Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age

Introduction

Dearest Readers,

My editors at Chelsea Green Publishing have graciously offered readers of this Substack an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age — the Introduction.

Facing the Beast is about the last three years, and about my personal journey — a journey in which many people, I am humbled to learn, seem interested — from having been a fixture in the DC/NY/CA left-wing legacy-media universe, to being cast out into non-personhood because of an unacceptable commitment of mine to telling the truth, only to learn to reassemble my life and thoughts while finding myself in “the rest of America”. In that formerly forbidden universe, I also found personal freedom, a culture in which questioning of lies and cant was not only accepted but welcome, a new set of life-and-death conversations to take the place of cliches, conformity and falsehoods, and new friends; altogether, I found an intellectual and emotional new home, the experience of which forced me to question most of my previous assumptions and certainties.

The book is also about the genuine revolution in which we find ourselves, and the heroes and heroines fighting it. And it is about what it was like to open the door that revealed bodies stacking up in the thousands and hundreds of thousands — babies dead and dying — amounting to the greatest crime against humanity ever.

Lastly, it is about realizing that if we are ever going to get out of this situation with humanity itself surviving, we need help from someone I was ultimately compelled to identify as being — well — God. Facing the Beast is about my spiritual journey too, as I slowly realized that someone I had thought of certainly as distant and possibly as not too terribly concerned with us, was actually as close to us and as involved with us as is our own blood and heartbeat.

I hope you enjoy the introduction — the book is based on my Substack essays, so thank you truly for having been part of its creation - and I hope you read, enjoy and share Facing the Beast.

Please pre-order here: https://www.amazon.com/Facing-Beast-Courage-Faith-Resistance/dp/1645022366

This story begins in the “Before” world.

“Before” the years 2020 to 2023, when a set of policies based on abject lies posed an existential threat to our democracy and our way of life. “Before” this likely AI-deployed set of lies, dispensed globally, targeted our West with its core traditions of free speech—and in the US, with its First Amendment—with arrant censorship.

“Before” the Left—the subculture that used to stand for human rights, freedom of speech, real science, critical thinking, and skepticism about Big Government and Big Corporations, let alone about their merger, and that used to fight against discrimination and inequality—fell into a trance in which that same group became champions of censorship, and of a two-tier society in which some people, as the pigs declared in Animal Farm, are “more equal” than others; and fell prey to magical thinking and cultlike behavior.

“Before” the media—which used to see itself as the source of investigation of elite powers; which used to ask questions about received narratives; which used to demand that its journalists produce evidence and independent verification before drawing conclusions in print—were bought out by Big Government via the CARES Act, and by Big Pharma directly, and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to the extent that almost all legacy media became unquestioning stenographers for interested parties aligned with the global powers who dictated the harmful nonsense.

I miss the “Before Times.”

Because I have studied the histories of the overthrowing of past democracies, and learned that many democracies have died incrementally; that tyrants’ attacks on liberty are often executed surreptitiously, or attributed to benign motives, and thus succeed in draining people’s freedoms; or by enforcing bit by bit tiny compliances that add up to huge compliances, any of which would never have been considered by the same population without revolt, if the curtain was brought down all at once—I thought it was important to keep a kind of journal of these changes as I witnessed them. This book is a memoir of how our “Before” world—that lasted up until March 2020—became, through a slow boil and through various shocks to its core institutions—this “After” world of tyranny, sadism, and forced inequality.

I have been an activist defending the Constitution for the past three-plus decades. As a result of my work identifying and fighting earlier threats to democracy and free speech, I was able to see, early in 2020, the inevitable implications for our democracy and for our country as a whole, in the rollout of pandemic and lockdown and then mandate narratives and policies.

