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April 23, 2020 - American Countdown - Barnes

01:46:44

20200423_Thu_Barnes

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	Thank you.
	Welcome to another edition of American Countdown, where more admissions today that, in fact, what some of us have been saying for months continues to be proven true.
	While the Doomer and Gloomer folks have been forecasting a massive rise in deaths and mortality and a lethality rate that was supposed to be very high, that the serology tests were purportedly going to support their position, that we would see overcapacity in hospitals across the country, That particularly those places that either shut down late or did not shut down at all would suffer the worst consequences.
	The countries that did not shut down or shut down late would suffer worse consequences.
	In fact, all the data goes in the other direction.
	Today, another study that confirms, which the president himself confirmed today, what common sense had dictated from the beginning.
	Which was that like most flu viruses and influenza-like viruses, this virus, there's a reason why we call the flu the seasonal flu, because it tends to have difficulty spreading outdoors in the heat, in the humidity, and in the sunshine.
	Well, in fact, the sunshine remains a key disinfectant for the transmission rate and contagion rate of this disease.
	And as suspected, all of our public policies telling people to not go outdoors, arresting mothers for simply taking their kid to the public park, arresting fathers for simply playing t-ball with their daughters in a public park, arresting swimmers
	For just taking a morning swim, arresting and chasing surfers and paddle boarders for being by themselves out on the water, telling people they couldn't fish off the dock, telling people they couldn't go out in a boat on their own lake by themselves has turned out to be horrendous advice.
	By contrast, those shutdown-heavy jurisdictions like New York City, like New Jersey, like Northern Italy, are showing some of the worst outcomes from this virus, and that may not be coincidental.
	Indeed, there's more evidence that New York completely botched its handling of the virus in two critical ways.
	First, by telling people to lock themselves up indoors and use mass transit on a concentrated basis, locking people into close continuous contact in confined quarters in ways that effectively prohibited and precluded them from being outdoors and encouraged and incentivized and maximized the risk and spread of the virus.
	Also taking no particular efforts to be protective or precautionary towards nursing homes, towards hospice centers, towards long-term intensive care units, towards places where the vulnerable elderly were.
	In fact, more articles today confirmed that not only is the outdoors good to defeat the virus and indoors bad to compete with the virus or to reduce the spread and the contagion rate of the virus, the management of nursing homes and mass transit were particularly pernicious in spreading the contagion and increasing the management of nursing homes and mass transit were particularly pernicious in spreading While at the same time, surveys now out of both Los Angeles and New York City confirm that the lethality rate is much lower than what the World Health Organization and others said.
	Indeed, the studies out of New York confirm it was in L.A., studies that confirmed what happened in Santa Clara in surveys that were released last week that had a bunch of pseudoscientists on the social media trying to take it apart by every means possible.
	Well, it turns out those critics were wrong.
	It turned out the serology test confirming what we had seen in places like the Diamond Princess, seen from serology test in Iceland, seen from serology test in Germany.
	Now we're seeing the same thing in serology test taken from people on the USS Roosevelt, taken in Santa Clara, taken in LA, taken in New York.
	And what it shows is that the rate of infection was both much earlier and much broader than was originally stated, meaning that the mortality rate is much less and the danger rate is much less than was originally projected and predicted.
	Once again, they got it wrong.
	It looks like this will end up being somewhere around on average three times worse than the flu in terms of its risk to people, though more targeted in who it risks in terms of life expectancy, in terms of number of years lost because it disproportionately targets those who already have the shortest life expectancies in terms of number of years lost because it disproportionately targets those who already have
	In terms of an actuarial analysis, we would find that this disease really presented a risk to only a group of population that was already vulnerable and susceptible, and not to the broader public and the broader population.
	And we restricted and restrained their quality of life for no gain in quantity of life as it relates to them.
	For people under 60, the flu turns out to be as serious a threat as this virus, at least according to the data so far.
	So everybody who mocked the just-the-flu crowd, well, it turns out those mockers have turned out more wrong than right, and that the just-the-flu crowd was a lot more accurate than the this-is-the-plague crowd.
	And so, to give an example, here is one of the studies.
	Indoor transmission of SARS-CoV-2, which is COVID-19.
	By early 2020, and this is from the medical literature that was put out today, this was funded in dealing with Hong Kong, and what they found was in the 318 outbreaks with three or more cases, they created the contagion.
	You essentially had these concentrated centers of contagion.
	These concentrated centers of contagion principally occurred indoors, particularly as it related to home or transport.
	Indeed, only less than 2% had anything to do with anything outdoors.
