Support and Defend: Military Whistleblowers Confront a Rogue Chain of Command
Bret speaks with three active and past duty service members about their experience in the US military during Covid, they seek to bring to light what they are seeing and what it represents. ***** John Bowes is a first lieutenant in the United States Airforce, he is a student F16 pilot who has been grounded over the Covid vaccine mandates. Olivia Degenkolb has been in the US Navy for 20 years as an active-duty service member, she is a foreign area officer, and was selected ...
They're not vaccines in that, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with the right to die cases that came out of Oregon and, and, uh, um, Yeah, Governor Booth Gardner, if I'm not mistaken, was integral to that fight.
Right, and the outcome in the Supreme Court was ultimately that you could not force someone to take a treatment even if it were life-saving.
In other words, the Supreme Court said, we don't even belong here, you know, but you cannot force someone to take a life-saving treatment.
And so if these vaccines that aren't, if it turns out they're a treatment, Legally speaking, that means that even if you could show that they saved a life, and I'm with you, I don't believe that's been shown.
In fact, I know it hasn't.
That's a different issue.
That you can't mandate a life-saving therapy on someone under Supreme Court precedent.
So if these are gene therapies, then You've taken paternalism to a level now where the underlying premise would be the government controls your body and you're getting your immune system on a license agreement.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
This is going to be a very special episode.
I have the distinct pleasure and honor of sitting today with Jon Bowes, Dale Saran, and Olivia Degenkolb.
I'm going to allow them to tell you who they are and what role they play.
And to deliver a disclaimer that I know they must in order to protect themselves from forces that would rather that they not show up and speak publicly about what they have seen.
Why don't we start with you, John?
Well, thank you for having me on, Brett.
It's really a privilege to be here and an honor.
My name is John Bowes.
I'm a First Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, and I'm an F-16 student pilot who was grounded over the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
And I want to make it clear that, like Brett said, I do have a disclaimer, and that is that I'm representing myself, and my thoughts and opinions expressed here are purely my own, and I don't represent the Department of Defense or the United States Air Force.
All right.
Dale?
My name is Dale Saran.
I'm an attorney.
I'm a retired Marine major.
I don't need any disclaimers because the Marine Corps doesn't pay my salary anymore, but my opinions are my own as always.
And Olivia?
Olivia Degenkolb, active duty Naval officer for 20 years now.
As John mentioned, the thoughts and opinions are my own.
I do not represent the Department of Defense or the Department of the Navy.
Excellent.
So, what brings us together is a shared battle over vaccine mandates.
They're not the only mandates, but they're clearly the central ones here.
And I think what many Americans and many in the West do not understand is that although mandates have largely been lifted across much of the civilian world, they are still quite active in the military.
Now, I don't know The full details of that.
I'm aware that courts have enjoined mandates in certain branches of the armed forces and not in others.
Before we get to the details of that and the details of what you each have experienced, what follows is a very special episode of Dark Horse.
It's the first in a series in which I talk to military whistleblowers about the mandates that they still face.
They are bold for coming forward, and this kind of programming is only possible because we have equally bold sponsors.
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I did want to say a word about why Dale is here.
Dale is functioning as an attorney in this context, and he brings not only experience with the law, but experience with past military mandates over vaccines, as I understand it, anthrax being central.
In that earlier fight.
And so that battle over the anthrax vaccine actually sheds a great deal of light on the current battle over the COVID-19 vaccines that most of us are just simply unaware of.
So Dale, I'm glad to have you here to provide that context and also to provide insight on the various nuances of the law that obviously surround the question of Whether mandates are legitimate.
Do you want to say something about the Anthrax battle, how it ended up where it stands now?
Thank you, Brett, for having me on.
These mandates, I think it's important just for a little historical context to kind of understand how we got here, is that the Anthrax vaccine was really, well, first of all, it was the first EUA vaccine.
So now everybody knows what EUA means, Emergency Use Authorized Product.
But the first one of those was actually the anthrax vaccine back in 2004.
But all of this really begins, at least in the recent history, with the Gulf War.
And the DOD, you know, I don't need to tell you about the WMDs, and we probably don't need to cover that history too much.
But the DOD's view was that it should have the authority to inject military members with prophylaxis vaccines, give them drugs, a whole bunch of stuff.
And that really began in the Gulf War, and everything that's happened since then has just been a really continuous march, and it happens to track my career.
I was commissioned in 1991 as an officer, and I didn't really know about it, but the Gulf War vets that I, you know, some of the guys I flew with certainly had stories about, you know, this variety of products.
But Gulf War illness, which I think, you know, those of us old enough to remember that are familiar with, out of the 700,000 or so service members who served in Gulf War I, the Persian Gulf War, about 100,000 reported some kind of symptoms that came to be known as Gulf War Syndrome.
And that really led to, eventually, to the EUA statute and all of this, but prohibitions on the Department of Defense's use of unlicensed products in operations to protect service members.
And where we are now is really just the end state of that march, to be honest with you.
Well, there's a lot I want to know about that.
I followed for quite some time the story of Gulf War Syndrome.
I was absolutely struck by, I guess I probably would not at the time have called it gaslighting, but I certainly would now, the idea that many people who served in Iraq were suffering from a recognizable syndrome and The military and the federal government was simply pretending that it was in their heads and that shocked me.
I remember as a scientifically minded person thinking very carefully about what might have caused the syndrome.
Uh, at the point that I stopped paying attention to the story, I thought the leading hypothesis was depleted uranium rounds, which were strewn around the battlefield.
And my understanding now is that that probably was not the cause and that, in fact, there was reason to suspect the anthrax vaccine, which was experimental.
I'm learning from you now.
It was literally the first emergency use authorized medical product.
It sure was.
It was the first one granted that status, but that came later in the context of the litigation over the legality of that program in 2003.
I was a young judge advocate in 99.
I'd been a pilot and then left that, got into a program that turned me into a lawyer, a military lawyer.
And that my first cases, among my first cases in Okinawa, Japan, were about a dozen or so Marines and a sailor who had refused the anthrax vaccine.
And I think, having been a prior military officer, I assumed, because my command sort of put in my head that these guys were just malcontents and, you know, non-hackers and they didn't, they were just looking for an excuse.
These were people who were otherwise, this was their out.
And I quickly was disabused of that notion after talking to my clients and some of the folks they were involved with.
I found out quite quickly that the program was illegal, that it was an illegal order, which is kind of a strange thing to stumble onto as a brand new lawyer.
A strange thing indeed.
And I must say, I'm heartened to see people like all three of you fighting this battle.
I feel that it is a battle that I'm fighting and I'm meeting patriots of every conceivable stripe who have all realized that something very serious is afoot.
And I think the quickest route to that recognition is the idea that we are looking at orders that any reasonable person can determine are immoral.
And the fact is, immoral orders have a special status.
For me, that status is codified by Nuremberg and the idea that the world in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, it Spent a great deal of effort figuring out what one was supposed to do at the point they had been ordered to do something obviously immoral.
And the answer is, you are supposed to reject the order.
So this is a matter that stands above the chain of command.
In fact, it is a check on the chain of command.
The modern context is clearly very different, but any time Nuremberg is in play, I believe it's an all-hands-on-deck moment.
If Nuremberg is in jeopardy, if we're going to forget those lessons, then we are in danger of a new tragedy of history, which undoubtedly will not look like any of the previous versions.
But we simply do not want to allow, we cannot allow anything to be added to the list of great tragedies.
And this is our warning sign.
So interesting that you as a young lawyer encountered immoral orders.
And that must have been quite bewildering to be dealing with, you know, effectively the top legal concern at the early part of your career.
Yeah, and I think the other interesting thing was that the research quickly led me to conclude that, and this may bum you out, in the aftermath of Nuremberg, but this has been constant Non-stop for all that we prosecuted the folks at Nuremberg.
You know, there was three of the charges against some of the doctors were dropped.
They actually were able to defend themselves on some of the charges.
The idea is that Nuremberg was based on the idea of international common law.
And so the Allied forces were prosecuting the Germans and said this was clearly outside the pale, beyond the pale.
And some of the German doctors were like, wait a minute, you guys have been doing this The whole time.
There is no international common law.
You know, the British have been doing this at port and down.
You've been experimenting on your own troops.
And, of course, we had been flashing, we'd been doing, you know, there were the atomic veterans.
And then, of course, you fast forward into Korea and post, you know, 52 to 64, I think, was the MKUltra program, the joint army, CIA, you know, unwittingly giving them hallucinogens and there was a Senate report done during the Gulf War when Congress really got involved and started holding some hearings in the mid 90s.
There's a Senate print 103-97 and it's called the Rockefeller Report, named for the Senator.
But it's called something like 50 years of, you know, 50 years of experiments on veterans or something like that.
And it was a look and it had testimony from all these world war two veterans who had, who had been, um, uh, silenced.
And that's part of the problem with the military is in John and Olivia can certainly talk to this is, you know, the military can make you sign documents, submit, classify things and say, you can't talk about this.
And so the very people who are being harmed and having, you know, what amounts to war crimes conducted on them, the man break tests with mustard gas.
I mean, there's terrible things documented in there.
But that's been nonstop.
And you can take that right through Agent Orange, you know, all the way up through the Gulf War.
So I hate to say it.
I mean, as much as we point to Nuremberg and the U.S. likes to point fingers at other countries, our record of, you know, living up to those ideals has been just about non-existent about Nuremberg.
All right.
Well, I accept what you say, and I know a good deal about several of the subjects you mentioned, so I would agree that this is hardly the unique new violation On the other hand, there's obviously something about the scale of this violation that is, I would argue, unprecedented.
Because not only is it being inflicted upon members of the military, it's being inflicted simultaneously across the civilian population, and not just in the U.S.
either.
This has been a global effort.
And so, something unprecedented is taking place here.
Wise to be reminded of the long history of explorations of how effective Nuremberg really is as a policy.
So, let's bring Olivia and John into this.
Olivia, do you want to start by telling us your story, what's happened to you, and how it fits into the context of your career and your life?
Sure, absolutely.
