bed space; and the only patients that are paying are the ones that have coronavirus or test positive for coronavirus. The incentive for hospitals to drive up the figures on the coronavirus tests positive, case counts, fatalities and illnesses was obvious, but the media didn’t cover that.

So where are we now because of all this? We’re at a point in America where our free market has become weaponized against us. Under the coronavirus, I don’t remember laws passed in Congress mandating me to a wear a face mask when I go into CVS or Walgreens, and yet every store I tried to go into during this two-plus-years’ timeframe had signs on their windows saying facemasks must be worn. It’s the law. And everybody did. But it wasn’t the law. So another impact from this is that too many Americans have been conditioned to accept executive orders and dictates from bureaucrats and pinheads. Whatever they say becomes law. Think of what that’s doing to our next generation. Our next generation that’s already being taught in the public school system to hate America, to hate the Founding Fathers, to look at capitalism as a racist system. That’s why even today, you see people wearing face masks, particularly young people, without being told they have to wear face masks.

And that leads to my next point. We’ve been conditioned to believe that we should do for others more than we do for ourselves. If you happen to be one of those citizens who found the face mask mandates burdensome and nonscientific, all the more so as the weeks and months wore on and the real data started coming out showing that indeed, they did not work like the government said they would work, it didn’t matter. You were expected to wear your face mask because that person across the room might feel bad if you don’t. You were told it was your patriotic duty to wear a face mask to make your neighbors feel less afraid. When was it in America where fearful people got to run policy, got to dictate to the unfearful in America how to live? Redefining patriotism, redefining what it means to be a Christian. These are things that Joe Biden happily tried to do. He tried to make patriots and patriotism something completely opposite of what patriots and patriotism are in America. He tried to put the burden of other people’s feelings onto you.

Free speech. Free speech. I was booted off of LinkedIn because I dared to post a commentary, which is my job — which is what LinkedIn is for, professionals to share their work — I was booted off of LinkedIn because I wrote a piece, fact-based, linked to the fact-based reports that I cited, about the perils of contact tracing coming from the coronavirus. Somebody complained. I got booted. I’m still off LinkedIn.

The biggest peril, though, about where we are, and this is the left’s greatest win and our biggest loss, was the flip in America of individualism for collectivism. In this country, historically, since founding days, it’s up to the individual to decide for the individual and the individual’s family how to go about protecting yourself medically, medical choice, the idea that you get to provide for your family, you get to protect your family as you see fit.

And suddenly, you were told that was non-patriotic, that you were dangerous to society, that you were very nearly killing people. Suddenly, your individualism got in the way of the government’s intent to change us into a nation of collectivism. Your individual rights didn’t matter to the government and to the bureaucrats. The only thing that mattered was that you stifled your individual rights and your individualism to make way for what was good for the larger body.

Think of all the ways the coronavirus has changed the mindset of the American people now, from elderly to youth, on thinking of America as a nation of God-given liberties. That doesn’t enter the equation of the coronavirus. Your God-given liberty to wear a face mask or not wear a face mask, to open your business or not open your business, to go to church and worship, or if you’re out in California, to even sing in church as part of the worship service, all that stuff got pushed to the side because of the greater good.

If America is a nation that was built on individual liberties and American exceptionalism comes from the idea that our rights come from God and government is only there to preserve and protect those rights, then that right there, the crumbling of that concept, is the biggest peril that we face right now from the coronavirus, because it opens the door for everything that will follow. Once you change the mindset of the American citizen to believe that individualism is only good so long as it serves the collective, the government has a wide-open door to whatever it wants, and this is where we’re headed.

The Great Reset. You’ve all heard of it. The media tried for the longest time to pretend as if that was a conspiracy theory, even though you can right to World Economic Forum’s website, weforum.org, and see The Great Reset and how Klaus Schwab and all his minions plan to use The Great Reset to change the economic and social systems of the world. ESG, environmental/social/governance goals, these are all coming on strong as part and parcel of The Great Reset. The Great Reset that only has steam in America because for the last two years we have been conditioned to put our individual rights subservient to the government’s wishes.

We’re headed to a Chinese-type social credit system. And if you don’t believe that, look at the college campuses right now, with the mandates that as a condition of your child attending college on campus, he or she must download an app on their phone where they can be tracked by the administrators — they call it a contact tracing app — and so it pings when they come into a certain social distance from somebody who has tested positive with the coronavirus. That’s a step toward a social credit system. That’s a step toward getting a citizen rating. Are you healthy enough to be out in public?

