Canadian pastor says Soviet-style tyranny is drawing eerily close after another arrest.
‘If they came for me, be sure of it, they’re coming for you as well,’ the pastor warned Americans!
Pastor Artur Pawlowski warned Americans on ‘The Ingraham Angle’ that draconian COVID-19 restrictions he was arrested for won’t stop at the Canadian border.
Canadian pastor Artur Pawlowski spoke about his latest arrest on Wednesday’s “Ingraham Angle” and reiterated a prior warning to Americans: totalitarianism is rearing its ugly head in the West.
“Pawlowski went viral when he protested Canada’s insane COVID mandates. And now authorities are arresting him again,” host Laura Ingraham said. The pastor was arrested by Canada Border Services Agency when he returned to his home country and was charged with “failure to wear a mask.”
“I came to the United States with a simple warning,” the pastor told Ingraham about his recent trip abroad.
“You’re next,” he said. “If they came for me, be sure of it, they’re coming for you as well.”
He called the individuals who arrested him “masked gangsters,” that he “couldn’t even consider them officers of the law.”
Pawlowski, head of Calgary’s Street Church in Alberta, Canada, first gained international attention when he confronted local inspectors on Easter after he said they entered his church without a warrant. The inspectors were there to ensure the church was abiding by COVID-19 guidelines, which called for an indoor maximum capacity of 15%, social distancing, and mask-wearing.
“Get out of this property,” he shouted to the police during the confrontation. The pastor proceeded to call the police “Nazis” and “Gestapo,” referring to Nazi Germany’s secret state police. “Nazis are not welcome here,” he shouted again.
Pawlowski told Fox News in April he was raised under Soviet communism in Poland. “It was a disaster,” he said about his childhood. “Police officers could break into your house five in the morning, they could beat you up, torture, they could arrest you for no matter what reason they would come up with … So, it was like a flashback when those police officers showed up at my church. Everything kind of came back to life from my childhood, and the only thing I could do is to fend off the wolves as a shepherd … We as lions should never bow before the hyenas, and that’s what they’re right now.”
“You came to freedom,” Ingraham said about the pastor’s journey to Canada. “This is feeling very Soviet to me,” adding that the process was incremental.
The pastor responded that he believed “What they’re doing today is identical to what I remember growing up.”
Pawlowski was arrested in May for “organizing an illegal in-person gathering” after court-imposed restrictions. “The service organizer acknowledged the injunction, but chose to ignore requirements for social distancing, mask-wearing and reduced capacity limits for attendees, and continued with the event,” police said.
The pastor claimed he was facing up to four years of prison for the charges, and possibly more.
“I was handcuffed like a common criminal, like a terrorist,” he said. “They wanted to break me. They wanted to show the whole world ‘You see what we do to those who dare to speak against our tyranny? If you will follow … you’re next.'”
Hannah Grossman is an Associate Editor at Fox News. Follow her on Twitter at @GrossmanHannah
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