So, I went to boot camp right after 9-11.
Obviously, joined the military to support and defend the Constitution.
I truly love my country and the American way.
I was prior enlisted, selected for the Seaman to Admiral program, which is an enlisted to officer commissioning program.
I was a naval flight officer on E-2s and subsequently selected for a naval or I'm sorry, not a naval flight officer, foreign area officer, which is effectively international relations.
I was an Olmstead scholar, so studied in Beijing for two years and was recently selected as the assistant naval attache designate to Beijing.
I was supposed to go to Beijing.
I actually went, you know, did language training, went through training and briefed with people, just ensured that I was ready to represent the United States abroad.
And prior to the Department of Defense mandates being announced, I was told, hey, we've heard a rumor that there might be these mandates coming.
And so we're going to put you on operational hold.
You and your family aren't allowed to go anywhere.
At the time, I had significant medical concerns.
I had concerns both about fertility.
If you read the Pfizer or I guess the community package insert, it specifically addresses male fertility, carcinogenicity, genotoxicity.
It states… actually, let me read this to you.
It's just too funny.
This is Pfizer's package insert.
It says, in a developmental toxicity study in rats with Comirnaty, there was no vaccine-related effects on female fertility, end quote.
I don't know about you, but as someone who is a firm believer in science, my background's in nuclear engineering and engineering physics, I'm just not comfortable putting the balance of my fertility on a couple rats, you know?
Well, you ain't kidding.
I'm going to restrain myself from discussing here the particular issues with the rodents that are used for these studies, but let me just say that When I was a graduate student, I'm an evolutionary biologist.
When I was a graduate student, I was studying what I thought was just an interesting evolutionary question, which is why do we grow feeble and inefficient with age?
Why do we senesce?
And what I stumbled onto was that the way we breed rodents for scientific tests actually results in them becoming extremely robust to toxic substances.
And this is a problem that, as far as I know, has never been corrected.
So the mice are, in fact, biased to make dangerous substances look much safer than they actually are.
Even if these rats were excellent models, you would be right to be hesitant.
But given what these mice and rats actually are, your hesitancy is much more than justified.
Further, I would say... That's terrifying.
It is terrifying and the fact that it has not been addressed is mind-boggling to me.
I thought when I found this problem that science would rush to correct it because it was blinding us.
It was in fact causing us to believe things were true that were not because these animals were misleading.
And when instead my colleagues simply pretended the problem didn't exist, it woke me up to what has gone wrong in science, in academia, in the regulation of drug safety, all of these things.
But I would also say that there is evidence Actually of the accumulation of lipid nanoparticles in reproductive tissue in rats also.
And so the whole idea that what we've learned from rats tells us that this would be safe for women's fertility is nonsense.
There's reason to wonder about its effect on fertility and at best what we can say is we don't know.
Right?
Which is not all that comforting.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, you know, I had those concerns.
I brought them up to my chain of command and to my doctor.
The doctor kind of blew me off and said, hey, this is a non-issue.
At the time, there were a lot of people seeking medical exemptions and, you know, speaking to their doctors about concerns they had with the mRNA vaccine specifically.
And So it took a while to get an appointment and in that time frame I learned that it was illegal to mandate emergency use authorized products and that the vaccines that were available that were being given not only to the U.S.
military but to the American people were all emergency use authorized products.
So I started to notify my chain of command.
I actually wrote a point paper about my concerns and sent it up to the Pentagon back in October.
I did everything I could to, you know, kind of sound the alarm and over time started meeting other like-minded people who were similarly situated, you know, also unvaccinated and concerned.
I filed a religious accommodation with the help of a lot of those people.
I was learning So being able to talk to other people who were also researching this topic was incredibly helpful.
I think prior to that, I'd known one person who'd submitted a religious accommodation in 20 years of service.
So being able to talk to other people who were also researching this topic was incredibly helpful.
And as a group, over time, we've just realized more and more challenges that are associated with these vaccines, A, A, they're emergency use authorized, so you can't mandate them under Title 21, and for military, Title 10.
For religious accommodations, there seem to be blanket disapprovals within the service, which obviously is unconstitutional.
For me, when the president mandated, or I guess not mandated, but pushed out executive order, I believe it was 14043, mandating government civilian employees to take the vaccine.
That was honestly when, for me, I had a real Real problem with, problem of conscience.
It effectively said, look, you know, because of the successes we've had with, and I'm paraphrasing here, you've got to pull up the actual executive order, but because of the successes we've had with mandating COVID guidance in agencies, and at the time the DOD, the military specifically, was the only agency that was mandating the COVID vaccine, we are going to require this of the civilian population.
At that point, I felt that the military's acquiescence to taking these emergency use authorized COVID-19 vaccines had resulted in them being rolled out on the civilian population, which was clearly unconstitutional.
And that for me was a huge crisis of conscience.
It was terrifying.
And again, it was actually the basis of my religious accommodation, which under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, most people don't know this, but you can file for religious beliefs, moral conscience or moral principles, and also your conscience.
So that was, Yeah, just incredibly troubling.
And since then, there are over 80,000 other service members that are in the same situation that are looking at potentially being kicked out.
Many of us have spoken to our leadership about our concerns with the legality, with the lack of constitutionality, with the discrimination, how religious personnel and people with medical issues are being disproportionately impacted.
And honestly, they're falling on deaf ears.
So, you know, whether we file a religious accommodation or speak to the chain of command or file an equal opportunity complaint or file an inspector general complaint, most of these aren't being resolved in a satisfactory manner and people Have given us answers from, hey, there's nothing to see here to, yes, it looks like there is a violation of law, but because it's currently being adjudicated in courts, there's nothing we can do.
So we're going to continue to violate your rights, which obviously is unacceptable.
So there are many themes in there I want to make sure that we cover.
I do want to ask you about the basis of the religious objection.
I can think of several, but there are obviously important questions here because religious freedoms are called out specifically in our Constitution and for good reason.
I also want to talk about the So for me, there are certain things about the story of the COVID treatments, including these so-called vaccines, which really do not deserve that term.
But nonetheless, there's certain things about the way this has transpired that tell me that we are not dealing with a normal story in which those who are dictating policy are grappling with an understandably difficult issue and they're making some errors. there's certain things about the way this has transpired that But nonetheless, they're doing the best they can.
We know that's not the case because, among other things, we know that the risks of COVID go spectacularly down the younger you are and the healthier you are.
And yet these policies are persistently indifferent to your own ability to fend off this disease, which goes specifically then, in the case of the military mandates, to questions of readiness.
Which is the greater cost to readiness?
Vaccinating healthy people and exposing them to the risks of these experimental treatments, sidelining people who have been trained to do important jobs that are involved in our readiness because they have reasons not to want to take these so-called vaccines, The fact that the policy appears to be vaccinate at all costs is inconsistent with the military's mission, and I think obviously so.
And, you know, I think your story speaks to that.
So I don't know which of those issues you want to start with, or if someone else wants to answer.
John's probably the expert on the readiness issue.
I think he's really the one who's been tracking a good deal of those numbers, haven't you, John?
Yeah, John, you want to jump in?
I have.
That's absolutely correct.
Yeah, so the national security issue and the readiness issue is, I think, one of the more serious ones that kind of almost exists outside of the argument about whether these vaccines are good or bad or not.
And like you've said, Brad, is that it seems to be inconsistent with The desire of the military to have a competent, ready force.
Just to paint a picture of where we stand right now this year in terms of readiness, it's not looking very good.
The Army missed its recruiting goal by 15% in this fiscal year, 2022.
And Heritage Foundation recently came out saying that the military's recruiting this year, fiscal year 22, is the worst it's been since the all-volunteer force began in 1973.
And I'm sure you know that's just after Vietnam.
The military wasn't a very popular organization then.
So our recruiting is really hurting, and the DMDC data, which is the Defense Manpower Data Center has put out the numbers on our military total force composition.
And if you look at that data closely, you realize that people are leaving in mass after the vaccine mandates came down.
So there's a case to say that it's almost directly related to this.
In April of 2022, we lost 10,000 people in a single month, total uniformed service personnel in the active Guard and Reserve.
That's the most people in a single month that we've lost in over 10 years.
So people are running for the door already.
And when you look at the fact that there are 80,000 plus unvaccinated service members, we already can't afford to lose anyone.
And now we're saying that we want to discharge 80,000 individuals because they won't take a vaccine that our own CDC says is meaningfully not important anymore.
They've released guidance that says the vaccinated and unvaccinated should be treated the same.
And so From that perspective, and especially these tumultuous times this year, I think it's a dangerous policy to adopt this idea that we need to get rid of any person who doesn't want the vaccine, or we need to have 100% vaccination.
Because from a readiness perspective, that's extremely detrimental to our ability to defend our nation.
And perhaps in 2020, when COVID was still thought to be extremely serious, that maybe you can make a case for that.
But now, with the data about vaccine injuries and everything else, There's, I think, absolutely no case to say that we need to get rid of these individuals or coerce them into taking a vaccine that they don't want to take because that's contrary to the absolute foundation of our country and the Constitution and the foundation of our military.
Yes, you point to a third readiness issue that I hadn't considered, which is that obviously bullying people into taking these, I know they're supposed to be safe and effective, but these obviously unsafe and ineffective so-called vaccines, is going to drive certain people who might otherwise sign up to do something else.
So, we are taking highly competent people like yourself and grounding them after investing a great deal in training you to defend the country.
We are driving people who might sign up for such a job to pick another career.
And frankly, the military's own data on adverse events says that we're injuring people who would otherwise have been able to fight on our behalf.
So that's three different ways that we are harming readiness here.
And the question really is, why would we ever harm readiness?
We would need a very good reason to do that, given the fundamental role that the military plays in keeping the nation free and making room for a society that is, frankly, the fairest one that has ever existed.
And, you know, really, I think it makes sense to think of the founders of the United States as having Not only found it a great country, but having invented the West.
This is the fairest system.
Even if you like someone else's version of it better, it still started here, and defending it is fundamental.
So, the idea that something is allowing us to cripple our own readiness is another, you know, in addition to Nuremberg, sets off alarm bells for me.