	80% were from the home and the others involved transport and only one or two they're able to identify occurring anywhere outdoors.
	In fact, they say we identified only a single outbreak.
	In any outdoor environment, which only led to two cases out of the thousands present.
	So what they had already confirmed, what we were seeing from more and more data and information was there's a reason why even in restaurants and bars this wasn't spreading.
	This was at any significant, substantial level.
	They've seen, they've done surveys and studies of aspects of this where there actually was an outbreak.
	It happens when there's close continuous contact indoors in confined quarters with more than 15 minutes of unprotected interaction with someone with the virus.
	And even then, a large number never got it.
	In Wuhan, when they followed it, 90 to 95 percent of people who had close continuous contact in confined quarters with those infected, at a time period they didn't know about the virus nor knew the other person was infected, 95 percent never got the virus.
	83 percent of the people that were on the Diamond Princess never got the virus.
	The reality is this virus did not pose the degree and scale and scope and severity of risk that was said to be needed to justify this shutdown.
	And it turns out methods of that shutdown, including suppression of outdoor activities, backfired and were counterproductive.
	While strategies like, hey, let's force everybody to be on mass transit, let's run fewer subway cars, let's have them be on mass transit for longer because we're not going to have the same number of subway cars available, and let's do it particularly to working class poor communities in the outer boroughs of New York City, where they're and let's do it particularly to working class poor communities in the outer boroughs of New York City, where they're going to go back, That turns out to be a disastrous idea of course.
	And that may be why New York City has a rate of infection almost 10 times higher than is estimated for the rest of the country.
	Eight times higher than is estimated for the rest of the state of New York.
	If restaurants and bars, which are as common in upstate New York as they are in New York City, were the main epicenter of outbreak, we would be seeing a comparable rate of infection between the two neighboring regions.
	We do not.
	We do not because the risk rate was disproportionate to nursing homes, disproportionate to long-term care units, disproportionate to mass transit.
	That is evidencing that's why New York has a massive outbreak and Los Angeles does not.
	Los Angeles does not rely on public transit.
	Ever since after the 1940s the car companies got together and conspired as popularly featured in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit to get rid of the red car in the great public transit that then existed in California.
	They made it the center of the automobile for marketing purposes in the United States advertising.
	Well it turned out it actually has a profitable benefit in this context because the lack of forced mass transit As New York City's mayor and governor effectively did with their public policies, is what kept LA from having the kind of outbreak that New York City uniquely had in the United States.
	This is increasingly simply a New York City, New Jersey related outbreak in the United States.
	Outside of those two areas, New York City and the New Jersey part of New York City, that constitutes more than half of all of the mortality associated with this virus.
	Indeed, the president himself made comments on the fact that more evidence showing that sunlight is good, more evidence showing humidity and heat is good, more evidence showing that this is a wise strategy to pursue is to go outdoors, not be locked indoors, that we shouldn't be preventing people from doing outdoor activity, which is good for their health, their physical health, their psychological health, their emotional health, can be good for the economy in terms of activities they can go on outdoors.
	But it turns out it's simply a healthier way to deal with this virus in particular.
	Let's take a look at the video clip from today's press conference with the president.
	Video clip number nine.
	Our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the virus, both surfaces and in the air.
	We've seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well, where increasing the temperature and humidity, or both, is generally less favorable to the virus.
	So if you look at an 18-hour half-life, what you're basically saying is that every 18 hours, the virus, the life of the virus, is cut in half.
	So if you start with a thousand particles of the virus, in 18 hours you're down to 500, in 18 hours after that you're down to 250, and so on and so forth.
	That's important as I explain the rest of the chart.
	If you look at the first three lines, when you see the word surface, we're talking about non-porous surfaces, door handles, stainless steel.
	And if you look at the, as the temperature increases, and as the humidity increases, with no sun involved, you can see how drastically the half-life goes down on that virus.
	So the virus is dying at a much more rapid pace, just from exposure to higher temperatures, and just from exposure to humidity.
	If you look at the fourth line, you inject the sunlight into that.
	You inject UV rays into that.
	The same effects on line two at 70 to 75 degrees with 80% humidity on the surface.
	And look at line four, but now you inject the sun.
	The half-life goes from six hours to two minutes.
	That's how much of an impact a UV rays has on the virus.
	The last two lines are aerosols.
	What does it do in the air?
	So in summary, within the conditions we've tested to date, the virus in droplets of saliva survives best in indoors and dry conditions.
	The virus does not survive as well in droplets of saliva.
	And that's important because a lot of testing being done is not necessarily being done, number one, with the COVID-19 virus, and number two, in saliva or respiratory fluids.
