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Katelynn Richardson
Daily Caller News Foundation
Santa Clara County deployed a variety of surveillance techniques on congregants of a local church that met during COVID-19, including tracking phone location data and parking a car in a nearby lot to observe behavior, court documents reported by independent journalist David Zweig reveal.
Inspectors from the county’s COVID-19 Business Compliance Unit spent a total of 51 hours conducting stakeouts near Calvary Chapel San Jose between November 25, 2020 and January 3, 2021, observing everything from Sunday services to baptisms and prayer groups, Zweig reported. Enforcement officers, who were paid $219 an hour, wrote in great detail about church activities, noting each violation of the mask mandate, social distancing policy and state-wide ban on singing.
Using cellular mobility data from a company called SafeGraph, which aggregates location data from 47 million devices nationwide to show movement patterns, the county also set up a geofence around the church building to track how many people visited each day, documents obtained by Zweig show. The county paid Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho $800 an hour to analyze the data, determining there was a daily peak of 1,700 people visiting in early 2021.
County Counsel James Williams told Mercury News that the data is anonymized and not used to track the cellphones of individuals.
“It is unconscionable how much time and money this county has spent surveilling and targeting this church when they should be focused on rebuilding the community,” Mariah Gondeiro, an attorney for Calvary Chapel, told Mercury News.
A complaint filed by the church in 2021 says that several congregants “expressed to Pastor McClure they felt intimidated by the County enforcement officers’ persistent surveillance of church services” and “believed the County was going to order the police to arrest them for attending church.”
Calvary Chapel re-opened its church on May 24, 2020 after two months of being closed, defying the county’s mandates. It sued the county for violating its constitutional rights, which the county followed with its own lawsuit against the church in October 2020, arguing the church violated public health orders and failed to pay fines. The county is currently seeking $2.87 million in public health fines from Calvary Chapel in the ongoing lawsuit.
In August 2021, Grace Community Church, which also opened in defiance of the COVID-19 lockdown, secured a $800,000 settlement from the state of California and Los Angeles County after the Supreme Court ruled against California’s indoor worship ban.
Santa Clara County and County Counsel James R. Williams did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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This new state religion is Wokeism. “Going woke” conjures up visions of someone claiming to be acutely sensitive (“awake”) to “systemic social and political injustice.” And not just alleged bigotry against blacks, but toward every other “minority” as well, from LGBT folk – especially everything transgender and “nonbinary” – to “undocumented immigrants.” All of them, being VICTIMS, intrinsically more virtuous than the shameful oppressor class: primarily heterosexual white males.
This new “woke” consciousness has turned America upside-down – from the nationwide Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, to tearing down of historic monuments, to demanding multi-million-dollar reparation payments for blacks, to appointing transgenders as top government officials, to rampant reverse discrimination in every area of life, to the U.S. military imposing mandatory “diversity training” and transgender pronoun use on all personnel, causing recruitment to disastrously plummet.
Yet there is hope. Being “saved” – which in Wokeism is called being “woke” – is largely a matter of worshipping victimhood by becoming an “ally” and “defender” of all the many victim classes, and a determined enemy of the straight white male oppressor class. Thus, “joining the righteous” as an ally – even if one is cursed to be a straight white male – opens the door mercifully for salvation, even to the most wretched.
That is the power of the religion of Wokeism. And it’s explored as never before in the February 2023 issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine. If you’ve ever wondered, for example, exactly how the most radical elements in American society are successfully pressuring the biggest corporations into adopting the most outrageous and immoral policies imaginable, even when doing so permanently damages and devalues the company, the stunning answers are in this issue of Whistleblower, titled “WOKEISM: AMERICA’S OFFICIAL STATE RELIGION.”
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