Given my previous work, it was easy to guess what all these policies would quickly do to us. It was easy for me to foretell that the immediate deployment of mass censorship of critics of these policies; the ramped-up State surveillance; the forced closures of schools, places of worship, and businesses; the unconstitutional declarations that we must not assemble, beyond a certain small number of people, even in private homes; the violation of the Nuremberg Laws and the most basic international human rights laws that guarantee bodily integrity and informed medical consent, represented mRNA vaccine mandates—would utterly transform our nation, and the nations of the West, into post-democratic societies; into societies that may look pretty much the same on the surface (as I argued in my 2008 bestseller The End of America that post-democratic societies would)—but that the heart of their freedom would be annihilated, leaving intact pretty-looking vassal states, with no real autonomy left for their citizens, where the nations of the free West so recently prevailed.

I saw early what a dangerous time it was and is: 2020 to 2023.

In my 2008 book about dying democracies, I had described the threats to liberty that prevailed at that time, in the George Bush Jr. era, as deriving primarily from the Right. But even then I was not deceived by partisanship assumptions about fascism, as I learned from my study of earlier totalitarian and fascist regimes and leaders that authoritarians of the Left and the Right are exactly the same; they take the same ten steps to ensure the death of democracies, and do the same things to propagandize their subject people, to silence dissent, to arrest opposition leaders, to create surveillance societies and prisons outside the rule of law, and eventually to bring about emergency law, which is Step Ten.

Since 2020, in America at least, these threats to our country have been deployed largely from the Left. Though I come “from the Left,” I had no problem recognizing this.

The threats to liberty worldwide had no partisan quality as they were “metapartisan,” being handed down from the WEF (World Economic Forum), the WHO (World Health Organization), the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), nongovernment foundations such as Bill Gates’s, and allied Big Tech leaders, as I described in my 2022 book The Bodies of Others. You could see the exact same pandemic, lockdown, and mandate policies rolled out in conservative-led Australia, in conservative-led UK, in liberal-led Canada, in liberal-led France, and so on.

Other people also spoke up, as the dark shadow of fascism descended on our nation under the cloak of a “public health emergency.”

Some others who had been identified with the US Left were also speaking out against the public health response to the pandemic. They also spoke out about the censorship regime that so visibly descended on us. Glenn Greenwald, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, Joe Rogan, Robert Kennedy Jr., and others, though identified with the Left, held the principles of the Constitution and basic human rights above partisanship. Other heroes, too, arose in this dark time, in ways that also transcended partisanship. Many of these were heroes of real medicine, real science, real public health. Some were doctors: Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Paul Alexander, Dr. Henry Ealy, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, and many others. Some were scientists and economists; the signatories and the convener of the Great Barrington Declaration, for instance: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and economist Jeffrey Tucker. These all refused to tolerate, or even accept as settled “science,” policies that they knew would destroy schooling, damage the development of children, and lead to mass starvation.

Some heroes for truth came from the world of finance—critics such as Ed Dowd, formerly of BlackRock, who raised an early alarm about data showing excess deaths and disabilities post-mRNA vaccination. Or Steve Kirsch, an entrepreneur who also crunched the numbers on these harms, independently confirming the “democide”—death by government—that Mr. Dowd had found. These critics, whose training was in the world of hard data, perhaps spoke out because they simply could not tolerate the fibs and bad math that undergirded “the narrative”; as well as out of concern for their fellow human beings’ health, and even survival.

There were—are—many heroes and heroines. But not nearly enough.

There were—are—many millions more quislings and colluders, as I learned upon this painful journey.

****

My own life changed utterly, because of my taking actions that would have suited the “Before” world, but that I took in an “After” reality.

Until the COVID era, I had lived a fortunate life. I had been a well-known feminist nonfiction writer for thirty-five years; I’d published eight bestselling books. I had lived in Washington, D.C., and served as a campaign consultant to President Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign; I had advised Vice President Al Gore. I’d later moved to a charming apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, where I’d eventually, as a single mom, raised a beautiful family. I appeared on every news outlet, wrote for every major media platform, and was a columnist for outlets ranging from the Guardian, to the Soros-funded Project Syndicate, to the Sunday Times of London.

In addition to these professional validations, I was privileged to be part of the cultural “scene” made up of influencers on the progressive Left. It was a satisfying lifestyle: film premieres and art openings, book parties and galas. All these events reassured those of us attending that we were at the center of the universe, and for good reason; and that our worldview was the right one—indeed, the only one.