Right?
Is that even well-intentioned, or has something gotten into our system that is unhooking our readiness because it doesn't really want us ready?
Brett, you know, there's an interesting, I said when this first started, I got a lot of calls because people knew my history with the issue, but one of the first things people asked me, and it included people like John and Olivia and a lot of military members, particularly pilots, and I've got some theories about why that is, but people all asked me the same thing.
They're like, what is possibly going on?
And it's related to what you talked about with risk stratification, where You know, um, John, for example, is an F-16 pilot and, uh, you know, the idea that, well, COVID's a threat, you know, but, um, John's on his own oxygen when he's flying.
So the idea, you know, it's not like he's got the air conditioner vents
Turned up, you know, and this is, it's so the idea that like, we've got to get all these people who were at, if you did by risk stratification, both by age, health, and then by just even potential threat to them, like in their day to day workings as a pilot, you know, a lot of the pilots that we have in this group that, you know, live and job both know a lot of the other folks in this group, um, you know, you're on your own oxygen.
You're with, I mean, it's, I don't know, like all of the possible justifications for doing it largely turn out to be just nonsense.
And so you have to, to your point, you have to start asking yourself, what's really behind this?
And I said that whether it was intentional or not, it perfectly split the force into those who would bend the knee and those who wouldn't.
And, you know, I don't know what... People can draw whatever conclusions they want from that, but that's, in essence, what the mandate has done.
Well, I'll go one step further.
My argument has been that there are two violations of Nuremberg here.
One of them is about informed consent.
And obviously, we are not well informed, nor are we being asked for our consent.
We are being mandated to take these things.
And the military is still being mandated, even when the rest of us have gotten a reprieve.
But the other violation has to do with the question of immoral orders that we talked about earlier.
But I would point out that if you have a policy that delivers an immoral order, and then you fire the people who refuse to take it, you build a force that is much more likely to accept immoral orders in the future.
And the question is, I mean, look, I think you said it very carefully, Dale, and I agree with you.
Freely admit, I do not know what's going on.
I do know that this looks like something that is almost impossible to explain as a matter of incompetence or being misinformed.
Right?
Were it a matter of incompetence or being misinformed as the system woke up to things like the adverse event signal?
The policy would get better.
You would expect there to be a lot of covering one's ass and all of that.
But nonetheless, the policy would change in the direction of reason.
We would stop mandating these things for young, healthy people for whom the risk of the vaccine is actually greater than the risk of COVID.
And the fact that that doesn't happen, What I've said before is that we have been left with a policy that is actually, it's not unreasonable, it is the inverse of a reasonable policy.
If you did the opposite of what it asked you to do, you'd be far better off.
And it's hard to explain that pattern by anything other than some form of sabotage.
Now again, am I alleging that there's a saboteur?
I don't know.
I'm not alleging it.
I don't know that there is one, but I do know that the pattern matches what a saboteur would do.
One thing a saboteur would do is they would screw with our readiness.
Another thing it would do is it would try to make a compliant force that didn't ask a lot of questions, right?
And so, you know, how many of these data points do we need before we say, look, we admit we don't know what's happening, but we do know it's, um, It is tantamount to being attacked by an adversary that does not have an interest in our long-term well-being.
It is doing what that adversary would do.
do.
Maybe there's no adversary, but it is doing what an adversary would do.
Yeah, there's a point, you know, in the law, there's a point where, oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
I was going to say there's a point in the law where you can arrive at the functional equivalent of malice through stupidity.
You know, if you run me off the road because you're completely incompetent with your car, to my family and my estate, it won't matter.
I'm dead either way.
And the only difference will be what level of criminal incompetence we assume.
You can be criminally incompetent.
You can be criminally negligent.
So at some point, stupidity can become the functional equivalent of malice, or incompetence can be the functional equivalent of malice.
But I'm with you.
I don't see incompetence here, because what I see is, now I'm in three different cases with this, and I help on others.
But the beast reacts.
And even as the orders change, to your point, Brett, you know, you're saying we would see some competence, we would think, or you would see some changes.
You see, what's really interesting is you see some of the changes in print, but never is there a retraction or a go back from the position.
In other words, the DOD, the CDC, the FDA will put things out that suggest, yes, we recognize things are changing, but nothing, no mandate stops.
It's almost, it's impossible for them to ever admit, maybe this was a bad idea.
Well, no, I'm going to push back a little bit.
If you imagined that you had incompetent authorities who were interested in our military readiness and thought that they were serving that interest by mandating these vaccines so that COVID didn't render us unprepared.
Then you would expect upon the discovery that young people are better off fending off the disease naturally than receiving one of these vaccines which doesn't prevent contraction, doesn't prevent transmission.
And carries its own risk.
You would expect, even if this cover story was garbage, you would expect a shift in policy that would increase our readiness from the bad policy that was delivered in the beginning.
The fact that age stratification doesn't show up tells us whatever it is, is at the very least completely indifferent to our readiness.
It doesn't care if we're ready at best, or maybe it wants us unready.
What's your point on that, Brett, with the idea of, you know, I can't attest as a service member to any sort of conspiracy or anything like that.
It's not my place, nor do I really know with any certainty.
But at the very least, from the ground level up, in most leadership stratification all the way up to the general officer level, you know, I think the general sentiment is not so much this malice that exists, but more so of this is just how the military works.
To give you a little background on myself, I'm a fourth generation military officer.
Both my parents were pilots in the United States Air Force and so I grew up around officers and I grew up around the military environment and I had a passion for it and I love it and I devoted my life to becoming a fighter pilot and a military officer and I was successful in that and even in my time at the Academy where, you know, they taught us values of officership where
Integrity first, service before self, excellence in all we do, our oath to the Constitution as officers, all of these values were instilled in me for my entire life and to a large degree for pretty much every military officer.
And so when I graduated from the Academy as a distinguished graduate, I had high hopes for how the military operated based off my life with my grandfather and my mother and my father and with what I saw at the Academy.
It feels like there's almost an inversion of reality here where everyone talks about these high and beautiful values that everyone aspires to have, but then in execution almost everyone says, well, that's just how the military works.
You know, we follow orders and we don't really question anything.
And that's not what we swore an oath to do.
And so, you know, this passion that I developed for my country and my constitution and my career as an officer, I feel almost a little bit betrayed because there seems to be the sentiment, well, the military owned you.
Well, you need to get the vaccine because that's what you signed up for.
I didn't sign up to take anything with mRNA in it when I entered the military in 2015 as an academy cadet, nor when I commissioned in 2019.
And so, you know, there's so many arguments to be made for that, but the bottom line is that when I stood up and said, well, this is a violation of my constitutional religious beliefs or constitutionally based, excuse me, religious beliefs that are founded in the Constitution and the First Amendment, but also as an officer, I think this order is lawful, unlawful but also as an officer, I think this order is lawful, unlawful People scoffed that, and they said, well, you know, like, I agree with you, but there's nothing I can do about it.
And I hear that a lot from military officers, is I agree with you, but I can't do anything because that's just what the order came down to.
And I think that's pretty contrary to our foundational beliefs as a military and as a country.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I would say what you're reflecting is something that I think is part of a bigger pattern.
I know that as a scientist, I have been under tremendous pressure to acknowledge the truth of things that I can tell you are not true.
Now, I don't know why I'm being told not to do the job I trained for, but that message has come through loud and clear on every channel.
Do not behave as a scientist.
Behave as an advocate for a policy that I frankly believe to be radically reckless.
And I think we can say the same thing About journalists, for example, right?
They are being told not to report certain stories, only to say things that adhere to a particular perspective.
We could say the same thing about social media platforms, which apparently the executive branch is telling should have a slant in what sorts of discussions they allow and what sorts of posts are tolerated.
So I guess the question is, how many different, oh, and maybe the worst of these is doctors?
Doctors are being coerced into violating the Hippocratic Oath, right?
As if they have a higher obligation to this policy of mass vaccination than they do to do no harm to their patients.
So in every realm where I see this policy being discussed or debated, Everybody is being told, don't do the job you trained for, right?
Don't be a doctor.
Don't be a scientist.
Don't be a journalist.
Don't defend your constitution.
And how many of those realms would you have to see before you said, you know what?
That isn't incompetence.
That's a pattern.
Everybody is being told not to do their job.
Why would that happen?
What are the least frightening explanations for everybody in civilization being told, don't do your job?
Right.
And you know, the problem is we can come up with the least bad explanation, but they're still pretty bad.
Well, I'd tell you this, Brett, there's an old joke and Olivia will appreciate it.
I know she knows this one, but it's once is once is random, twice is a coincidence, but three times is enemy action.
Yeah.
I was hesitating to be the one to introduce that because I am obviously in the worst position to say it, but I, you know, I do think there's some wisdom there, right?
We're looking at something that behaves like enemy action and you know, my feeling, you know, as somebody who tries to be very careful,
About I don't even think in terms of conspiracy theories you have hypotheses They function just as a scientific hypothesis does they make predictions you try to figure out whether you try to prove them false and in this case the Least terrifying explanation for the pattern of behavior that we see is that our system has been captured by something and this has become a
purely about money, and it has absolute indifference to human suffering and death, right? - For sure. - And indifference to the wellbeing of the nation in the long term. - And this wasn't, I don't know if you right? - For sure. - And indifference to the wellbeing of the nation And this wasn't, you know, I don't know if you know Marsha Angle.
She was the director, medical doctor, first female editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Long time.
Barely.
Yeah.
She wrote a book that came out, I think in 2000, I don't know, six, eight.
It was the darling of, and you'll appreciate this, the political left at the time, because she was telling truth to power.
And she was, she detailed in that book, I think it's called How Pharma Deceives Us, or I forget what the title is, the full title.
essentially the book details in her role as head of the New England Journal of Medicine, she just lays out that in her view and experience, the pharmaceutical industry, the regulatory capture of the Food and Drug Administration by pharma was complete during the regulatory capture of the Food and Drug Administration by pharma was And the book was hailed as a triumph and how wonderful and truthy, you know, and how it told the real truth.