	And thirdly, the virus dies the quickest in the presence of direct sunlight under these conditions.
	And when you look at that chart, look at the aerosol as you breathe it.
	You put it in a room, 70 to 75 degrees, 20% humidity, low humidity.
	Half-life is about an hour.
	But you get outside and it cuts down to a minute and a half.
	We're also testing disinfectants, readily available.
	We've tested bleach.
	We've tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus, specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids.
	And I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes.
	Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds.
	And that's with no manipulation.
	No rubbing.
	Just bring it on and leaving it go.
	You rub it and it goes away even faster.
	It's on somebody's hands, right?
	And they haven't touched their face and all of it.
	And it's exposed to the sun.
	But if they're outside, right, and their hands are exposed to the sun, will that kill it as though it were on a piece of metal or something else?
	Not, I don't want to say it will at the same rate, because it's a non-porous surface.
	What we do know, what we do know is that we looked at the worst case scenario, and the virus lives longer on non-porous surfaces.
	So porous surfaces, it doesn't live quite as long.
	So in theory, what you said is correct.
	You know, when you see this, a lot of people have been talking about summer.
	Maybe this is one of the reasons that we've, I once mentioned that maybe it does go away with heat and light.
	And people didn't like that statement very much.
	The fake news didn't like it at all.
	And I just threw it out as a suggestion.
	But it seems like that's the case, because when it's on a surface that would last for a long time, when that surface is outside, it goes away very quickly.
	I think a lot of people are going to go outside all of a sudden.
	People that didn't want to go outside, they'll be like, to me, this is really a very interesting media.
	We're covered in great detail and these are incredible people at that we could call it a laboratory because that's essentially what it is it's a super laboratory it's a lot of things going on at that laboratory so what we've been talking about on this show for now over a month that all evidence is that this kind of virus does not survive very well outdoors does not survive in open air does not survive in sunshine does not survive well in heat or humidity
	and we showed the various studies and surveys that have been done on related viruses over the past half century now is being confirmed for this virus Which means all of the public policies, by all these mayors and governors, it never did have empirical foundation, now it clearly has no empirical foundation.
	So any mayor or governor that continues to close parks, continues to arrest people for going for a swim, or going for a picnic, or going for a bike ride, or going for a jog, or going for a walk along the beach, has no evidentiary basis, as was admitted today and was put up by the president talking about what the best available practices are, move activities outside.
	That is the official formal policy now of even the United States public health officials who have conceded and admitted what frankly was evident about this by anyone studying it or surveying it or with background knowledge in it from the get-go.
	But now all the politicians that had their pretextual basis to be petty tyrants, to declare themselves king and queen of their local community, of their city or county or state, no longer have any evidentiary or empirical authority or predicate for what they're doing.
	And so while courts are finding all kinds of excuses to excuse this conduct, as the sequel to Korematsu Part 2 happens in our federal courts, as again our judges unfortunately too often, too frequently, too easily turn a blind eye to civil rights and civil liberties in this country anytime the magical words crisis are raised.
	There's a reason why our Constitution has no exception for emergency powers.
	Emergency powers do not exist in the United States Constitution.
	There is no exemption or exception or loophole to emergency powers for any of the Bill of Rights or any aspect of the Constitution.
	There's legislative authority, there's executive authority, there's judicial authority.
	It comes within certain restrictions and restraints.
	And by no means, as any of those said, you can just ignore all of this in times of a virus.
	You can just ignore all of this in times of an emergency.
	You can ignore all of this in times of a crisis.
	Indeed, that was the great flaw, as both legal and historical scholars have recognized, in the Weimar Constitution of Germany passed in the 1918-1919, after the abdication of the Tsar.
	One of the great flaws in this otherwise very forward-looking constitution, very democratic constitution, particularly for continental Europe, was that it allowed for the constitution to be suspended in cases of emergency.
	And it was the president who used it to favor the politically protected and the politically connected after the economic crash of the late 1920s in Germany.
	And he set the things into motion.
	For the Nazi power to seize, for the Nazis to seize power, to rise to power in Germany.
	And they used his very declaration of emergency powers in the Constitution to give Hitler complete power as a dictator and chancellor.
	So we have a known history that this is dangerous to even think about it.
	Our Founding Fathers refused to include any aspect of it and here we're repeating it and justices and justices justifying it.
	Now public policies that even the central public health authorities in the United States acknowledge is exactly contrary to what they're advising.
	They're advising go out, have more outside activities, more outdoor activities, be outside of your home.