I had been treated as a media fixture for those thirty-five years, for doing what I had always done—speaking up for civil liberties and the Constitution and reporting on women’s health issues—especially on sexual and reproductive health issues, my beat.

During the pandemic and the lockdown, then, I did what I have always done; I investigated the myths and narratives that I saw forming online and in news outlets and asked public questions about them. For me, this was nothing new. By doing so, I realized that many of the diktats of the period were untrue. I saw quickly that the COVID-19 maps on the front pages of the New York Times, and the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 map cited by almost every other news outlet in the US, were all produced without giving the reader any access to the underlying datasets, for example. As a tech CEO whose website specializes in presenting the same kind of government data (application programming interfaces—APIs), I saw immediately that there was no way to trust these COVID-19 maps.

I knew from having written The End of America that the fact that we were, in July of 2020, already at Step Ten of the Ten Steps to Fascism—emergency law—represented a very dangerous situation. I knew from having read my way, as a former graduate student, through many of the last 400 years’ worth of English memoirs and novels, that waves of infectious diseases, ranging from yellow fever to typhus to cholera, had passed over both Britain and America, but that these diseases had never been treated as we were treating this purportedly serious infectious disease, COVID-19. Never had multiple generations been advised to crowd together into closed indoor spaces, only to be denied light, air, and exercise, during an epidemic. Indeed, from Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, to the reformers of the Progressive Era, health pioneers knew well that doing this was, in fact, deadly.

So many “truths” of the COVID narrative made no sense to me.

As I have always done with official narratives, I questioned these “truths.” But the world had changed. My questioning, instead of continuing to solidify my cultural status, called forth waves of bots and trolls, threats and harassment. My right-on, progressive friends let me know that they did not approve of the issues that I was raising.

Then came late 2020 and early 2021: the launch of the presentation of the mRNA injections as “the only way out” of the lockdowns. I recall reading Moderna’s website, which boasted that the company’s mRNA technology, and the spike protein in the vaccine formulation, would enter every cell in the human body.

I am an English major—not a medical doctor or a scientist. But I remember thinking: Every cell? In your ovaries? Your heart? Your liver? Your digestive tract? Your eyelashes? I have a neurological condition—spina bifida occulta; and I knew from experience how delicate was the nearly miraculous activity of healthy nerve conduction and how easily it could go awry. The nerves? I wondered. The myelin sheaths of the nerves? And I wondered how that—spike protein and mRNA entering the cells of the myelin sheaths of the nerves—would affect the fragile electrical conduction that allows for healthy nerve processes; and I decided to pass.

This personal, rational decision about my own body—one related to my own private health issues—abruptly thrust me into a new social and even legal category; one that was created in the start of 2021: that of second-class citizen; “anti-vaxxer” (note the trashy double xs); dissident; weirdo; “conspiracy theorist”; and, though I remained a classical liberal, “Trumper.”

The moment I began asking basic questions on my Twitter feed specifically about the novel mRNA injections—the kinds of questions I had asked for three decades about silicone breast implants; about high estrogen levels in birth control pills; about dangerous IUDs; about vaginal mesh, or industrial hospital birthing practices and high for-profit C-section rates—my bio changed everywhere, online, and all at once. Instead of being described as a leading voice of Third Wave feminism, with a string of honors, degrees, and awards after my name, I was now identified from the first sentence, on Wikipedia and everywhere else, as a “conspiracy theorist.” Not being aware yet that AI had already been deployed journalistically, I did not even understand how that overnight change in my reputation had been accomplished.

I began to be left out of the social events that had resumed, in New York, after almost everyone had rushed to get vaccinated; I was cut off the guest lists that had once sought to have me. Hostesses told me that I was no longer welcome, as the hosts were “being careful.”

Many journalists who had been my colleagues and some even my friends, and who had had no problem in the “Before” world seeking out favors and book endorsements from me, remained silent as I was portrayed as a lunatic and a QAnon aficionado. Others, who knew me and knew better, even joined in the melee.

