After harsh lockdowns, an Australian singer appreciates American freedoms

Australian singer and songwriter Lauren Kellie says she never really knew what true freedom was until moving to the U.S. with her family while her native land struggled under draconian COVID-19 lockdowns.

"You think you know what freedom is until you come to the U.S.," said Kellie Friday on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "You know, not even two weeks after my husband moved here — he came a few months after me and our children did — he said, there's just a different feel here, there's just a different vibe, you know, you guys understand what actual freedom is."

Kellie recently released a song titled "Liberty," an ominous, urgent plea to the complacent and comfortable sleepwalking into tyranny to wake up and recapture their receding freedoms while there's still time. The video is available on Rumble and YouTube. 

"The idea of freedom for me is so incredibly important," Kellie said. "From a personal standpoint and for all the things that I've kind of been personally walking through the last couple of years, and then to write a song like this that fits with what is happening in the whole wide world is, I think, just huge."

Kellie recalled how strict COVID-19 lockdowns turned her native Australia by degrees into an unrecognizable surveillance state. 

In her own state of Victoria, "they were on lockdown for 275 days out of the first year of all the tyrannical stuff that started happening," Kellie recounted. "It got to the point where people could only go three miles — one mile from home, I think, in some areas — they literally were not allowed to leave their houses, they had police on the streets, they had blockades blocking people from getting to places, and then once the vaccine became a thing, it's like they were not allowed into stores or kind of go anywhere unless they had it, and they had to sign in, at a grocery store, you know, so they're being tracked constantly wherever they went." 

Kellie said people have told her that her song gave them hope.

"I'm still hearing stories," she said, "from friends who messaged me saying, 'I love your song. It gave me hope.'

"It's been so rough for them in Australia that it's still gravely affecting people."