	Don't be shut ins, don't be shut down, don't be locked in, be outside.
	That's the best practices according to the formal policy of the United States government.
	How can any city, how can any county, how can any state continue to justify not allowing people to go outdoors under these circumstances?
	There is no evidentiary basis.
	It doesn't even meet the rational basis test.
	Least of all the strict scrutiny that's supposed to apply to the suspension of core constitutional liberties, like the right to peaceably assemble, like the right to speech, the right to express yourselves religiously, the right to self-defense with the purchase of a gun, the right of privacy under the Fourth Amendment, the right of freedom of movement under the Fourth Amendment, the right of property with due and due process of law under the Fifth Amendment, and the right to property with just compensation for any takings under the Fifth Amendment.
	How can any of those core constitutional liberties be restricted and restrained as they currently are and continue to be and to be threatened to be?
	Like the Illinois governor today talking about he's going to extend the shutdown another 30 days.
	The Michigan governor giving the same kind of language.
	Wisconsin governor giving similar language.
	New Jersey governor giving similar language.
	How is that going to be justified to suppress outdoor activities when the official public health policy is we need more outdoor activities?
	In the same context, that contrasts, for example, to Governor of Florida, who was late to shut down, early to reopen, and one of the key points was he refused to shut down the beaches.
	Well, we now know he was right.
	As the Florida governor said, we flattened the curve despite all the false predictions.
	For example, an initial study suggested that there would be 465,000 Floridians Hospitalized due to COVID by April 24th.
	Well, guess what?
	The number is 2,000.
	So there was this group COVID-19 Now, a politically connected group with questionable ties, pushed on that was used as propaganda to terrorize people and terrify people into implementing these policies and procedures.
	It was used as the excuse that a lot of ordinary people out there still buy because they listen to mainstream media and establishment press.
	And they listen to these public health officials who've been compromised by political bias or a conformist culture within academia and the intellectual world that has compromised their ability to have independence or true intellectual analysis of these issues.
	They were wrong by, let's see, 2,000 divided by 465,000.
	465,000.
	So you're talking about they were wrong by a rate of 230,000 as a multiplier?
	I mean, that's the number.
	And I was...
	If they were 90% wrong, there would have been 46,000.
	If they were 99% wrong, there would have at least been 44,600.
	Instead, there's less than half of that!
	So they were off by a ratio of almost 100 to 1 in their estimates of what would happen in Florida.
	It turned out they were completely wrong, and particularly wrong, about the beaches and public access.
	Indeed, let's take a look at some of the influenza charts that people have been tracking and tracing and creating, including Tracy Beans and others on radio at places like unheard.com, U-N-H-E-R-D, helped create some charts looking at influenza-like illnesses being reported from various medical data, including the CDC.
	And let's take a look at some of the shutdown states and see if they have had any spike compared to prior years even though they have refused to shut down.
	So let's look at the states that refused shutdown.
	Let's look at chart number 59.
	Look at South Dakota.
	There was all these predictions and even though there was a Small outbreak at a pork factory.
	You can look at that chart.
	All those are different years of influenza-like illnesses over the different weeks.
	So the weeks are at the bottom.
	The different graphs, the different colored lines are the different years that occurred.
	2020 is in the early part of the process.
	You see it's indistinguishable from the other years in terms of influenza-like illnesses.
	They refused to shut down.
	They never experienced a spike.
	Let's take a look at chart number 47 and look at Utah and see, did Utah suffer a sudden spike after they refused to shut down as all of the doom and gloomers predicted and forecast?
	Well, let's take a look at chart 47.
	Once again, the same thing.
	Indistinguishable from prior years.
	Worse than a low or average flu year, but basically the same as all the other states that did shut down.
	In fact, what we'll find and what we did find is the states that shut down continued to have escalated growth, whereas the states that did not shut down actually suffered or received a better outcome.
	Let's look at chart number seven.
	And let's look at Iowa, another state, despite a lot of complaints, despite all their neighbors shutting down, refusing to shut down.
	And what do we see when we look at Iowa's chart?
	We see the same sort of pattern as happened in past years in terms of influenza-like illnesses.
	We don't see any spike.
	No shutdown, no spike.
	Everybody said that was on the Modeler side, that was on the Doomer and Gloomer side, that said this is the next plagueside, said any of these states that refuse to shut down should see a spike.
	Instead, no shutdown, no spike.
	Take another look at it.
	Let's look at chart number five and look at the state of Wyoming, another state that refused to shut down.
	What do we see when we look at that chart?
	Well, we see the same thing we saw in all the other states that did not shut down.
	We see no spike.