******

After President Joe Biden gave his notorious and factually baseless December 2021 speech about how the unvaccinated were bringing “severe illness and death” onto themselves and everyone else, my friends and even some of my relatives began to shun me—and my equally scandalously unvaccinated husband.

But it’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase. . . . We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated—for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.¹

There was no place left for us in communities that aligned with nonsense. We had left New York City at the start of the pandemic and had moved into a little house in the woods in the Hudson Valley. Despite our physical separation from the heart of the culture, this bizarre ostracism really stung. And it went on and on. We were left out of family Thanksgivings. One of my best friends moved out of the city to another country, without saying goodbye; later she explained in an email that she had been “disappointed” in me for my position on the vaccine and the lockdowns. Another one of my oldest friends told me that I could not have dinner with him because “he does not sit indoors with unvaccinated people.” A beloved elderly relative told me I could not even see him outside because he “does not sit outside with unvaccinated people.” A family Christmas vacation was canceled at the last minute, after the President told all our loved ones that we would kill them with our very presence. No one in that world could hear me when I kept explaining that the vaccines did nothing to affect transmission.

It was as if a hex had been cast over everyone I loved, and over the entire culture in which I had, till so recently, felt so at home.

The nail in the coffin came on about June 19, 2021. I had posted a tweet warning that women were experiencing menstrual dysregulation—to say the least—upon having received mRNA vaccines. You don’t have to be a biologist to know that this is a serious signal of something going very wrong with a woman’s health. And it was obvious that if women were having horrible problems with their periods in 2021, there would be fertility issues—as there are—in 2023.

But after I posted this tweet, my world turned upside down. I was deplatformed from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. A wave of mocking news articles—centering on tweets that did not even exist, tweets I had immediately deleted as being badly worded—appeared simultaneously, in multiple languages, around the globe. Editors at the Sunday Times of London and the Guardian and the Daily Mail—editors who had commissioned my work for decades—ran similar hostile stories; some depicted me falsely as interested in QAnon (I barely knew what that was) and others as “unhinged.” Matt Gertz of Media Matters and CNN mocked my tweet, and did a hit piece on me, for my daring to speak with Tucker Carlson on Fox News about my concerns regarding women’s health. Former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson called me “batshit crazy.” And so on.

Overnight, my world closed. No editor who had formerly commissioned me took my calls or replied to my emails now. An investor in my company withdrew a six-figure investment. I was persona non grata. And it seemed like a blanket fiat. No one who used to invite me to the glittering events of yesterday dared to contact me; not a single legacy media producer would cross the invisible no-go line that cordoned me off from the culture as a thinker. I was radioactive, for telling the truth; for telling the truth about women, as I have always done; for telling the truth about women—related to something unbelievably important.

When the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general successfully sued the Biden administration,² we learned that this fiat had been so massive and so absolute because the administration—for whom I had voted—had coordinated with Twitter and Facebook attacks on “misinformation” online. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Bureau of the Census, Twitter, and Facebook had all colluded to review lists that included my poor, brief, important, accurate tweet. Carol Crawford, “Chief, Digital Media Branch” of the CDC, on May 10, 2021, had sent out a “BOLO (Be On the LookOut)” alert about tweets and had included mine. I was put on a “misinformation” hit list. And so the CDC and the biggest tech companies in the world used the millions of dollars and gargantuan power at their disposal to close down my voice, along with other dissidents’ voices.³ “The below are just some example posts. We do plan to post something shortly to address vaccine shedding and I can send that link soon. Our census team, copied here, has much more info on it if needed. Also, we are standing up a BOLO COVID misinformation meeting and inviting all tech platforms,” wrote Ms Crawford.

My tweet, written in response to someone worried about abnormal bleeding post–mRNA vaccination, which Ms Crawford singled out, read: “Well hundreds of women on this page say they are having bleeding/clotting after vaccination or that they bleed oddly being AROUND vaccinated women. Unconfirmed, needs more investigation. But lots of reports.”

That warning turned out to be accurate and important.

