☕️ PRINCIPLES ☙ Saturday, June 7, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The continuing relevance of the pandemic, and how to fix government; fabulous Ninth Circuit mandates decision; and an internet troll with alleged jury knowledge blows up the Internet.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your vacation roundup includes: notes from my NACL talk yesterday; another fantastic appellate decision from the Ninth Circuit; and the latest dust-up in the Trump Trial by an internet troll who may or may not have inside intel.

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖 I have no transcript from yesterday’s talk at the NACL Conference, but I wrote this up from my notes.

Why was I asked to come here and talk about “covid”? Isn’t the pandemic over? Can’t we move on already? Unfortunately, the pandemic is not over. The pandemic is the explanation for every major problem. The pandemic knocked the world off its axis, and it is still spinning wonky.

Here’s the problem. Covid launched the three most important Biblically-based values historically constraining government into outer space: truth, transparency, and trust. In absentia, these fundamental core principles were all enslaved to a new master value: science.

From the first, when Christians originally invented science, it was never a value system. Christians already had a value system. Science was not a value system, it was a skeptical process for falsifying hypotheses.

Science was a thinking toolbox. It held a hammer of skepticism, a wrench of logic, and a screwdriver of reason. It was designed to help humans learn more about the natural laws governing our perceptible universe. You couldn’t touch science. You couldn’t see it. It’s not tangible. You can’t really put it in a toolbox, or a hot pocket, or anywhere else.

But like the Hulk, ’science’ evolved. It morphed, emerging after centuries from its intangible chrysalis of rational inquiry, revealed as something new, something tangible, something that had its own separate existence. It became Science with a capital ’S’. And Science was something to believe in, like Santa Clone or the Tooth Fauci.

Belief in capital-S Science required faith, not reason. And faith is something that brooks no questions.

Faith and belief are binaries. They are litmus tests. Either you believed in Science, or you didn’t—there was no middle ground. If you didn’t believe in Science, put your faith in Science, and trust in Science, you clearly were anti-Science.

You were, in fact, a Science denier.

The ‘Science denier’ label was, of course, always a blood libel. It was intended to evoke the sulphuric odors of antisemitic Holocaust denial. Ironically, shredding small-s science’s pragmatic roots, Science irrationally injected muddy belief and politics into the previously sterile corridors of rational philosophy.

It didn’t make sense. Calling people “anti-Science” always bore the same logical weight as calling atheists anti-God, or calling UFO skeptics anti-UFO.

(This irrational train would shortly pass through the rabbit hole tunnel and arrive at an Alice in Wonderland station where the gift shop sells books like Anti-Racist Baby. But that’s a different discussion.)

Science’s zealous and devoted high priests were the billionaires, bureaucrats, and bioengineers. Science’s sacrament was the high-tech vaccine that, like baptism, must be unquestioningly received by evangelistic believers in a public demonstration designed to prove their faith. Science’s original sin was disbelief.

Many career scientists with impeccable credentials who asked the wrong questions were branded anti-Scientific and ritualistically excommunicated from the ranks of true believers.

It’s easy to mistake the high priests of this new religion of Science as the architects and authors of the religion itself. Blaming the pandemic’s fervent administrators is natural, since they were the visible face of its worst excesses. But this comfortable conclusion overlooks the vast community of maniacal adherents.

Politics, they say, is downstream from culture.

Observe the global nature of the pandemic response. The new religion of Science took the world in its iron grip, and over a few days, every single world government signed a legal loyalty oath requiring them all to respond in exactly the same way.

But universal agreement is not human. Humans never easily agree on anything. They never all agree, even when people are all aligned and same-minded. Anyone who’s ever volunteered on the homeowner’s association board knows exactly what I mean.

How then did the entire world fall into line in a few days (apart from short-lived exceptions that more fully prove the rule)? How did they achieve universal agreement to supplant the long-standing, inarguable goods of truth, transparency, and trust with a brand new lodestar, a new universal faith offering redemption to the human race — Science?

It’s equisitely tempting, comforting even, to blame the high priests of the pandemic — the billionaires, bureaucrats, and bioengineers — global agreement has never before been achieved, regardless of money or military power.

We must look for a non-human cause.