	In fact, we see declines, often declines bigger and greater than occurred in the shutdown states.
	Let's look at chart number two.
	The good state of Arkansas.
	Might have to go up there this weekend to get a haircut and a beard trim on the way to Tennessee for a protest on Monday.
	Look at Arkansas.
	What do we see?
	Same pattern.
	Arkansas this year had the same kind of influenza-like illnesses as it has had in the past years.
	In fact, it had a precipitous decline rather than precipitous rise after they refused to shut down.
	Same pattern.
	No shutdown.
	No spike.
	No shutdown, no spike.
	That same pattern.
	Now, let's contrast it to, say, the beloved New York City, which in all its genius decided to lock people up in intergenerational homes and on mass transit and in nursing homes, where Governor Cuomo, by the way, was sending people who had COVID, knew he had COVID, back into the nursing homes to spread it to other people.
	That was the genius advice of the would-be Democratic nominee by some of the political folks in Washington.
	Let's look at chart number 36.
	And what do we see in chart number 36 after they shut down?
	We just see a continuous spike up.
	That line just goes up, up, up, up, up.
	So there was no success of the shutdown in reducing that spike in terms of influenza-like illnesses.
	That pattern was similar and comparable all across the country.
	In fact, what it reinforces is what is being increasingly reported in the results from Sweden.
	That was the nation that refused to shut down.
	That was the nation that refused to adopt these panic-related policies and instead followed the historical policies of let's protect the vulnerable, let's look after nursing homes, let's look after intensive care units, let's look after hospitals to make sure it doesn't spread within the hospital.
	Let's be careful about mass gatherings of very large numbers in indoor confined quarters.
	But let's not shut down our economy or civil society.
	And here's the headline from CNBC.
	Sweden resisted a lockdown and its capital Stockholm is expected to reach herd immunity in weeks.
	In other words, not only did they not experience the explosion that was supposed to happen in ICU beds, the explosion of mortality, the explosion of hospitalization in general, the exponential growth that was supposed to spike Instead, no shutdown, no spike.
	Not only that, they're looking at they may have achieved a degree of herd immunity that means they are at much lower risk for continuous problems down the road in the fall and in the winter next year.
	So they are in better, not only did they achieve comparable and often better outcomes than places like the United Kingdom or Michigan, which have comparable urban density and population size, they actually are going to be much better situated than the rest of the world is if there is a second or third wave of COVID-19 like there was of the Spanish flu.
	So, indeed, an additional piece of information today from the various, they're doing autopsies of people in California and other locations to see if COVID-19 might have been here earlier than they said.
	That would be significant, and that would also show up in the serology test, because the serology test, they show a much larger number of people had it than expected.
	That means it's nowhere near the threat that people thought it is, and it means that it was here a lot earlier than people thought it was.
	Well now, according to a published report and actually put together well by Tracy Beans looking at the available data across the country, could CDC data prove that COVID-19 infections were here in the United States as early as maybe November 2019?
	What she did is she tracked the available data to show that in fact some places experienced an earlier spike and that corresponds to anecdotal data and reports of people saying they had these light conditions in particular hotspot regions in different parts of the country.
	Before late February, when they originally assumed was the originals set down of the virus.
	The virus had been here a lot earlier and a lot sooner, and it spread a lot further.
	That means it's lethality rate is much lower, it's hospitalization rate is much lower, it's ICU rate is much lower, and it's risk to our population is much lower.
	It would be even further evidence that this shutdown was not only nonsensical, but was indeed dangerous to public health.
	In the same context, there are additional charts and reports coming out about the actual COVID epidemic, comparing it across the country and different parts of the country.
	And we're seeing a similar pattern that those places that did not shut down experienced often a better decline than areas that did shut down and no causal correlation between shutting down and reducing the spread of the infection, particularly its rate of lethality.
	Another article and study identifying Sweden talks about Sweden shatters the lockdown model as its curves stay flat.
	Going into details about how all the doom and gloom predicted and forecast.
	And remember Sweden anticipated it might experience a short-term spike.
	It was willing to experience as long as the hospitals didn't get crushed because they believed herd immunity was the only long-term solution to this, which has always been the public health response until now in the United States and the West.
	Yet, they didn't even experience that.
	They ended up not having hospital overcapacity problems, not having ICU bed problems, and having a mortality rate that's either comparable or less than their neighbors and than their demographically comparable cities and counties and states, like New York, like Michigan, like London and the United Kingdom.
	And so the data increasingly points to that.
	So if we come back, join us on the next half of the hour.