And then now if you go look at, you can find articles that are sort of why Marsha Engel wasn't really correct about pharma.
You know, suddenly Pfizer has gone from being, you know, the largest criminal find in history to being the savior of mankind.
You know, it's, we live in, we live in an amazing time.
I wanted to at least throw out, you know, when you talk about this idea of the worst, the least, the least worst possible thing is I would just say that, you know, we're, While this has been going down, you've got, I think it's something like 10 of the last 14 FDA directors now sit on boards for pharmaceutical companies.
My favorite is Scott Gottlieb was 2017-19 director of the FDA.
He, of course, winds up at Pfizer.
And then the Trump guy, Steve Hahn, comes in from 2019 to '21.
In January of 2022, or 2021, he approves spike vax.
Less than six months later in June, he's sitting on the board of directors for the company that owns Moderna, which itself took DARPA money.
I mean, at some point, you know, the FDA owns Robert Kennedy at Children's Health Defense made the claim that the FDA is fundamentally a pharmaceutical company with regulatory power.
And he said, oh, they've got 31 patents.
And somebody decided to do a funny fact check on Robert Kennedy.
And they said, fact check, it's not 31 patents, it's 57.
And they own, you know, it's, I mean, they own something like, they've got a $4 billion IP portfolio, you know?
So, I mean, 42% of the vaccine regulatory budget for enforcement, 42% of it is paid for by user fees from the pharmaceutical industry.
So if I paid 42% of your salary and you're a regulator, how do we pretend that this is all okay?
It's as bad as you could possibly imagine.
It would be like the SEC having a stock portfolio.
You wouldn't think that that was what could go wrong, and yet here we are.
Those are all matters of public record.
Yeah, I must say, this is the part of it that is hardest for me to understand, is that I don't think there's anything especially new about the idea of regulatory capture.
That's a phrase I've known for A decade and a half, right?
It's a well-known phenomenon.
Pharma is known to be among the worst cases of this phenomenon.
It's been thoroughly academically documented.
And suddenly, in this case, we have people marching in lockstep.
I, in fact, have been trying to pose the question to people to wake them up.
What fraction of the policy that we see surrounding these so-called vaccines do you think is the result of undue influence by pharma?
Right.
And my feeling is if you say zero, I know you're either lying or a fool.
Right.
So if it's not zero, then really the question we ought to be discussing is, OK, it's somewhere, you know, between zero and 100.
This is looking a lot closer to 100 to me.
It behaves like 100.
Now, convince you.
That's what I want to hear.
It sure looks like 100.
But, you know, let's get back to the central matter here.
This is one thing when we're dealing with the civilian population.
I mean, it's jaw dropping and And I struggle to find words to even encapsulate how terrifying it is to watch this thing, not even interested in vaccinating as many people as will accept it, but strong-arming people into it.
But this becomes so much more dangerous when it's the military to whom We are doing this because the role the military plays in preserving this system is Obviously, you know literally at the front line.
And the fact that the mandates have held on more tenaciously in that context, presumably that's because the chain of command already has a leg up on telling members of the military what to do.
And the circumstances in which a member of the military is justified in refusing an order, those are extreme circumstances.
And so, I mean, A, I do see a kind of turning of the tables here, right?
We in the civilian population cannot leave our military behind.
If we have successfully fended off these mandates because they were medically absurd to begin with and extremely dangerous, the younger you were, the more dangerous they were.
This is about the future of that civilian population for us now to walk away from that issue while the military is still exposed to this danger is not only for.
Foolish from the point of view of our long-term well-being in the civilian population, but it's it's It's it's a betrayal of the service that the military provides for the nation so Can we talk about what that's like to be?
Forgotten to have your mandates persist after the civilian population has more or less escaped its Yeah, Brett, this has been incredibly troubling.
I think one of the challenges that I saw was the Secretary of Defense mandated the COVID-19 vaccine in August of 2021.
At that point, after over a year and a half of living with COVID, we'd lost 28 military service members.
Now, obviously, any loss of life is a terrible thing, but that number is far eclipsed by suicides, motorcycle accidents, alcohol-related incidents.
After implementing the mandate by October, late October, that number had more than doubled and we'd gone to 70 military deaths that were labeled due to COVID.
And those are the DOD's own, the Department of Defense's own numbers.
At that point, it shocked me that considering there was no parallel in the civilian population, the Department of Defense didn't feel a need to stop and reassess the order that they had put out.
Having witnessed such an incredible loss of life.
I don't understand what's going on.
And to your point with, you know, capture, whatever's happening, clearly, clearly things are not where they need to be.
One of the things that the military is known for, and as a prior aviator, one of the things we always do after every mission is to debrief.
And so, you know, you go, you prep for a mission, you fly your mission, hopefully you get the bad guys, and then you come back and you talk about it.
And you say, Hey, guys, how can we do this better in the future?
And we haven't seemed to do that at all with any of these policies, which is, just not aligned with military culture and has been really disturbing.
You know, it's shocking, frankly.
Yeah.
And look, I, again, I know that we have to be very careful about what hypotheses we entertain here, but this is another data point.
The idea that you would not reflect on the policy and figure out what worked and what didn't, and what was its effect on our readiness and how can we fix it?
Exactly.
That is also consistent with, you know, I will try to find some alternative to enemy action, but it is beyond incompetent, right?
An incompetent entity might review what happened incompetently, but the desire to ignore what happened and not improve the policy is is It is only consistent.
The absolute least pernicious explanation is total indifference to the well-being of service members and the readiness of our military force.
Absolutely.
That's the least bad it could be.
To your point about the military getting left behind, I think you can maybe stir up a little bit of passion for those that are listening to this, and I thank you for taking the time to listen.
It's not just the simple fact that service members are being coerced into taking this vaccine.
It's what's happening with the coercion.
You know, from my personal experience, I literally spent my entire life trying to be a fighter pilot.
I remember distinctly thinking that my eighth grade science fair project somehow mattered for me getting into the Air Force Academy.
And it's been my passion, and so I love flying.
I absolutely adore flying.
I think it's the most fun job in the world.
It's an absolute blast.
To be grounded now for over a year and watch my peers and my friends put on the G-suit and the flight suit and go fly and rage around and hear their stories, it makes me a little bummed out.
It's frustrating and it's saddening.
My story isn't even close to the worst of it.
I recently spoke to a service member who was told After he got a federal injunction protecting him from discharge, he had two options.
He could either get the vaccine or the military would move him to the middle-of-nowhere Alaska with his wife and kids because he wasn't considered deployable and they thought that maybe moving him to Alaska might convince him.
He ended up getting the vaccine over that.
Just because he knew that moving his family to the center of Alaska was just not something that was even remotely sustainable.
And keep in mind, again, that this is after he had a federal injunction protecting him from discharge.
So the coercion's not over.
And this kind of sentiment that's directed towards these service members who are unvaccinated is exactly what's forcing people out.
I mean, even our own fighter pilot community is Leaving because of things like this.
Our fighter pilot retention in 2021 was below 30%.
That means less than 30% of people who finish their 10-year contract as an aviator are staying in the military.
We are hemorrhaging people at a time when we're already 1,650 pilots short in the Air Force alone.
And in 2017, the chief of staff of the Air Force called a 1,500 pilot shortage a crisis.
So we are in a pilot crisis.
And like Dale mentioned, the pilots seem to be specifically targeted in these mandates.
We are in a crisis of pilots in the military, and that's a humongous readiness issue.
And it's policies like this vaccine program where people feel like they're alone and left behind and isolated and attacked.
That's making people that are even vaccinated go, you know what?
I think I'm going to leave this organization because it doesn't seem to represent my values or it doesn't seem to care about me.
And I would encourage the civilian population and all the viewers to start speaking up about that, because that kind of sentiment is exactly how our military crumbles.
And in a time like today with China and Ukraine and Russia, that's a dangerous precedent to set for our military when we need every single service member possible.
people.
Yeah, I mean, it's particularly acute with respect to pilots for a number of reasons.
I mean, you know, this is not my area of expertise, but I can see, first of all, that the amount we invest in the training of pilots is disproportionate because the job is so technical and so difficult.
The equipment we entrust to pilots is extremely expensive and so and you know Here's where I'm really speculating but I would imagine that as difficult a job as it is to become a fighter pilot Uh, under simulated conditions that in the heat of battle, the quality of pilots, um, is certain to be a, a central question.
That is to say who can keep their, their cool enough to not only fly the plane, but operate the weapons and, you know, put themselves in the right spot.
So there's something shocking about You know, you know, we're not this is not the indifference of the command to the infantry, which would be bad enough, right?
These are highly trained professionals who are being strong armed into taking a vaccine that, frankly, is maximally dangerous in in a pilot who can't afford to have a sudden heart attack
In the air and you know that that data is slow to emerge but the Let's put it this way if you pay attention to medical circles in which people are seeing adverse events and
They are not only seeing anomalous heart attacks in young healthy people, they are also seeing things like automobile accidents on the rise in a spectacular way that is consistent with the idea that people who would ordinarily have gotten from A to B without a problem suddenly have a severe medical incident behind the wheel and the car careens off the road.
That's all the worse if, you know, you're 15,000 feet in the air.
So, you know, to the extent that there is no medical argument for vaccinating a young, healthy person with these mRNA vaccines in the worst case, it's even worse when that person's job involves extreme pressures on their physiology and the necessity that they stay absolutely competent until the plane is back on the ground.
Am I wrong about this?
To your point on the data that you mentioned and how there's not a lot of data, I independently quantified exactly what you're talking about in terms of the pilots that we could stand to lose from these vaccine mandates.
I worked with 350 unvaccinated pilots to generate a Grassroots, if you will, study on exactly what those pilots mean to our national security.
And in that study of 352 pilots, which is only about half of the unvaccinated pilots that I'm aware of in the Department of Defense, they are worth $7.8 billion in tax money.
And that's including salary and training costs and everything else.
That's only $350 and that's $7.8 billion.
That's a big number.
And the average years of service of those pilots is 14 years.