America First Legal also filed a lawsuit, and in July of 2022, they published documents confirming that my tweet, along with other tweets from other commentators warning women about miscarriages and menstrual damage suffered after mRNA injection, was in the CDC’s “BOLO” email alert to tech companies.⁴

This global reputational attack proved to be both a heartbreak and an opportunity. My life completely changed. I thought that no one would ever want to hear from me again; but, paradoxically, conservative, libertarian, and independent news outlets and podcasters—a whole world of citizens who cared, as I did, about the Constitution, and about women and babies—sought me out. My life changed even more powerfully when in early 2022, the Pfizer documents were released via court order—the FDA had asked the court to keep them hidden for seventy-five years—and I was prompted by Steve Bannon on his podcast, WarRoom, to organize scientists and physicians into a phalanx of experts to read through the highly technical documents and to write reports explaining what was in them.

I was joined, rather miraculously, by the only person whom I can imagine running such a complex, important undertaking: Amy Kelly, the program director overseeing the dozens and then hundreds and finally thousands of experts who sought to join this historic undertaking. She is also now my company DailyClout’s chief operating officer. A petite, lovely woman with shoulder-length blonde curls like those of a heroine in an Edwardian novella, her steely mind and inexplicably effective organizational genius defy every stereotype. She turned thousands of experts into an unstoppable truth machine, capable of confronting and ultimately overcoming phalanxes and battalions of lies.

At last, 3,250 distinguished doctors and scientists, including pathologists, oncologists, radiologists, cardiologists, sports medicine physicians; registered nurses and nurse practitioners; biologists; lab clinicians; medical fraud investigators; biostatisticians; and other experts joined our project. These experts—all working as volunteers, simply for the sake of real science and medicine, and for the good of humanity—produced what I consider to be some of the most important journalism of our time: the eighty-four reports that reveal that Pfizer committed the greatest crime against humanity in recorded history; with a special focus on destroying the reproductive capacity of human females.⁵

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result,” concludes Joseph, in Genesis 50:20.⁶ The highest levels of power in this country sought to silence me; yet I was sent by this cancellation on a journey that brought me new friends, new insights, new questions, and the privilege, along with Amy Kelly and these courageous volunteers, of alerting the world to a danger that put humanity itself in jeopardy.

Today Pfizer has lost 89 percent of its manufacturing demand, and at least a substantial portion of humans are going to survive its assault.

What readers will find in this book is a story of a world that changed, bit by bit, into its dark opposite. I am sure it mirrors many of their own stories.

On looking back, I see that I sought to describe three things. First, I wanted simply to be an accurate and reliable witness to a world in a state of degradation and, I hope, also to testify to seeds of its rebirth. In this task, I bore in mind a work by an “ordinary citizen,” a German scholar of French literature, Victor Klemperer, who kept a journal during the descent into barbarism of the Nazi years. It was published as I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1941.⁷ When I read that book, I realized how important it was to have such journals, since they record indeed how fascism does not descend overnight, but moment by moment, loss by small loss. I was also very moved by and related to Klemperer’s stance squarely in the ideals of the Enlightenment—in his belief that culture and literature, the ideals of civilization, cannot be abandoned and must ultimately surely save us again. His faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment, and of a civilized culture, heightened his shock and outrage when those ideals were trampled before his eyes. I too feel, as I witness the destruction of our world today in the West, that we must cherish the memories of a civilized and literate society if we are to save one another and rebuild. So, one task I set myself was simply to, as Klemperer did, “bear witness.”

A second theme that drove the writing of this book was my slow-dawning realization that we were not in a normal time of normal bad human politics and normal bad destructive material choices. I realized gradually that the degradation taking place on the material plane simply reflected or manifested a much larger battle—indeed a spiritual battle; one between Good and Evil themselves, and that God—whom till now I hesitated to mention in public—was of course central to what we were witnessing; and He is central, I slowly realized, to whether or not we will survive.

Lastly—relatedly—this book is about how I realized that the pandemic, lockdown, and mandate policies strove to destroy human love, care, and intimacy; that it was human love, care, and intimacy that have saved us, individually and collectively, and that will save us again, if we are to be saved. And I discovered that it is only in human love, care, and intimacy, ultimately, that God lives, and moves in, and rescues, if they are to be rescued, our lives.