	We'll be with Jennifer Bukowski, a lawyer, talking about some of the civil liberties implications of this data and information.
	To what degree the governors and mayors can get away with the continued repression of our civil rights and civil liberties.
	So come back and join us.
	We'll talk about those issues and more.
	And as we continue to fight for the American freedom in the American way today.
	We'll see you next time.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	We're going to be with Jennifer Bukowski, who's a lawyer, and talk about some of the civil rights and civil liberties implications of this.
	Some frightening decisions that have come out from some courts today in California from cases brought by Harmey Dillon.
	Not a surprise, because courts have a long and notorious history of turning a blind eye to government abuses in times of quote-unquote crisis.
	So you can follow Jennifer Bukowski on Twitter and her webpage and her show, and we can talk about some of that.
	So Jennifer, welcome to the show.
	Thanks for having me, Robert.
	So a lot of people sometimes ask me what the data matters in terms of a constitutional lawsuit.
	And one of the things I explain is that a big issue in all of these cases is going to be whether evidence backed up what the governors and mayors did.
	That if they can show that, let's assume strict scrutiny applies, there's going to be arguments about that, but let's assume for the time being that they acknowledge, as the Supreme Court acknowledged even in Korematsu, that strict scrutiny applies, a potential defense for the governors and mayors and politicians is, well, this is okay because it was narrowly tailored and necessary to prove to limit the scope and scale of the disease and death.
	Could you explain some of how some of the data and the evidence ultimately is going to play a role in the constitutional analysis of what these politicians did?
	Well, as time goes on, it's going to not be as supportive of their decisions here.
	Quarantines are allowed, but according to the Supreme Court, they can't be arbitrary or overbroad or unreasonable.
	And the more that we get this data showing the different antibody test levels and so on, The more unreasonable and arbitrary some of these shutdown orders appear to be.
	Exactly.
	I've explained to people there's sort of a staggered level of analysis or structured level of analysis that's going to deal with like if we're looking at from a strict scrutiny purpose analysis then they can defend themselves only if they show both a compelling public interest in what they did And that what they did was narrowly tailored to that compelling public interest.
	If they're able to argue, as happened today successfully in California, is that all they have to show is a rational basis analysis, they still have to show a rational basis.
	So things like, for example, saying you can't go outdoors by yourself, it doesn't even have a rational basis given the current federally available data by what the president released today.
	So that the evidentiary and empirical evidence increasingly has a correlation to the ability to succeed in court, also just from a political perspective of persuading judges and justices to do the right thing in a political context where that might not be easy.
	Could you explain like some of the background that I have, when I run into people, people ask, why wouldn't courts enforce the Constitution when this has never happened before?
	I explained that the unfortunate political history is that judges are politicians like everyone else at some level.
	They're political actors and that they tend to respond to public activities and public scrutiny.
	So, for example, the more protests that occur, the more likely it is a court will pay attention to the evidentiary issues and second guess the politicians as to their the constitutionality of their actions.
	Could you explain how how much politics interplays with the way courts tend to make decisions?
	Well, bad facts make bad laws.
	You mentioned Korematsu.
	That was a case that was wrongly decided, and they've even admitted as such with regard to the Japanese internment.
	And they are under political pressures of the day.
	They have families, too.
	And so sometimes you see results that don't seem consistent with the Constitution, and their legacies are really a blight on their legacies.
	And why do you think, like I've been not totally surprised given the recent trend in the law and politics related to the law, but still somewhat surprised at the degree to which the ACLU has been completely silent about this.
	The only time they're suing is to release inmates.
	Or get abortion?
	Exactly.
	They're not doing anything to second-guess the suppression of freedom of assembly, freedom of religious expression, freedom of political protest, freedom of public action, freedom of civil disobedient actions, freedom of either religion, political expression, press, you name it.
	They have taken no action.
	Could you explain, like, I've tried to explain to people that the degree to which that there's a political preference increasingly amongst the professional class in which lawyers are a substantial portion, that increasingly their politics is governed more by being anti-Trump and being more statist in the 19th century.
	Yeah, could you explain that?
	Like, how much that's infected our legal class?
	At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I've really been wondering if the Trump Arrangement Syndrome is getting in the way of the legal analysis by so many of these legal pundits, where their analysis is basically like, eh, it's okay.
	Normally, if Trump were doing something, for example, if it wasn't unhelpful to Trump that this is going on right now, they'd be all over it, don't you think?
	Oh, exactly.
	In particular, the way I would look at it is this way.