So we're not standing to lose younger and experienced pilots like myself.
We're standing to lose extremely experienced aviators with deployments and actual combat experience overseas.
And that's not something that you can just recruit in and fix the problem immediately as a military.
So these are extremely valuable people.
And also, they're families.
There's 800 dependents in that study as well.
And so this has largely gone ignored by Congress, which I think is unfortunate.
And I hope that many members of Congress start to see the study that we released.
Because although it's not an official study, and to some degree some of those numbers are estimates, They're conservative estimates, at the very least.
And, you know, 14 years of service is certainly something that's not an estimate.
That's real hard data.
And so, with that, on top of the injuries, I also helped to generate a congressional injury report that talks about and has medical data from service members who have been injured by the vaccine.
And some of those injuries include a fighter pilot who got pericarditis and has been grounded for seven months.
There was one enlisted service member that had four strokes after getting the vaccine.
These are serious injuries.
Florida just recently, a few days ago, released a study where they said that they're no longer recommending the COVID vaccine, any version of the COVID vaccine, or mRNA vaccines at the very least, for people in the 18-39 male age group.
That's based off of a self-controlled case study that they did.
On their own data.
It's starting to come out, at least in Florida and other locations across the world, that they're not recommending this vaccine to people.
I can't see how, in light of that information, that we could be recommending that when we know for a fact that this vaccine is maiming and injuring our most competent and qualified military members.
Maiming and injuring people who are perfectly capable of fending off, I mean, I believe COVID is a serious disease.
Let's be clear about that.
But young people who are healthy, and the military is disproportionately composed of such people, are perfectly capable of fending off COVID naturally.
It is their best option.
And these so-called vaccines have such a powerful risk profile that it just there is no medical argument for this.
Right.
And, you know, I think you've done a good job of exploring all of the various ways that this impinges on our readiness.
You know, there's the financial investment.
There's the risk to pilots.
You point out something I had missed, which is that you're losing the experienced pilots who are obviously essential to our being able to fight in the air.
Right.
This really, it couldn't be more foolish.
You also point to another group of people who is effectively being expected not to do their job here, which is members of Congress, right?
The members of Congress have a patriotic duty to protect our military, not just for the military's sake, which would be sufficient on its own, but because of the role the military plays in protecting the nation.
The fact is, I don't care if you're going to lose an election for doing the right thing.
You got yourself elected to Congress, presumably because you wanted to make better law.
Well, here's your opportunity, right?
We have an obvious travesty of justice and a hazard to the nation's military readiness.
Where is the uprising in Congress that forces the federal government to relent?
My understanding is they also take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, so I'll turn it over.
Go ahead, Dale.
They have the same oath as we do.
Same oath.
And of course, we know that if we're being really honest about political issues here, there's no bill that Republicans could get passed right now to do anything in the House.
There's discussion, and certainly as a lawyer working on a lot of these cases, we've had some discussions with Senator Johnson's office and a lot of these folks.
But I don't put any hope that that's going to magic itself because President Biden, he'll veto anything.
Presumably he's not going to sign a bill that says, whoops, I was wrong, since he's the one who ensured that this mandate is happening.
We're going to have to find a way out of this in the courts, I think, because I don't see how that's going to come through a House or Senate that's divided.
And, you know, you're being you're being too easy on them.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Don't get me wrong.
I don't expect it either.
But that is people falling down on their obligation to their nation, to the oath that they took, to their fellow man, to their fellow citizen.
The fact is many of us, and I include myself here, have taken very substantial risks to say the right things.
That is to say, to explore this issue honestly and expose what is taking place.
And the costs have been high for many of us.
I mean, as this group of people can illustrate, and, you know, as you all know, for each one of you sitting here, there are dozens of others with stories of what they've faced.
So the fact that people will not you know, look, the military is composed of people who believe that there are hills on which one must be willing to die, right?
That there are things worth fighting for.
That's the nature of the military.
And the fact that on the civilian side, not only are people not willing to die for anything, they're not willing to risk their reputation or their job over anything is a sad commentary on on what we have become.
So I expect more of these people to the extent that That President Biden has overseen a mandate that has been a disaster.
Of course the right thing for him to do is to give a hell of a speech to that effect, right?
Of course that's the right thing to do, and I would respect him a great deal more if he did that rather than keep doubling down on a bad policy that's killing people.
Well, Congress certainly can use it.
This group is for some perspective, Brett, but the clients of which John and Olivia, I've got three different cases and a total of about 900, maybe 1,000 clients right now, military clients.
And I took on so many for a lot of reasons, but one of them was that I thought there was something to be, I knew there were so many people knocking on my door, as Olivia said, largely out of this book that I had written about the prior iteration of this.
In fact, Olivia would be arguably justified in claiming, you know, this is her second time in her career, within a 20-year career, that she's facing an illegal Department of Defense vaccine mandate.
I mean, they got shut down the first time for the anthrax one.
We got a court order shutting that down.
But, you know, The group that I represent, I thought it would, it would be helpful in mass, but there are, I think if we were our own air force, we would be the 16th largest air force in the world.
Like just my clients would be the sixth, the world's 16th largest air force.
We have between pilots crew, we've got heavy lift, you know, C5 pilots, C-141 pilots, C-130 pilots, the entire aircraft range.
We've got V-22 Osprey pilots in the Marine Corps.
We've got F-35 pilots.
We've got crew chiefs, loadmasters.
I mean, I represent qualitatively almost a battalion level, you know, of officers and enlisted who all know this is wrong, and they're all getting the boot.
You know, it's unfortunate.
Yeah.
All right.
I want to make sure that we cover certain things in the time that we have left.
And I know that there's more for both Olivia and John that should be explored in terms of what you experienced in the military prior to these mandates, what you have experienced in terms of
Consequences from standing up against the mandates I want to talk about the question of the religious Exemption how it's functioning what it might be based on So let's make sure we don't miss any of those topics either one of you feel Sorry, I should be I should be directing better than I am but does either one of you feel like this is a moment to Jump in and fill in part of that story Sure.
John kind of spoke to some of the challenges he's faced.
For me, you know, 20 years, you're going to see some crazy stuff.
And in the past, I've actually witnessed other violations of law.
What I found striking is in the past, when we would uncover some sort of, some action that was either illegal or, you know, Discriminatory or there was something wrong that was going on.
Leadership had a genuine interest in what was occurring and they sought to resolve that issue as quickly as possible.
You know, it was an all-hands-on-deck effort.
There was absolute transparency.
We brought in lawyers or whoever we needed to bring in to ensure that the wrongs that were occurring were remedied immediately.
That hasn't been the case for, you know, anything related to COVID-19.
So, As I said earlier, you know, my family and I, we were headed out to China to go be diplomats.
And when we were grounded, our stuff, our household goods had already been packed out.
So everything we owned, all of our worldly possessions had been put into boxes and were put in a warehouse here in D.C.
and were just waiting for us to arrive in China so that they could send our stuff overseas.
Our household goods were held for an entire year before the military agreed to release them, and anytime I would ask about it, you know, I was kind of told, well, you know how to get your stuff.
Medical's right down the road.
And that was with a religious accommodation Absolutely illegal, not something that you can do.
That was just one example of the sort of challenges that I've personally faced.
I've had training canceled or denied.
I've had leave chits, requests for vacation denied.
I didn't get to go to one of my daughter's medical appointments, to my sister's baby shower.
When things were really stressful, I'd been told that I was going to get kicked out of the military two weeks prior to my 20 years.
And I had several people that I know kind of pull me to the side and say, are you really, really willing to risk your retirement over this?
And for me, the Constitution is worth it.
You know, absolutely, I'm willing to risk my retirement.
And fortunately, at this point, it won't come to that.
I guess we'll see.
Most recently, I've received an adverse fitness report that's like a performance evaluation in the civilian world.
I am being recommended for a board of inquiry based on not taking two emergency use authorized COVID-19 tests.
So, you know, the vaccines aren't the only emergency use authorized products out there.
COVID tests and face masks are also emergency use authorized products, and they have the same legal protections that we discussed earlier.
Americans, to include service members, have the right to accept or refuse these products at any time.
And I was also kicked out of my command, and I'm actually in the middle of going to a new command right now, and all of that was for speaking up at a town hall at the agency I worked for and questioning the legality of it.
One of the points I made, I just, I keep hearing from DOD, Department of Defense Leadership, I apologize, I'll try not to use acronyms.
It's a language in and of itself in the military.
One of the things that I... DOD, we've got.
I agree, you can leave us in the dust pretty easily, but DOD, we've got.
So, you know, I questioned the DOD mandates, and one of the things that I keep hearing from senior military leaders...
Is that they're just following policy and one of one of the things that I like to point out is that a policy never trumps law.
Certainly not the Constitution.
And then B, DOD policy has been wrong in the past.
You know, and I like to remind people, we used to have don't ask, don't tell.
We didn't allow African-Americans in the service.
We didn't allow women in the service.
And now in hindsight, we look back and we realize that those policies were misplaced.
And I just ask people, you know, at the point now where the president of the United States has stated that we no longer are in a crisis, you know, COVID is not an emergency anymore.
I think he said the pandemic was over specifically.
Why is it that we continue to drive out all of these service members, coerce people, take these negative actions against each of our service members?
And again, we're talking about over 80,000 people here, people who want to serve their country, people who are actively trying to support and defend the Constitution in taking the actions that we're taking right now.
The punishment that's being inflicted on our service members is unacceptable and really disturbing.
Well, again, I wish it didn't.
I wish I could be on the other side of this argument, but this again matches exactly what you would predict if somebody was not interested in our long-term well-being as a nation, because For whatever reason, the policies that are so devastating here are being advanced most aggressively by what I call the blue team, the Democratic Party, of which I've been a lifelong member.
But I can't even recognize that party now.
And so if you were interested in keeping that party in power so that it could continue to advance bad policy, But you also were interested in degrading military readiness, then the mandates might persist in the military while they are withdrawn in advance of midterm elections or something like that in the civilian population.
I hear myself saying that and I know how it sounds.
