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Pastor Brian Gibson

January 19, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Americans must stand up now and defend their most basic freedoms, urged Pastor Brian Gibson, a popular evangelical preacher and advocate for First Amendment rights.

Gibson is the leader of Peaceably Gather, a Christian, pro-freedom network that helped organize the reopening of thousands of churches during scientifically discredited COVID-19 lockdowns last year.

“I believe that if the church gets pushed back and Americans don’t push back right now, we could lose all the freedoms we have here,” he said.

“The First Amendment threats under a Biden-Harris administration will be unparalleled,” Gibson warned. “Anything that’s holding to traditional Christian values, we start speaking out about it, they’re going to come after us, label it ‘hate speech’ and use that in a full-on war against the church.”

“I’ve been around the world, ministered to the underground church, I’ve been there when they’ve come in and started hauling people away,” Gibson related. “The only thing that separates us from them is the First Amendment. If the First falls, America falls.”

Joe Biden has made clear his intent to dismantle Trump administration religious freedom protections, promising to reinstate an Obama-era rule that requires Christian organizations, like the Little Sisters of the Poor, to facilitate abortifacient and contraception access.

In 2019, then-Senator Kamala Harris went farther, introducing a bill that would amend federal law to force Christians to perform abortions and hire LGBT individuals, she indicated. As attorney general of California, Harris ordered a raid on pro-life activist David Daleiden after he exposed Planned Parenthood employees discussing illegally selling aborted babies’ body parts.

She oversaw the prosecution of Daleiden and one of his colleagues on 15 felony charges before the case was taken up by her successor, Xavier Becerra, now Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

“They told us exactly what they are going to do. They are going to push us into a full-fledged Marxist situation,” Gibson said. “They are going to take away our freedoms, they are going to come after private education, they are going to destroy and attempt to destroy our economy and our small businesses.”

“So the churches will be attacked, small business people will be attacked, conservatives will be attacked, it’s going to keep going” as it has throughout the COVID-19 crisis. “America needs to stand up,” he stressed.

The most important thing for concerned citizen, according to Gibson, is prayer. He called on every religious leader to “(o)pen your houses of worship. Don't back down. Stand up for America. Stand up for your people. Stand up for Jesus.”

Gibson also encouraged conservatives to be “making noise with these political leaders and letting them know that we’re here.”

“One of the problems with conservatives and conservativism … is that we’re quiet until it’s almost too late, because we’re respectful people,” he said. “If you look at the way the left organizes, and the way the left acts, they’re loud, they’re aggressive, they’re pushy.” 

“I don’t want to live a life like that, but I don’t want to be ignored either. We have to start hitting these political leaders up with our texts or emails or calls,” Gibson continued.

“Stand and demand for voter integrity,” he urged. “Demand for voter ID” – which more than a dozen states currently don’t require – and for the elimination of mass absentee voting and “these softwares that kids can hack.”

While conservatives increasingly face blacklisting and outright persecution for questioning the 2020 election, major incidents of illegality and irregularity in the election still have not been resolved.

As LifeSiteNews reported, the Amistad Project, an election integrity watchdog, unveiled in December that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent more than $400 million funding local election processes in a campaign that may have violated federal law. The more than $60 million worth of grants that the Amistad Project tracked went almost entirely to predominately blue counties. 

Election officials in key swing states simultaneously worked to loosen mail-in voting safeguards codified into state law, as Trump adviser Peter Navarro has detailed. In Pennsylvania, absentee voters in top Democratic counties got extra help to fix their ballots, in violation of requirements authorized by state lawmakers. 

Georgia voters experienced a similar “two-tiered system” after the Republican Secretary of State entered into an agreement with state Democrats that purported to change legal deadlines and signature analysis for mail-in ballots. Few of the unilateral changes enacted by swing state administrators have been addressed by the courts.

“I believe it is a stolen election,” Gibson said, noting that he will not recognize Biden as president. “I am a man of peace, but I won't recognize a faulty and stolen election.”

“Right now, it seems as though many of the entities of America have failed us. We need to remember that they work for us. We don’t work for them. We’re not the property of the government. We are the government,” Gibson emphasized. 

“So I think there has to be a massive push for voter reform. If we’re going to save the republic, that is our only hope,” he said. 

Gibson added that “we have a lot of people that are in the Republican Party now that won’t stand – it has become obvious this year – they won’t stand for what’s right or wrong.”

“They care more about special interest groups, they care more about the cash they get, the kickbacks they get, and I think its time for us to begin to primary them, to get rid of them, and to reshape and rework the party that’s supposed to represent us,” he said.

The January 6 Capitol protest

Gibson also detailed his experience in Washington, D.C. on January 6, the day that Congress certified the results of the Electoral College after breaches of the Capitol.

“I was there the day before in an organized prayer rally,” he related, recalling that “thousands of people responded and came to Christ.”

President Trump’s speech on January 6, which Democrats have falsely alleged “incited” the riot, “was a normal President Trump speech. He said nothing to incite violence or rioting,” Gibson said. “The majority of these people were 100 percent peaceful, and to borrow a term from the left were ‘mostly peaceful,’” he attested.

When Gibson eventually reached the Capitol, he saw that “most people were just standing around. They were not violent, they were not doing what the media is trying to portray they were doing.”

“I hate that life was lost up there,” he said, noting the deaths of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick and Ashli Babbitt, a military veteran who was killed trying to climb through a window inside the Capitol.

“She was going through the window when she was shot. Now, she shouldn’t have been going through that window, (but) I want to know where the outrage for her is, because I’ve seen outrage all year when life has been lost,” he observed.

“We condemn any violence. But I do not think this kind of crowd did anything like an Antifa crowd or a BLM crowd,” Gibson said.

“I’ve been with them, and I’ve seen them attack. I saw them hit a woman in the head with num-chuks last time I was in D.C.; indiscriminately in the crowd, hammered this woman in the back of the head with num-chuks,” he said. “What’s happening now is a sting job on the media and on the left. It is going to take one incident with 200 people, that I think someone opened the door for.”

“People need to take heart and be courageous and stand against this kind of oppression,” Gibson insisted.