You can call it a “road diet,” or “15 days to stop the spread,” or a “fifteen minute city,” or a “smart city,” a “central bank digital currency,” or just an EV that comes with a virtual leash attached in the form of limited range and limited recharging options. Or you can be more explicit and just call any one of these examples an assault on your mobility, i.e., a lockdown. Whatever you want to call them, they’ve arrived, and it’s just begun. Americans, along with their European brethren, are being turned into livestock, living in high-tech pens, where literally every aspect of our lives is monitored and everything we do or consume is rationed.

The justification for these lockdowns is to protect us from pandemics, to protect the environment, and – in a society with diminished opportunities and a reduced standard of living – to ensure “equity” for members of protected status groups. The common thread? Protection. And where there is a need for protection, there is a threat. A killer virus. A “climate crisis.” A toxic environment of white privilege.

In reality, however, the policies being promulgated to counter these supposedly existential threats are grossly out of proportion to the actual threats. There is a hidden agenda.

While the worst interpretations of this hidden agenda may be overstatements, we would be well advised to hear them out. An early and comprehensive assessment of how the COVID pandemic was exploited to move Americans closer to the status of livestock came from Catherine Austin Fitts in her video “Planet Lockdown.” Some of her ideas and allegations may stretch credulity, but nonetheless are essential concepts for anyone trying to make sense of where we could be headed as a civilization.

Fitts observes that the wealth of the world is becoming more and more concentrated into nations with advanced technology, and within those nations, disproportionately to a small elite. She claims the COVID pandemic provided an excuse to institute controls necessary to convert the planet from democratic processes to technocracy.

According to Fitts, in 1995, as neoliberal ideology took hold in both political parties in the U.S., the decision was made to transfer most of the wealth out of the country. This is the hollowing out that Trump’s populism attempted to reverse. But now, with the process nearly complete, Pitt alleges the pandemic is the cover whereby the unsustainable financial situation in the United States – because it was hollowed out – can be “reset.” She then claims the virus is being used as the means to compel mass vaccine injections that will make it possible to digitally identify and track every person. These biometric markers will then be used to connect people to a new cyber currency, allowing complete control. She believes there are five sectors working in tandem to create this new world order:

(1) Technology industry building clouds. (2) Military doing space development. (3) Big pharma developing injections to modify human DNA. (4) Media providing propaganda. (5) Central bankers engineering a new crypto system of global currency.

What Fitts is describing is a dark version of futurism. Her perspective is negative, but coherent. Technology has created barriers to entry that make it easier for a shrinking group of elite special interests to consolidate entire sectors of the economy and become very powerful. But why the new world order? Why the “reset”? Why turn humans into livestock, without rights, without property? Fitts offers a logical answer:

“If technology can make it possible for people to live 150 years, and it isn’t possible to keep this a secret, then why not downsize the population, integrate robots, so you can have a very wealthy and luxurious life without the management headaches?” In one particularly chilling quote, Fitts says “I was having a conversation with a venture capitalist, billionaire type, and he looked at me with these amazingly dead eyes and said ‘I can take every company and completely automate it with software and robotics and fire all the humans. We don’t need them any more.’”

Another explanatory warning, much more recent, came from Vera Sharav, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, speaking at the 75th Anniversary of The Nuremberg Code. Next to America’s Bill of Rights, the Nuremberg Code is one of humanity’s greatest weapons against medical slavery. For an 86-year-old who can personally recall being herded into concentration camps, Sharav is remarkably lucid.

Sharav describes the gradual onset of slavery in Nazi Germany, how the instruments of oppression rolled out over several years. In particular, she explains how medicine was perverted from its healing mission and was weaponized. She puts forward the ten point statement handed down by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1948 as essential guidelines that restrict medical experimentation. As COVID variants, and COVID vaccines, appear poised to make a timely comeback, it will be useful to be familiar with the human rights set forth in the Nuremberg Code. But why is this happening? Sharav is explicit, and like Fitts, references transhumanism:

“Transhumanism is a bio-tech enhanced caste system. Transhumanists despise human values and deny the existence of a human soul. This is the new eugenics. It is embraced by the most powerful global billionaire technocrats who gather at Davos: big tech, big pharma, the financial oligarchs, academics, government leaders & the military industrial complex. These megalomaniacs have paved the road to another Holocaust. This time, the threat of genocide is global in scale.”

States of Emergency, Permanent Lockdown

To categorically dismiss these terrifying scenarios is to ignore the history of the world and the human capacity for evil. It is to deny the power of deception, and the propensity of millions, gripped by mass psychosis, to participate in abominations while thinking all the while that they are saving the world.

For each of the big three alleged existential threats to the American people – disease, climate catastrophe, and systemic bigotry – there is a curated, sponsored groundswell of popular demand for the government to declare an emergency. And in a state of emergency, human rights are suspended. But some of the more insidious threats to American freedom are moving forward without needing a state of emergency. The official response to the “climate crisis” offers countless examples.

If ongoing pandemics condemn Americans to recurrent lockdowns (a word once only used in the context of maximum security prisons, but to which we are now completely desensitized), it is to save the climate that might inform how our cells are designed. They’re not pretty. Across America, single family homes with yards are being outlawed. New construction is prohibited and existing suburbs are being rezoned. This is to reduce “greenhouse gas,” despite weak arguments that low density housing causes more “greenhouse gas,” even if you think “greenhouse gas” is a real problem.

More generally, a whole new genre of creative accounting has been invented, called “carbon accounting,” whereby corporations, along with state and local governments, are now required to calculate how they will reduce their “carbon footprint.” Failure to do so results in the loss of subsidies and grants, as well as access to investment capital. Carbon accounting encompasses every imaginable aspect of life. Have a look at this “Climate Action Plan,” prepared for California city with 400,000 residents. There is nothing it will not regulate; all personal appliances, building codes, real estate zoning, transportation policy, every business, every industry, right down to cow farts and light bulbs.

The variables that “carbon accounting” purports to measure and manage are infinite. Rarely in human history has a new enterprise been so riven with subjectivity, so conducive to manipulation, so unnecessary, or so parasitical. But these credentialed minions, most of them utterly convinced of their messianic indispensability, are the foot soldiers of the great reset. When they’re done, you will live in small apartments, consuming strictly rationed resources, and locked down like an inmate, like a penned veal calf, whenever there’s a viral surge or the sun is too hot.

The third leg of the triad, equity, is a risky strategy. But so far, it’s working spectacularly well. Every time another outrageous and divisive initiative is announced, whether it’s paying reparations, condoning the 2020 riots, or taking children away from their parents so they can be castrated, the population is distracted. But it is possible that members of these disparate, artificially enflamed identity groups may someday recognize a planetwide lockdown being orchestrated in the background, and stop fighting each other.

It is possible that tens of millions of Americans will begin to question the credibility of pandemic and climate catastrophists, and realize the already red-pilled skeptics are not “conspiracy theorists,” or “haters,” but people just like them, fighting to keep everyone free. That day may arrive, and if it does, there is hope. We may be allowed to remain humans after all, possessing our dignity and our agency, and not turn into livestock.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.