On the other hand, I'm a scientist and what I do is I look at patterns and I eliminate potential explanations based on the fact that they don't fit until we're down to a small number of explanations that might underlie the pattern.
And in this case, that is a very unfortunate process that points in a direction that I think ought to alarm every American.
John, do you want to speak to what's happened to you as a result of your stance on the so-called vaccines?
Certainly.
So, really, this all began for me in September of 2021, if I remember correctly.
September 21st, 2021, I was called into my commander's office and I was told, The mandate's here.
I know you don't want to get the vaccine.
You've expressed that to me.
And you said you're going to apply for religious accommodation, so here's your option.
You either apply for a religious accommodation or a medical exemption, or you get the vaccine.
And that in and of itself is fine.
That's within the realm of the legal structure and the regulatory structure of the military is affording the option to get an exemption for the vaccine if there's a mandate.
And so I applied for religious accommodation, but there was a catch.
And that catch was, well, if you apply for religious accommodation, you're going to be grounded.
And you're no longer going to be able to train in the F-16.
And that is where the issue kind of begins because the Air Force's own policies on religious accommodation say that no adverse training decisions can be made based off of the application of a religious accommodation.
So it was immediately contrary to the Air Force's own policies in this.
But nonetheless, I pushed through because, you know, I have a firm Religious belief and it's rooted in the use of fetal cells for testing in the COVID vaccines and I'm a devout Catholic and I'm pro-life so I decided to press forward with that and that has been my concern since the beginning of these vaccines and so I requested that religious accommodation.
I was grounded and then I immediately filed an equal opportunity complaint against my command for grounding me over that.
And to this day, a year later now, I have still not heard anything about that Equal Opportunity Complaint.
Even though I cited all the policy, I've had no communication and no adjudication of that complaint, which is concerning in itself that the Equal Opportunity Program is either that backed up or is somehow burying my paperwork.
I'm not going to make any accusations.
I was ultimately denied that religious accommodation, and I appealed it.
But what's interesting is in my denial, there were some interesting arguments made about why I had to get the vaccine.
And some of those arguments included, well, you would have to wear a mask if you were flying, and you can't wear a mask when you're flying an F-16.
And that's strange because masks have never been required for air crew in any capacity whatsoever.
And I assume they mean like an N95 mask or something.
But I mean, I wear a mask when I fly and I'm in a jet by myself.
So it's I mean, like, you know, the closest we'll get is like 20 feet away from each other.
And that's that's that's social distancing.
And I'm literally in like a bubble.
It's like a covid bubble, right?
I mean, there's canopy.
The absurdity of this is almost incalculable.
I mean, this is a virus that so far does not appear to transmit outdoors.
You're in a plane alone, and there is no conceivable way that you could transmit this virus to anyone or catch it from anyone.
In this context, what's more, as if that weren't, in and of itself, Catch-22 level absurdity.
The vaccines don't prevent you from catching or transmitting this virus.
And therefore, the whole basis for this is about protecting at best.
And the argument is thin as can be.
But at best, these vaccines can be argued to protect vulnerable people from severe consequences after they have caught the thing.
Right.
That argument can't be made for somebody young and healthy like yourself.
And so the only thing that protects this policy is that the people advancing it don't have to explain why.
Right?
It can't be explained.
There is no logic here that could explain why the military wants you to get this to protect you and your plane.
Makes no sense.
No sense at all.
You're exactly right.
If the military was interested in you being protected, they would want you not to get the vaccine because it carries risks and you're better off fending off the disease with your own natural immunity.
And speaking of which, Brett, you know, the other part of this is that what's been going on that's lost, and it's a part of the lawsuit, is what you just said is natural immunity.
You know, I grew up I grew up when it was pretty well established that, for example, I had chicken pox.
I don't know if you did when you were growing up as a kid.
That meant that I was never going to get a chicken pox vaccine.
Because it had been well established, you know, as old as I am, I think we're probably about the same age.
We're probably pretty close in age.
But, you know, it was pretty well established that it's contraindicated for you to get a vaccine or a shot, you know, a prophylactic shot for a disease you've already had.
And so if you had chickenpox, you weren't going to get the chickenpox vaccine.
So we've got a huge swath of the military, you know, given where we are now, two and a half years in on a respiratory virus, most people have had it and would, you know, have some form of immunity to it.
And the interesting thing is the DOD in 2013, Acknowledge natural immunity.
It's right in the DOD regulation on chemoprophylaxis.
AR 40-562 right in there says you should be exempt.
It's a preferential that you should be exempt if you've already had this.
And it is amazing how quickly when this came out, I mean, I went right to that because I had experience with it.
So I was telling people, hey, put this in your request that you've got natural immunity.
Go get tested.
If you're positive, you should be exempt.
We should.
And all these medical exemptions that natural immunity, the entire That regulatory framework, the biology that underlies the entire basis for these things just went, I mean, out the window.
And people who had prior anaphylaxis, I had clients who couldn't get their commands to acknowledge, they're like, well, you have to prove now that you'll have anaphylaxis to this vaccine.
I'm like, that's That's insane.
I mean, that's just, I can't believe anybody says that.
And so, you know, to your point, I know you think I've maybe been a little light on him, Brett, but I mean, I feel pretty strongly like the religious accommodation process isn't, when it's supposed to be, you file a religious accommodation, nothing happens to you, as John pointed out.
I tell people that when you take action to harm someone's career after they've filed for religious accommodation, that's not a religious accommodation policy.
That's a religious targeting policy.
Yes.
It's religious persecution.
Right.
And what you're doing, the other thing is, we don't know how many people who saw this, and I can tell you, I mean, I'm aware and I've done a little work on, there's 42 Navy or 42 chaplains who are suing, military chaplains who are suing over this vaccine in the Eastern District of Virginia.
That case is Alvarado, and they've been clear in their affidavits that from the beginning they were told that it was going to be DoD policy, they weren't going to grant any.
So this has been, I mean, from the get-go there were policies that were in effect where the DoD had made the decision That even all of its own regulations were going to be violated in order to let people know that we're going to hammer you regardless.
We're not going to follow the policies and we don't even know how many people didn't bother filing for religious accommodation or whatever because they were told there's no point, you're going to get kicked out.
I mean, I know John and Olivia know that for every one of them who's had the courage to stand up, there's probably another 10 who just We're cowed, we're broken because of what the DoD has done.
Yeah, this is the tragedy of it, is how many people, you know, had the objection and the concern and knuckled under because fighting, you know, the DoD is too frightening a prospect.
I will say that again, the pattern is unmistakable.
Yeah, whatever this policy is, it is not medically based, right?
And again, I don't know.
I can't imagine if you talked to me 10 years ago and told me this sentence is going to come out of your mouth.
I would have said, huh, what would have to have happened in order for me to say that?
But we have a policy in which we are mandating something that we are calling a vaccine that is really far more radical than a vaccine that is not apparently based on medical well-being.
It's not that it misunderstands medical well-being.
It's indifferent to medical well-being.
And the idea that that policy, whatever it is, whatever its purpose, is so important That we are going to violate constitutional principles like your right to religious belief is absolutely shocking.
And we should get into what, you know, you mentioned, John, the issue of fetal cells, which, although you and I might see that issue differently in the particulars, I see it as a perfectly valid reason to object in the strongest terms.
If you hold certain religious beliefs that are commonly held by many Americans, then that is an offense.
It is an offense.
I could come up with analogies from other contexts.
I think I will hold back from doing so, but nonetheless the idea that if you believe that Those fetal cells are effectively human beings, deceased human beings that were utilized in the production of these vaccines.
Then it seems to me that your right to object to them is absolute.
And yet, It falls on deaf ears?
I mean, what is it like when somebody tells you that that belief isn't sufficient to justify your refusing a vaccine that actually has no medical benefit to offer you anyway?
You know, it's...
Yeah, I'm a Catholic, and I'm sure as you know and everyone knows, Catholics are criticized quite often, and that's fine.
So, honestly, being told that my beliefs are invalid or whatever is not anything new, and it's not really anything that totally phases me, because I'm totally set and rooted in my beliefs, and they give me a good life, and I'm blessed.
That is unfortunate and it's frustrating, at the very least, to say that these accommodations are being denied because you're not valid.
Where it's really, truly frustrating for me is the fact that it's contrary to the Constitution and my oath to the Constitution, and it's contrary to the policies, and more importantly, I think that it's the perfect compromise.
That's really what confuses me the most, is the fact that if you were just simply to grant these religious accommodations, which are essentially lawfully required to be granted, all things considered, you can still have your vaccine mandate.
You can still have your vaccine mandate if people are allergic to some of the ingredients in the vaccine, you give them an exemption.
You can still have your vaccine mandate if you grant religious accommodations.
You don't even have to overturn it, you can just grant these exemptions.
And everyone's happy.
And although there are deeper-rooted issues with the legality of the mandate and everything else, at the very least, I think this would be a lot less of a problem if those were just granted, certainly from the perspective of national security.
But nonetheless, yeah, I would say that it does feel like religious persecution to be ignored and to scream out into the void, if you will, about this.
And what's more is That people just don't simply understand.
They think I'm a crazy person.
Or they tell people that, well, there's no organized religion really that's popular and common in America that says that you can't take the vaccine, when that's actually really not that true.
The Archbishop of the Military Diocese himself said that to deny a religious accommodation for those with sincerely held beliefs would be contrary to federal law and morally abhorrent.
And that's the Archbishop of the Military Diocese, who is quite literally a Catholic figurehead in the military.
And so we're, to some degree, I wouldn't say being lied to, but being told things that aren't necessarily true when they say that, well, like, your faith can't even, you don't have enough faith.
I know military members, especially the enlisted corps and the younger guys who have been told by even chaplains that, well, your religious belief isn't valid.
That's not part of Christianity.
And that's just, that's not how Christianity works for one, and also not how it works within the realm of the law.
And to tell people that they can't have a religious accommodation when they request it is concerning and a little bit scary, if I can be totally honest.
Well, I think it's actually terrifying and cards on the table.
I'm not a religious person.
I don't consider myself an atheist, but I'm very close to it.