Will we live through this? I have concluded, as you will see, that that is up to choices we now make. The attack on humanity is far from over. Pfizer and Moderna may have crashed as stocks, as I write, in August of 2023,⁸ but on the near horizon are other existential threats to our liberty and survival, ranging from GMO mosquitoes bearing malaria released intentionally in Texas and Louisiana, to arson-set or negligence-enhanced wildfires that are destroying communities in Canada and Maui as I write, to explosive derailments on our transport systems, to grid outages, to attacks on our food supplies, to the rollout of a central bank digital currency worldwide that can track our spending and cut us off for “social credit” violations; to the debanking of dissident voices, such as Dr. Joseph Mercola’s, recently, by Chase Bank.⁹ A drumbeat of scary stories about scary COVID variants is audible as well.

Most alarming of all is the insistence by our leaders of a global adherence to a WHO framework that supersedes national sovereignty; if that goes through, anything can be done to us.

I have long been predicting that all of this would unfold, around now. My predictions of all these kinds of attacks, which I made in public over the past two years, are all coming true, and not because I am prescient. They are inevitable now based simply enough on my reading of past histories. The bad guys are not done with us. Their goal is still a global feudalism.

Despite these horrors, and these escalating dangers, I think you will find as you read that I believe that we are also are in a time in which we may witness and receive incredible potential blessings—and experience incredibly rapid evolution—depending on what we choose to do; morally, and as humans fighting for humanity.

This is the story of my cancellation, my survival, my witnessing of an all-out attack on humanity, and my stumbling into an awareness of what holds us and upholds us all.

And this is an account of the unseen gifts and energies and presences along our way; the help and resources—especially as they derive from within our own hearts, deeds, and consciences, human actions that apparently call forth angels—that I believe, in spite of it all, still can save us.

Notes

1. Allie Malloy and Maegan Vasquez, “Biden Warns of Winter of ‘Severe Illness and Death’ for Unvaccinated Due to Omicron,” CNN, December 16, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/16/politics/joe-biden-warning-winter/index.html.

2. Missouri v. Biden, 2023, https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/missouri-v-biden-ruling.pdf; Associated Press, “Injunction Filed by Missouri, Louisiana Attorneys General Blocks Biden Administration from Working with Social Media Firms about ‘Protected Speech.’” July 4, 2023,

https://www.ky3.com/2023/07/04/injunction-filed-by-missouri-louisiana-attorney-generals-blocks-biden-administration-working-with-social-media-firms-about-protected-speech.

3. Naomi Wolf, “The Pain of Listening to Twitter Censorship Testimony,” Outspoken, February 9, 2023, https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/the-pain-of-listening-to-twitter.

4. America First Legal, “AFL Lawsuit Reveals Damning CDC Documents Proving Government Collusion with Big Tech to Censor Free Speech and Promote Biden Administration Propaganda,” July 27, 2022, https://aflegal.org/afl-lawsuit-reveals-damning-cdc-documents-proving-government-collusion-with-big-tech-to-censor-free-speech-and-promote-biden-administration-propaganda.

5. WarRoom/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Analysis Reports, “Read the Latest Pfizer Reports,” DailyClout, https://dailyclout.io/category/pfizer-reports.

6. Genesis 50:20 (New American Standard Bible).

7. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1933–1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years (New York: Modern Library, 1999).

8. Jared S. Hopkins, “Pfizer’s Covid Boost Crashes to Earth,” Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizers-covid-boost-crashes-to-earth-51e1d0; Derek Saul, “Covid Vaccine Makers’ Stock Crashes to Multiyear Lows Monday as Sales Keep Sliding,” Forbes.com, August 7, 2023

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/08/07/covid-vaccine-makers-stocks-crash-to-multiyear-lows-monday-as-sales-keep-sliding.

9. Ethan Huff, “Dr. Mercola Files Lawsuit against JP Morgan Chase for De-banking Mercola Market Employees,”Natural News, August 23, 2023, https://www.naturalnews.com/2023-08-23-mercola-lawsuit-jpmorgan-chase-debanking-employees