	If this had started out as a Trump movement, if Trump was the one shutting everything down, if he had done like the press now claims they wanted him to do, if he would have, during the middle of impeachment, began to order cities, counties, and states shut down, if he had sent out the National Guard and the Army throughout the entire country to enforce a shutdown, Then I have no doubt that the ACLU would have rushed to court to protect First Amendment rights, Second Amendment, well, maybe not Second Amendment, but at least First Amendment.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They skipped that one.
	But at least the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, they would have been on the front end of.
	I mean you look at organizations like Ralph Nader, he used to be a client of mine back in the day, public citizen.
	One of the first cases it used to bring that put Nader on the map legally was challenging the way cities and counties were corruptly taking people's property under Takings Clause jurisprudence that he was developing in the early 1970s.
	Yet he too has been completely moot in all of this.
	Not talking about, I mean this is the most massive taking In the history of the Fifth Amendment, there is nothing that comes even close to this.
	Could you explain to people what the Takings Clause is about, what it was intended to protect, and how it's at risk right now?
	Well, the Takings Clause is the prohibition of the government making certain private parties bear the burden of a public need by taking away property or their use of or an enjoyment of their property from them.
	As a matter of public policy, there needs to be compensation from that.
	And since they're not permanently like taking away people's businesses, it would be like a temporary taking.
	And so there's an analysis that would be done in the event that it was challenged.
	And just like we were discussing before, the more data that comes out, the harder it would be for the government to justify these broad, you know, shutdowns of all these businesses and prohibitions on them enjoying their privately owned property.
	There's also the contract clause.
	Go ahead.
	Which is, the contract clause is another one where these agreements, particularly, I thought it was interesting in LA, the city council balked at doing this just complete prohibition on evictions because that would violate a memo from the attorney for the county leaked out and she thought it would violate the contract clause because it would be the government interfering with the contract rights of people.
	Which we all have an interest in the government not interfering with those because if people don't have confidence that they can contract with one another, it'll have such a chilling effect on business and enterprise generally.
	Exactly.
	I think what is underappreciated in the current political sphere is the degree to which America's legal system, backing up property rights, backing up interest in contract rights, the reason why those provisions are there constitutionally, the reasons why they need to be enforced, is it gives people confidence to invest in the first place.
	It gives people confidence that their economic activity won't be overturned tomorrow.
	The kind of, the reason why economic activity tends to be depressed in regions of unreliable and unstable governments is nobody knows whether they'll, what they invest in will even, they'll get the reward for.
	Their property might be taken from them overnight, their contract might be invalidated overnight, the legal system might be so subject to and susceptible to bribery, that people cannot have their reasonable expectations enforced.
	And without reasonable expectations being enforced or without the belief and the confidence that it will be, then the economy itself begins to be undermined and crashed.
	And I don't think anyone would have thought possible in the United States what has happened in large parts of the United States in just the last month.
	This has no historical precedent on this scale at all.
	People, I'm amazed, I keep running into people who think that this happened during the Spanish flu.
	This did not happen at all during the Spanish flu.
	There was no mass shutdown of businesses.
	There was no deprivation of contracts.
	In fact, unemployment went down during the efforts to suppress the Spanish flu, not up.
	Today, 4.4 million people added to the unemployment rolls.
	And I think in that context, in terms of protecting contracts, which is a constitutional provision, protecting property, which is a constitutional provision, this sort of shifting of responsibilities that ends up having an evidentiary argument in court.
	Because the question is, was there a public health benefit?
	Was the public health benefit proportionate?
	Was the compensation reasonable?
	That the entire point and purpose of this kind of structure of the Fifth Amendment was to make sure people's reasonable expectations would be protected, people's contracts would be enforced, and people's property would not be denied or stripped from them without both due process of law, that's the first part of the Fifth Amendment, or at least without just compensation, which is the second part of the Fifth Amendment.
	In my experience, I mean every prior quarantine has been a quarantine of someone who is sick or whom there is reasonable suspicion or probable cause that they are sick or in right within a neighborhood or community that's sick.
	So that there's a belief that that person has a communicable disease and if we let them out they're going to spread it.
	This is the first quarantine in American legal history that quarantined healthy people.
	Right.
	Healthy people that didn't have a suspected Exposure to the coronavirus.
	I mean, everyone is being kept at home, even in states where it's not an epidemic level of outbreak at this point.
	I think the government would try to argue actual necessity as a defense for the taking.
	But again, they would have to show an actual emergency, imminent danger, and the actual necessity of government action.
	And as we get antibody test results showing that this is 50 times The level of infection that people have recovered from that was previously thought to be death rates or just a mere fraction of what the models were predicting, they can't rely on these models that were very flawed and wrong anymore to justify their actions.