Contact tracing. H.R.6666 is a bill that Congressman Bobby Rush introduced a year and a half or so ago. It’s an interesting number, 6666. I wrote about it, and I wrote about the bill. My commentary got put on Drudge Report. Bobby Rush’s office called me, ticked off, because I dared to point out the obvious truths about his bill. What this does is take $100 billion of taxpayer dollars, yours and mine, $100 billion, and use it to develop contact tracing programs around the nation. It hires experts who know how to contact trace. It hires experts who know how to do the technology aspects of contact tracing. It hires people to come and work with your local medical bureaucrats to make sure that all the citizens in the community are happily taking their government-mandated shots and vaccines. He denies — his office denies that this bill would do that. All you have to do is look it up.

So where else is this leading? The Great Reset, its end game, of course, is to link the coronavirus to environmentalism, which they’ve already done. A few months ago, the journal Nature had a piece from the so-called scientists, experts again, talking about if we don’t take drastic, dramatic, speedy action to cut carbon emissions, then what’s going to happen is more viruses are going to come and people are going to die. People are going to die. People are going to die.

And the leap in logic there is that as humans develop land, build more houses, cut down more trees, utilize more natural resources and expand their own footprints, that leaves animals in the lurch. So the poor animals have to go somewhere, and they’ll come closer to where the people live, bringing with them their viruses and diseases, which will then transmit to humans, and people will die, people will die, people will die.

So the groundwork has been laid, and now you have Joe Biden overseas, talking about the climate hell, which is the language that the socialists/Marxists at the United Nations just used in their most recent meeting in Egypt, the climate hell. It’s kind of dark and dismal when you think about it, so I just want to end on a couple positive notes.

So how to stop this? How to stop this, because this certainly isn’t just in America. It’s coming from a force outside America. And I want to give two brief stories on the hope for America.

So some of you may be wondering, when I told you the story about my husband, how I might have handled that at the time, and I can tell you, I’ve had better days than standing in a hospital with my four kids and the nurses hounding me to go speak with a grief counselor so she can tell my kids that their dad is going to die. So they chase me around for a while, and they finally tracked me down, and they sent my kids away for a minute, and then they told me it was coming; he was going to die. Should I go tell my kids? So I said, yes, I’ll go tell them. And I found them in the garden area in the hospital, and when I walked up, my eldest daughter said, is he going to die? And I said, yes, that’s what the doctors say. And then we stood there for a second, and I said, but let’s see what God has to say about that. So that’s what we did. And as you can see, that’s what God did. He had the final word.

And this strikes me as something that is the key to taking America back from the communists, Marxists, collectivists, evil forces that are busily using puppet, feckless Joe Biden to steal this country from us. We are a nation of individuals who take our rights from God. We’re born into them. We don’t need the government giving us a right, taking away a right. We don’t need the government to tell us what to do.

So number one in America to save America is you can’t have God-given rights if you remove God from the public arena. Because once you take out God, once you remove God, you have government, and that’s the fight right now in America to take back our God-given rights. And it starts in the family, it starts in the communities, it starts in the churches and it starts on our knees, alone, in the dark, praying.

And the second story I have about how to fight pragmatically when the bureaucrats want to steal your rights. My daughter, second daughter, she’s 16 now, but when she was 15, she has braces, and we went to her orthodontist’s office every four weeks, every six weeks. We’d go for the appointment. And every time she would go in, every time I would go in, we’d get the same, put your face mask on, blah, blah, blah, which we would ignore. And then it got to the point where the orthodontist was so frustrated that we wouldn’t wear our face masks he actually came out to the car before the next appointment and he spoke with my husband, I think it was, and gave him the lecture about wearing the face mask, which we once again ignored.

And so at the next appointment, they wouldn’t see my daughter, and my daughter, to her credit, stood there surrounded by adults, surrounded by four nurses or four office workers who were trying to badger her into putting a face mask on, and she said, I’m taking care of my health. I’m doing my personal responsibility. Why don’t you, if you’re worried about catching something, just keep your face mask on and worry about your personal responsibility?

And they didn’t like that, so this is how stupid it got. They told her to take her face mask and walk down the hall to the chair holding her face mask like this. So you can see, it wasn’t a science thing, it was an obey and compliance. But the doctor, the orthodontist, called me later and said that he would not see our daughter any longer if she refused to wear a face mask. We had a 45-minute discussion, during which I made clear to him that his stupid face mask policy was pulled out of thin air, whereas my contract for the orthodontic services and product, paid in full, was an official business contract that could go to court and be held up in the light of law. So after that, he opened the office for her in his off hours by herself.

So when you ask, how do we fight? You just do, right? You do what Americans do. You take your strength and faith from a higher power and you just, in your little sphere of life, you do what you do, and you just fight. And that’s how we’ll win America back, by refusing to quit.

I want to thank David Horowitz, Michael Finch, the amazing staff of the Freedom Center. I want to thank the Freedom Center for hosting this event. And I really want to thank all of you for all you do, because I know you’re out there every day fighting yourself. Thank you and God bless.