In early 2021, I published my most widely read post, which immediately went viral, got me canceled, and got C&C purged from every single publishing platform on the same day. It was a letter to the Church, addressed to pastors. I advised spiritual shepherds to stop falsely telling their flocks that the vaccines stopped transmission, and most of all, to stop preaching that taking the jabs was a moral imperative.

I explained the World had been possessed by a demonic Spirit of Fear, manifested in a substitute religion of Science with its own rituals, sacraments, and high priests. (Biblical rabbit hole: compare Zechariah 1:7-11 and 6 with Revelation 5:6 and 6:1-7, and discuss.) This diabolical Spirit of Science displaced everything in its satanic swath of destruction, casting churches into the non-essential abyss, instantly rendering them useless artifacts of the old order.

It was not coincidental that in the United States, the only lawful protection from the legalistic sacrament of mandates was a religious exemption.

The good news today is that, after recovering its footing after the shock of the initial onslaught, the rational world fought back. Now we are at war. Because it involves Spirits and not reason, it is a spiritual war.

And a spiritual war requires a spiritual defense.

Every inexplicable post-pandemic development in the world, like all the wars — both real military wars and insane cultural wars — plus the rumors of wars, and downstream global effects like worldwide inflation, are merely by-products of this spiritual war.

If that is true, how then should Christian legislators respond? The legislative response is to restore to government the essential Biblical principles of truth, transparency, and trust. The legislative branch must overthrow the false Religion of Science, along with all its unholy sacraments and performative legalism. Don’t fall into the slough of despond. Focus on those three positive values.

It’s unnecessary to grapple with Science’s made-up sins of misinformation, conspiracy theory, or its pseudo-scientific forced orthodoxy.

Government should always be truthful and should never lie. Government should always be transparent — sunlight being the best disinfectant — and should never act in secret. And government should always act in ways that cause citizens to trust it more, and never act in ways that destroy the essential trust required by democratic systems based on the notion that citizens govern themselves.

These arguments are uncontroversial and inarguable. Cling to them. Truth, transparency, and trust are universally recognized values. They aren’t the exclusive jurisdiction of Christians. They are fundamental, inarguable principles preserving freedom, individual rights, and human flourishing.

It is time to restore truth, transparency, and trust to government. It is time to reject the false premise that Science can somehow redeem humanity’s sins. It is time to focus legislative efforts on restoring real values, to force government to live up to its own standards, and to expose the false promises of pseudo-scientific deception, however painful or embarrassing that might ultimately be.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Yesterday, we received a terrific judicial decision from another unlikely place — the Ninth Circuit, which before Trump’s historic appointments, lawyers used to lampoon as the “Ninth Circus.” But the Ninth has become one of the most reliable protectors of Constitutional freedom from the worst excesses of the pandemic. Yesterday’s decision added to the Court’s admirable library of liberty.

In Health Freedom Defense Fund vs. Los Angeles United School District, the Court of Appeals overturned the federal court’s dismissal of a lawsuit by LAUSD teachers over the District’s 2021 vaccine mandate, which has continued, in fits and starts, ever since. The decision included three remarkable features.

First, LAUSD tweaked its strict vaccine mandate after the plaintiffs sued the first time. The tweak allowed a ‘testing alternative.’ The LAUSD then successfully argued the plaintiff’s first case was moot. Right after that first case got dismissed, LAUSD promptly revoked its testing alternative. So the poor, exhausted plaintiffs re-filed and sued again.

Again the federal court dismissed their case, this time on the merits. The plaintiffs appealed. Then, following a contentious appellate hearing, having enjoyed its first go around, the LAUSD again rescinded its vaccine requirement and again asked for the case to be dismissed as moot.

But the Court of Appeals saw right through that cynical ploy:

LAUSD’s pattern of withdrawing and then reinstating its vaccination policies is enough to keep this case alive. Twice LAUSD has withdrawn its policy only after facing some litigation risk.

Litigants who have already demonstrated their willingness to tactically manipulate the federal courts in this way should not be given any benefit of the doubt. LAUSD’s about-face occurred only after vigorous questioning at argument in this court, which suggests that it was motivated, at least in part, by litigation tactics.

This case is not moot.

