The corporate media is in overdrive trying to convince the nation that there is no “sick out” or “freedom flu” at Southwest Airlines that has led to the cancellation of over 2,000 flights in the last few days. Rumors on the internet say that Southwest employees and pilots came down with a mysterious illness related to the company’s new vaccine mandate. If it is a sick out, this is exactly the right industry to do it. If you shut down travel in America, you will get everyone’s attention fast. The airlines could single-handedly save all of us from mandatory vaccines by simply refusing to work. PJ Media’s Charlie Martin pointed out that this is a lot less like 1984 and more like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, where several industry leaders suffering under onerous government red tape just disappeared and quit working, shutting down entire industries and grinding the country to a halt.
This is exactly what we need at this scary time when our very way of life is under attack. Someone has to say “enough.” Is it the airlines? BuzzFeed says, absolutely not! It’s the weather (which is completely clear with blue skies), or “staffing shortages” (with no explanation), or “air traffic control problems” (which, again, have no explanation). No one is buying it. But what I found most interesting in BuzzFeed’s reporting was the statement by the pilot’s union.
“I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise,” the union said in a statement Sunday. “SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.”
When I read that, what stands out is “SWAPA has not authorized… any job action.” That doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And if it is happening and employees are calling in “sick,” they aren’t going to come out publicly and say they aren’t really sick and risk losing their jobs.
Also, the SWAPA just sued Southwest Airlines over the vaccine mandate. Why didn’t BuzzFeed tell you that?
Bloomberg reported,
Southwest Airlines Co. pilots asked a court to temporarily block the company from carrying out federally mandated coronavirus vaccinations until an existing lawsuit over alleged U.S. labor law violations is resolved…
“The new vaccine mandate unlawfully imposes new conditions of employment and the new policy threatens termination of any pilot not fully vaccinated by December 8, 2021,” the legal filing said. “Southwest Airlines’ additional new and unilateral modification of the parties’ collective bargaining agreement is in clear violation of the RLA.”
Several senators and lawmakers, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have been tweeting out their belief that the cancelations, which only seem to be affecting Southwest Airlines and no one else, are related to the heavy-handed vaccine mandates. Would our lawmakers fuel internet rumors without any inside knowledge? Would a senator from Texas, where Southwest is based, do this without having knowledge? I doubt it.
Not possible. The corrupt corporate media told me this doesn’t exist. #SouthwestEmployees #ThanksJoe https://t.co/j02YnmF4MO
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 12, 2021
RELATED: Southwest Cancels 1,800 Flights. Is There a ‘Sickout’ Over the Vaccine Mandate?
I keep a well-worn and furiously highlighted copy of Atlas Shrugged on my desk for moments like this. It’s the perfect opportunity to share parts of my favorite novel with readers who may have never picked it up. (And if you don’t have a copy, buy one before they are destroyed. And don’t watch those terrible movies. Read the book.) Rand actually gave us a manual for what to do when the government gets out of control and removes our rights and freedoms through force. Shut it all down, for “one does not bargain about inches of evil.”
For moments like these when I need to share Ayn Rand with my audience I have this well-worn copy on my desk. #freedomflu pic.twitter.com/iwdvj3wx2u
— Megan Fox 🦊 (@MeganFoxWriter) October 12, 2021
Atlas Shrugged follows several industry leaders who start disappearing under unjust laws written to confiscate their wealth and impose unfair hardships. One of them is Midas Mulligan, a banker who is ordered by a court to give out a loan based on need. Instead of paying it, Mulligan disappears. Rand wrote:
Seven years ago, Midas Mulligan had vanished. He left his home one morning and was never heard from again. On the next day, the depositors of the Mulligan Bank in Chicago received notice requesting that they withdraw their funds because the bank was closing. In the investigations that followed, it was learned that Mulligan had planned the closing in advance and in minute detail; his employees were merely carrying out his instructions. It was the most orderly run on a bank that the country ever witnessed. Every depositor received his money down to the last fraction of interest due. All of the bank’s assets had been sold piecemeal to various financial institutions. When the books were balanced, it was found that they balanced perfectly, to the penny; nothing was left over; the Mulligan Bank had been wiped out.
The loan was never paid.
The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, a railroad magnate who is desperately trying to keep her railroad running under the ridiculous government regulations intended to strangle it, starts losing colleagues in similar ways. After hearing about Mulligan, Dagny knows that Ellis Wyatt, an oil tycoon, is next, due to the laws passed to destroy his business.
The tax on Colorado, she thought, the tax collected from Ellis Wyatt to pay for the livelihood of those whose job was to tie him and make him unable to live, those who would stand on guard to see that he got no trains, no tank cars, no pipeline of Rearden Metal—Ellis Wyatt, stripped of the right of self-defense, left without voice, without weapons, and worse: made to be the tool of his own. destruction, the supporter of his own destroyers, the provider of their food and of their weapons—Ellis Wyatt being choked, with his own bright energy turned against him as the noose—Ellis Wyatt, who had wanted to tap an unlimited source of shale oil and who spoke of a Second Renaissance…
She sat bent over, her head on her arms, slumped at the ledge of the window—while the great curves of the green-blue rail, the mountains, the valleys, the new towns of Colorado went by in the darkness, unseen.
The sudden jolt of brakes on wheels threw her upright. It was an unscheduled stop, and the platform of the small station was crowded with people, all looking off in the same direction. The passengers around her were pressing to the windows, staring. She leaped to her feet, she ran down the aisle, down the steps, into the cold wind sweeping the platform.
In the instant before she saw it and her scream cut the voices of the crowd, she knew that she had known that which she was to see. In a break between mountains, lighting the sky, throwing a glow that swayed on the roofs and walls of the station, the hill of Wyatt Oil was a solid sheet of flame.
Later, when they told her that Ellis Wyatt had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a board he had nailed to a post at the foot of the hill, when she looked at his handwriting on the board, she felt as if she had almost known that these would the words: “I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It’s yours.”
Are the people of this country finally feeling the pain of their rights being stripped away for the “good of others”—that despicable philosophy under which any evil can and has been justified—and is it finally action time? Is the threat of losing their livelihoods—as a weapon to force compliance for an unprecedented science experiment—enough to spur Americans to halt the motor of the world? If America falls to vaccine mandates, there is nothing our government can’t do to us.
Midas Mulligan was asked whether he could name a person “more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity.” His response was: “the man who uses another’s pity for him as a weapon.” Our government has been trying to use our empathy for vulnerable people as a weapon to force us to act against our own consciences and best interests and that’s the real sickness. This all only ends one way if not resisted: violence and terror, like all the other places in the world that have tried authoritarianism.
Can the American people shrug and stop this before it gets to that point? We may be witnessing it right now. Compliance is the means of their despotism and a full strike would stop this madness. Our despicable government shut down our businesses for more than a year. What if the people decided to shut down America on our terms instead? Think about it.
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. — Ayn Rand