I don't believe in an interventionist God, but I have to say there is something about this disease, the apparent origin of it, which is unnatural, the result of at best scientific hubris.
And the fact of this incredibly radical medical intervention, which is bound, Heather and I spotted at the beginning, that this was such an unusual way to intervene in bodily physiology, that the risks were just almost uncountable.
The number of ways this could go wrong was very large from the beginning, even before we knew that it did go wrong.
But the whole thing to me, like I struggle for a term that isn't, there is something unholy about this, right?
Again, I'm not a religious person, but the idea that someone thinks that I might be or you might be required to accept this intervention, despite the fact that it doesn't actually work epidemiologically to prevent the spread of the thing, right?
If it did, The question might be somewhat different, but it doesn't.
And yet, somebody would tell us that we are required to accept this, and that our sincerely held belief that it is the wrong thing to do is immaterial, is shocking.
It's shocking.
And in this case, you have an objection.
You know, I will...
I will say that the belief that Catholics hold about fetuses is a... it doesn't have to be perfectly philosophically consistent, but it is, right?
If you believe in a God who intervenes in the affairs of humans, that decides that a child will come into the world, right?
Then everything about your objection here flows very naturally from that belief, which frankly, although I don't believe it, Nobody on earth can say it isn't true, right?
It is a simple matter of this is where my understanding of the universe leads me.
Nobody can tell you it isn't right.
And if it is right, then of course it makes this objection very obvious and robust.
And to be stared down by a military that can't explain in rational terms why it should want you to take this thing in the first place is, it's just, it's jaw dropping.
Um, so I want to get a little bit, we talked in a prior conversation about the nature of the constitutional protection for religious beliefs, and I've alluded to it a little bit here, but I think it's likely that Virtually everybody in my audience has only a passing familiarity at best with these protections.
So, do one or all of you want to speak to what the Constitution actually says?
How do we know if your religious belief is a valid reason to be exempt?
Well, I'll do a little of the heavy lifting as a lawyer, just because I'm fairly familiar with it.
But one of the interesting aspects to the government looking in, or the courts have said, essentially, look, it's not for us to pass judgment on whether a religious belief is valid or not.
And so it's largely, can you articulate, you know, something that's coherent?
It doesn't even have to be really, I don't want to say logical.
It's really, do you have a religious belief?
And in that sense, they're really just trying to say it's a belief about which, you know, how you believe the universe is organized and matters outside of sort of, It's not a political assertion.
But I will say that there are, you know, the line gets pretty close.
There are people who feel, for example, I represented a airline pilot who put in for a religious accommodation and part of his his belief was it was scriptural based and there was certainly the fetal cell thing but one of the things he said was that I thought was interesting was that the government actions in this case started to look more and more remnant of scripture and
That the government's desire to force this no matter what started to make it look like its own religion.
Like this is a, you know, you must get the jab and that this secular humanism that underlies this now has become its own religious kind of dogma.
And his take was, hey, I'm, you know, I only have one God, and so I can't serve.
And there's a lot of other scriptural things about whether putting a... I mean I have a devout Orthodox Jewish client as well, and there's a lot of Torah passages that certainly suggest that it would be That it would not be proper for an observant person to do this, particularly given the technology.
You've alluded to this, Brett, that they're not vaccines.
They're treatments, fundamentally, since they don't prevent transmission, they fall right into therapies.
The folks who made them in SEC filings referred them as gene therapies.
They did it before other regulatory bodies.
And then the FDA realized they went right after they announced this program, they switched the definition on the website of vaccine.
And so all of that made, you know, one client say, yeah, this is looking like I'm being asked to, it's a loyalty test, you know, it's a And it's forcing people into the idea of choosing this over their God or their beliefs.
And so I don't even think you really need to get too deep into whether HEK cell line 293 was used.
There's a lot of other reasons why people of conscience should and could be outside of it.
And the Supreme Court would say, at least the case law says, that's good enough.
It's not like you need to have the Pope back you up in order to be entitled to some protection of conscience.
Am I right, my understanding is that the test is effectively, is your belief earnestly held?
Are you faking in order to get out of something, or do you actually believe that?
And if you actually believe it, then it isn't a question of whether it makes sense or others believe it.
Yep.
You've got it pretty much.
Sincerely held belief.
Sincerely held belief.
So I would also say, you know, I mean, I think this is very interesting territory because again, I'm pretty close to what would have been called a secular humanist or is called a secular humanist.
I'm certainly a science first Well, maybe I don't want to say that, but from the point of view of what I believe to be true, I'm definitely science first, right?
I believe that values have a different status, but science is my guiding light from the point of view of what is and is not true.
And even from that perspective, Am I allowed, you know, if I was working in a university still, would I be allowed to opt out of these so-called vaccines on the basis that I understand how immunity works, that I believe more strongly in my body's ability
to fight this virus based on ancient capacities that I have on board rather than a radical new technology in which a corporation decides that it wants to conscript my cells into becoming factories for a protein that is known to be physiologically dangerous.
It seems to me that I am well within my rights to say, actually, I believe that my immunity is better than that plan.
And yet I know that...
Go ahead.
I actually have a story for you on exactly that.
So when I first requested a religious accommodation, another individual that was requesting one as well, another fighter pilot, actually processed a religious accommodation for ethical veganism.
And that was her reasoning for why she requested a religious accommodation was that she was a vegan and that she couldn't take this vaccine because of it.
But essentially, it was her de facto religion because it was essentially her worldview on life.
And it ultimately got processed.
She ended up getting the vaccine under the pressure of being grounded, which is very unfortunate.
They didn't really know what to do with it, but they're like, okay, I guess so.
So that's definitely within the realm of possibilities, and the conscience-based objections, which might be a little closer to what you feel, would also be considered somewhat valid in that context as well.
They certainly should be.
And you know, the funny thing is, I think the more you understand about these particular so-called vaccines, the more obvious it becomes that you have a fundamental right to object.
Right?
I mean, to the extent that we were told initially that, oh, what these do is they introduce some mRNAs into your cells, and your cells produce some proteins, and the mRNAs get broken down pretty quickly.
Right?
That was bullshit.
Right?
They actually modified the mRNAs with what are called pseudouridines.
And while Nature does this occasionally, they did it absolutely across the entire mRNA, which makes it incredibly durable.
Right?
This is not a natural entity at all, and my body doesn't know how to deal with it because it has no history with such a thing, right?
My ability to say, you know what?
That's a really dumb plan, right?
I may regard you as clever for inventing it, but I know you're not ready to inject that into a human being, right?
It's not ready for that.
You haven't tested it in a way that will tell you how that will go wrong, and until you do, I want no part of it.
That's a perfectly straightforward argument for me to make that I couldn't make at the beginning of this because the evidence that they had done this to the mRNAs was so thoroughly buried in the heap of garbage that they handed us, right?
We had to figure out that this was going on, that their story that, oh, well, you've got lots of mRNA in your body and this is just another one and it's short-lived, that that was nonsense they wanted us to believe because it made this seem less radical than it was.
So at some level, what I would say is there are dozens of different beliefs that one might hold stretching from, you know, epistemological considerations about how the universe came into being straight to basic epistemological considerations about how the universe came into being straight to Human biology, right?
There are dozens of different beliefs that would support a rational objection to taking these things into one's body and the idea that something has decided that it knows better than all of those objections and is therefore in a position to mandate these things in spite of the fact that, you know, I keep marveling at the fact the entire logic of the mandates is about The control of the pandemic.
But we've known for a long time these transfection agents are incapable of controlling the pandemic.
So the argument has been backed off to, well, they reduce your chances of going to the hospital or dying, which is highly debatable.
But the point is, that ain't their business.
That ain't their business, especially for young people who aren't in significant risk of going to the hospital or dying from COVID in the first place.
It's at the heart of one of our claims.
You've gotten right to the science of one of the claims in our cases, which is that they're not vaccines.
I don't know if you're familiar with the right to die cases that came out of Oregon.
Washington State.
Governor Booth Gardner, if I'm not mistaken, was integral to that fight.
Right, and the outcome in the Supreme Court was ultimately that you could not force someone to take a treatment even if it were life-saving.
In other words, the Supreme Court said, we don't even belong here, you know, but you cannot force someone to take a life-saving treatment.
And so if these vaccines that aren't, if it turns out they're a treatment, Legally speaking, that means that even if you could show that they saved a life, and I'm with you, I don't believe that's been shown.
In fact, I know it hasn't.
That's a different issue.
That you can't mandate a life-saving therapy on someone under Supreme Court precedent.
So if these are gene therapies, then You know, you've taken paternalism to a level now where the underlying premise would be the government controls your body and you're getting your immune system on a license agreement, you know?
And so, I mean, it's something that we're hoping, you know, we're kind of procedurally placed to get an answer on that question.
There are more than, you know, more than just those questions as well.
I mean, there's, I'm sure you followed, you know, relative risk versus absolute risk.
They broke the control group.
There's been no well-controlled clinical studies.
I mean, about everything that you could possibly do wrong in a clinical protocol has been done wrong with respect to these products, you know?
Every way the deck could be stacked, we have discovered that it has been stacked.
And yet we do not react with the kind of caution That would be natural in the case that you discover, you know, this many independent violations of scientific principles and law.
It's absurd that we do not react with shock and a great deal of skepticism in this context which speaks to the The degree of power that they have over many people, you know, Olivia and John, you have both described what are, I mean, I feel safe to say it's obvious retribution that you have experienced, right?
The whole idea is, well, if you're going to object, Then we're in a position to punish you extrajudicially until you relent, which of course will cause most people not to object in the first place and will cause many people who do object to relent, which leaves only a tiny number of people, which actually in the aggregate turns out to be hundreds, to actually stand up and stick by it.
But I've forgotten which one of you raised it a few moments ago.
It was the issue that this is actually functioning.
The term vaccine is highly debatable here, but litmus test does appear to be what is taking place.
And, you know, again, this this reminds me of, you know, my concern that what's really going on here is we are being marched in the direction of relinquishing the gains of Nuremberg.