Next, in a wonderful development, the Court distinguished the horrible, ancient Supreme Court case the government wielded like a club during the pandemic, Jacobson vs. Massachusetts. You’ll love the reason why—because Jacobson was about vaccines, and the covid shots aren’t really vaccines:

The district court held, applying rational basis review under Jacobson, that the Policy satisfied a legitimate government purpose. But the district court’s analysis diverges from Jacobson.

In Jacobson, the Supreme Court balanced an individual’s liberty interest in declining an unwanted smallpox vaccine against the State’s interest in preventing disease. The Court explained that the “principle of vaccination” is “to prevent the spread of smallpox.”

Jacobson, however, did not involve a claim in which the compelled vaccine was “designed to reduce symptoms in the infected vaccine recipient rather than to prevent transmission and infection.”

The district court thus erred in holding that Jacobson extends beyond its public health rationale—government’s power to mandate prophylactic measures aimed at preventing the recipient from spreading disease to others—to also govern “forced medical treatment” for the recipient’s benefit.

The justices were skeptical of the government’s evidence of vaccine benefits:

LAUSD only provides a CDC publication that says “COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.” But “safe and effective” for what? LAUSD implies that it is for preventing transmission of COVID-19 but does not adduce judicially noticeable facts that prove this.

Finally, even more encouragingly, in a concurring opinion, one of the judges recognized a Constitutionally protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment:

The district court further erred by failing to realize that these allegations directly implicate a distinct and more recent line of Supreme Court authority, in which the Court has stated that “[t]he principle that a competent person has a constitutionally protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment may be inferred from [the Court’s] prior decisions.”

In Washington v. Glucksberg, the Court explained that Cruzan’s posited “‘right of a competent individual to refuse medical treatment’” was “entirely consistent with this Nation’s history and constitutional traditions,” in light of “the common-law rule that forced medication was a battery, and the long legal tradition protecting the decision to refuse unwanted medical treatment.”

Given these statements in Glucksberg, the right described there satisfies the history-based standards that the Court applies for recognizing “fundamental rights that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.”

The Supreme Court’s caselaw thus clarifies that compulsory treatment for the health benefit of the person treated—as opposed to compulsory treatment for the health benefit of others—implicates the fundamental right to refuse medical treatment.

This reasoning is a legal earthquake. For years, we anti-mandate lawyers have argued that the covid mandates were unconstitutional. But the government lawyers have always argued “there is no Constitutional right not to take a vaccine.”

Now, a federal appellate judge — one step below the Supreme Court — just cut through the confusion like a hot needle through butter, agreeing with our arguments. Since the shots are not vaccines, Jacobson does not apply.  Since they don’t protect others, mandated shots are legalized battery.

It is the concurrence heard round the world. It’s taken three years to reach this point, which is lightning speed in the law. As I keep saying, this is not over.

🔥 The hot takes this morning are burning brightly again, but keep your cool. Politico reported the developing story, headlined “Judge in Trump's hush money trial flags Facebook post that claimed insight into jury deliberations.”

The news was lawyers in Trump’s Manhattan case got a letter from Judge Merchan yesterday, informing them of a scandalous post to the court’s Facebook comment section that popped up the day before the jury rendered its verdict finding Trump guilty:

That’s all we know for sure. The post has since been deleted, we don’t know by whom (the Court, Facebook, or the original poster). The media has so far been unable to figure out who “Michael Anderson” is. Nobody knows whether Anderson is actually related to a Trump juror or was just “sh— posting.”

Anderson’s account is still active. Responding to the controversy, he described himself as “professional sh— poster:”

It’s awkward when your defense is “I was just lying.” Nobody knows yet whether this amounts to anything, and to be honest, the odds favor Michael Anderson is just a stupid internet troll.

Problems with jurors sometimes crop up. Sometimes it’s just one sleepy juror, somebody seen on a device during deliberations, or it could be something affecting the whole group. What normally happens is the judge brings the jurors back, together or one at a time, and interviews them about what happened. The lawyers may or may not be invited to watch. They may or may not be allowed to ask questions. The judge then decides whether anything inappropriate happened.

It’s way too early to say anything for sure, and there’s nothing yet to get excited about. Most alleged juror irregularities get resolved without needing a retrial. We’ll see.

Have a wonderful weekend! I’ll open up tomorrow’s normally subscriber-only post to try to catch up with all the breaking news this week.

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