Right.
If what we're going to do is expose the entire military to a mandate to see who objects and then we're going to see who can be coerced into relenting and throw everyone else out.
What does that leave us with?
That leaves us with a force that has effectively said, we will accept immoral orders.
And then the question is, what orders flow down the chain of command after that has happened?
That to me is a very, very troubling question.
I don't think you have to be anything other than listen to the news, but there are certain politicians who've made it clear over and over again, they're fantasizing about the notion of using the military against their political enemies.
You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist, you just need to read Eric Swalwell's Twitter account.
I mean, he's openly talked about doing that.
Never in my life did I imagine I would hear a U.S.
politician, but I mean, the Commander-in-Chief has said like-minded things, and you don't have to go very far in imagining, especially in light of January 6th.
I mean, look, the D.C.' 's had barricades around it for how long now, Dave?
They called out the National Guard, and I mean, we are heading to a very, very bad place if we don't turn things around.
But your concerns about the military, I share them.
I don't have to worry about like they do.
The military doesn't order me anymore.
But yeah, it looks to me like that's exactly what this is headed towards, is that the ultimate goal is that you'll have a military that will Once you've bent the knee, it's really hard to stand back up and say no.
That's well said.
I personally look at Joe Biden and I see a once very competent, if highly corrupt politician who is now
So feeble that I don't really think he's in charge, but nonetheless his recent speech in Philadelphia was Conspicuous in this regard to because what he effectively did was say come on Can't we all be unified and go after the so-called MAGA Republicans and as much as I'm not a MAGA Republican never have been Don't won't become one.
I was offended as an American to hear my president singling out a group of political opponents and effectively in not so well veiled terms argue that they are not entitled to basic constitutional rights like the right to speak freely.
I mean, that was the implication of his invocation of clear and present danger in that context.
And so, you know, again, it's a matter of there are a lot of dots in front of us.
And even those of us who are cautious about connecting them are having an increasingly hard time avoiding the picture that is emerging before us.
And it is it is a frightening one.
Yeah.
For sure.
So, before we close out here, I know there's a lot more to your story, Olivia, and your story, John, that I think the Dark Horse audience would be benefited by hearing.
I don't know quite how to get you to put this in full context, but I would like Both of you to think about what in your family histories might be relevant here, what in your experience will bring home to the audience of Dark Horse what is actually taking place in our military so that, you know, so the picture is maximally fleshed out.
Olivia, you want to start?
Sure.
So I was always told that, you know, integrity is what you do when nobody else is watching.
And that it's, you know, incredibly hard to do the right thing.
What I found throughout this process is that what's harder is to do the right thing when everyone is watching.
To see the level of coercion and abuse and discrimination that's been levied on myself and my peers, and not just within the military, but all of America, and frankly the globe, has been shocking.
I think that, you know, this is something that every American citizen should consider.
Perhaps you are absolutely pro-mandate today.
What if you were to find yourself on the other side of a situation?
My body, my choice type situation that we're dealing with right now, right?
You know, I don't, I'm not comfortable getting this vaccine.
Why am I being told that this is something that's going to be forced into my body?
Like why, why is bodily sovereignty not protected?
And furthermore, you know, why is there no concern about blatant violation of constitutional rights?
I keep thinking back to, I'm going to butcher the quote, but there was a World War II quote where, you know, it's, The government came for a certain group and I did nothing.
They came for another group, I did nothing.
You know, now they're coming for me and there's no one left.
If we don't stand up for constitutional rights today and reach out to our congressmen as congressmen do the right thing and move forward with laws that are aligned with American values, the Constitution, we're going to find ourselves in a very troubling place.
And I think we've seen this historically over and over and over again.
I just hope that everyone can listen to this and consider how they can take steps to preserve our Constitution, to preserve our way of life, to ensure that our children grow up to have the same rights like bodily sovereignty that we have had the privilege to have here in America.
Yeah, I think that's very well said and one of the things that I'm hoping will come out of this discussion is that people will recognize We have differences in this country.
That's part of the beauty of the system is that we hash those differences out in a way that results in us navigating through time better than alternative systems.
And what that means at a moment like this, when we're up against something so obviously wrong as The mandate of a medically radical and unjustified intervention to control a disease that for most of us is far better controlled by immunities we already have or can easily develop
That when we're up against that and when those mandates are being wielded against the very force that protects our way of life, that this isn't a moment for Our minor differences to matter there beside the point, right?
We can talk about our differences over how we are to govern ourselves and where we should be headed in the future.
Once we have rescued our system from whatever this spasm of authoritarianism is, but we have to do that.
And so You know, look, I'm a, you know, not even just a liberal college professor.
I'm a radical college professor sitting with members of our military talking about the fate of our nation, which we all believe is jeopardized by moves like this.
I'm hoping that people will discover their own patriotism and that it will cause them to stand up in whatever role they find themselves in, whether they are members of Congress or they are members of the scientific community.
There are certainly a huge number of doctors who now know that something has gone desperately wrong who have largely been completely silent about what they are seeing.
One's patriotism should cause you to say what you know now, and that doesn't mean that there won't be consequences.
There will be, but the point is the consequence for people not saying what they now understand to be true will be even worse.
We are dependent on this system.
To protect our liberty, and that means that, you know, college professors should be standing shoulder to shoulder with our men and women in uniform against these absurd and dangerous mandates.
John, did you want to talk about more related to your experience?
Sure.
So, I'll go back all the way to my childhood real quick.
When I was a kid, my family was very fortunate.
We actually full-time RVed and traveled the country in an RV for like five years.
I've seen the sun rise over Yosemite and I saw the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico.
I played in the cornfields of Kansas and I ate a Philly cheesesteak and checked out the Liberty Bell.
I did all of those things without a single worry about my freedom, my ability to be who I wanted to be, or worried about Invasion or death or concentration camps or anything of the sort that so many people in this world are so unfortunate to experience.
I developed a love for this country.
I love this country.
I love what it stands for.
I love the fairness that you talked about.
And for my entire life, I partook in that.
The flag behind me is from being an Eagle Scout where I learned about the values of America.
And so with all that, it's...
This desire to stand up over this vaccine is not because I'm a fringe right-wing extremist or a conspiracy theorist or some sort of religious radical.
I'm just a normal American guy who loves his country and wants to do cool things like fly jets and defend my nation that way.
It's fun.
It's a passion of mine.
So many service members are just like me.
In fact, I'd say all of them are just like me.
We're not crazy people.
We're just here to stand up for what we believe in, and we're here to represent the very values that were instilled in us from this great nation.
I would encourage the American people to keep that frame of mind when they think about us.
We've been vilified, to a large degree, by our own government, which is extremely unfortunate, and by our media.
We're just here to do the right thing, and that's all we care about.
That's really what we want to do, is do what's right and do what we believe, whether that's founded in Christian beliefs or whether it's veganism.
That's the beauty of this country, is that there's a diversity of opinion and thought, and we're allowed to express that and share it, and we're here to defend it as military members.
We're kind of the boots on the ground in this fight as unvaccinated service members, all 80,000 of us.
And maybe legal and lawsuits are going to be what takes the hill for this for us.
But at the very least, Congress can be our air cover.
And the American people can be our air cover.
You guys can share our story.
You guys can even just tweeting about it.
I would ask representatives, just tweet about it.
It's that easy to provide us some top cover and help change the narrative a little bit about who we are as people.
So we can stop being villains and start being just everyday Americans who are standing up for what we believe in.
And that's really what I'm most passionate about and why I'm sitting here and in front of this camera talking about it is because the narrative needs to change drastically if we're ever going to see any change.
And it starts in the military and it spreads across our entire country to the rights of even the viewers of this show.
So that's my plea to everybody, to Congress and the American people is I'm obstinate.
I'll say it.
and think about us.
And if you're a praying person, pray for us.
And if you're not, then maybe just think about us.
But that's what we're here to do.
And that's our mission.
And we're not going to stop until we win this fight.
And we're set in it.
And that's not to say we're obstinate, but simply just to mean that we believe and we stand firmly in what we believe.
I'm obstinate.
I'll say it.
I am.
Well, you're a lawyer.
It's kind of your job.
Yeah, that's beautifully said, John.
And I will say, you know, this isn't my first fight.
And one of the things that each of the fights I've been involved in has taught me is that you are often led to believe that there's some un-understandable group on the other side.
And you really have an obligation to sit down with those folks and see whether what you've been told is true.
And what I keep finding out is, no, actually, the people I've been told are a threat to the country have a different perspective.
Often, they often have something to teach me that I don't know, something that I missed from the perspective that I arrived with.
And in any case, this has been a great conversation in the sense that I think it does, it absolutely reveals your humanity and I think it's going to be hard for anybody to look at this and portray you as villains or, you know, crazy religious fanatics or any of the things that are used to get people, and this is key, to get people not to listen to what you're saying.
Because that's how they do it, right?
They get people not to listen, to judge before, and this is the basis of the word prejudice.
Right to prejudge they get you to prejudge somebody so you won't hear what they have to say and then you'll believe Oh that these people actually don't care that you know their resistance to these so-called vaccines Is causing other people to die.
No, that's not at all.
What's going?
going on here.
These are people who believe this is the right choice, both personally and medically, and that it is completely consistent with their love of their country and their oath to defend the Constitution.
And how can anybody look at that and be indifferent?
We have an obligation to each other is basically the point.
And you all, through your military service, are very directly addressing your sense of obligation to the nation.
And others of us in other roles are doing it in different ways.
But really, what we need to do is we all need to stand up because There are many signs we are in a very dangerous place.
So I thank you all for joining me on Dark Horse.
I thank everybody who is watching this for hearing it through and I look forward to hearing the discussion that I know that it is going to set in motion.
Is there anything any of the three of you would like to say in closing?
Just thank you for your time.
This has been fantastic and a wonderful opportunity to engage you and your audience.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
You don't need to thank me.
I actually really do feel a sense of honor and privilege that you have trusted me with this discussion.
And I hope that it catches the attention of people who will not be able to stand being silent anymore and will stand up and defend you.