	And I think the other aspect that has been underrated in this whole process is, there's a reason why the Constitution does not provide any emergency exception.
	There's a reason why there's not even an emergency power listed in the Constitution.
	Because if we just allowed politicians to declare an emergency, the Constitution could be dead overnight.
	And that one of the core problems, if we do like comparative law classes, we discover that there's a lot of constitutions around the world that look great on paper.
	And the reason that they don't matter is because they're not enforced, or like the Weimar Constitution, they have these poison pills, these emergency power exceptions that effectively negate them and make them null and void in the practical lives of the people within their governance or control or jurisdiction.
	And could you explain to people that there is no emergency exception to the Constitution, and it's not like the constitutional founders were unaware of this idea.
	This was an idea that was around, obviously plagues and viruses were around, and the key reasons why we've never included an emergency exception to the Bill of Rights in any Constitution, either federal or state.
	Our founders were very mindful of the need for separation of powers and checks and balances between branches of government.
	Justice Scalia, in fact, said that that's the most important part of our Constitution.
	And if you have an exception, like an emergency exception, it would completely eliminate the separation of powers between the legislative branch that writes the laws, not the executive.
	And the executive enforces them.
	If the executive gets to set what, like Governor Whitmer, that athlete, wants to decide what's okay and what's not okay to do, you can take a jet ski.
	You can't do a jet ski, but you can do a sailboat.
	Like, she's writing the laws and enforcing them using these emergency powers.
	If that were done at a federal level, I mean, where would there be anything saying you have to give that back?
	I mean, they intentionally were very careful in balancing the powers of government.
	And in governments that have longer, more robust Bill of Rights around the world, they aren't worth the paper that they're printed on because one range of government has an outsized amount of power.
	So there's no way for the people to assert those so-called constitutional rights under their constitution.
	It goes to the Constitution built in a methodological means of protecting the Bill of Rights, which is that the way in which power is separated and distilled between different individuals and different branches and different institutions ensures that no one can or gives it the best insurance possible or practicable to make sure that people's rights will be independently and individually protected,
	that there's an interdependence between the separation of powers and the constitutional liberties enclosed within the Bill of Rights and other attributes of the Constitution, that there's an interdependence between the separation of powers and the constitutional liberties enclosed within the Bill of Rights and other attributes of the Constitution, and that that is completely negated if the executive branch can on a whim declare with an emergency order, just a piece of paper on any given day, and that Everything that governs people's lives within that state, or in that city, or within that county.
	And we're seeing that all across the country.
	And what's more terrifying to me is lawyers coming up with excuses for it, coming up with pretext for it.
	I'm seeing constitutional lawyers say, hey, this is just fine.
	A constitutional lawyer down here in the University of Texas that teaches at the University of Texas Law School was encouraging the president to use the Insurrection Act.
	I mean, it was just the embrace of I think what particularly it seems to me has happened to the legal academy over the past decade or two, aside from Trump derangement syndrome as a dangerous virus of its own kind in intellectual analysis and infecting intellectual analysis, is the embrace of statism, is embrace of the state.
	And that this goes all the way back to the 19-teens, 1920s, a lot of the people disproportionately legal and professional class members were socialists and communists.
	embrace the state because down deep a lot of lawyers think they'll be the state that that means power to them that often in these controversies and questions the issue is who decides not just uh what should be decided but who should be the one to decide and could you talk about how the legal class as a class has been infected with the ideas of deference to the state
	the sort of white lab coat mentality that we should defer to anybody that's in a white lab coat in the old sort of Milgram experiment structure, uh, Can you talk about how that has damaged the ability of the legal class to defend ordinary people's civil rights across the country?
	Well, it really defies common sense, Robert.
	Despite all the evidence that this is not the case, these so-called experts think that they should make decisions about how individuals should live their lives.
	They don't have faith in their fellow man, that he is situated in the best position to make decisions that are wise.
	But as we saw with the American people in my state, Missouri, people were complying before there was an order with social distancing because they wanted to do the right thing.
	I think we should have more trust in our fellow man, but this elite, so-called elite class, thinks that they know better and that all the other people are too stupid to make their own decisions for their lives and that they'll act badly.
	Exactly.
	It's this degree to which they really as a class want more power over the rest of the people.
	And they see the state as the most effective means to do so.
	So rather than be skeptical of the state, rather than be distrustful of the state, they often embrace the state.
	And the only time that you see anybody on the left sort of second guess it or question it or contest it, is if the state is wearing a military uniform or police uniform.
	Then you see some pushback.
	Then you see some resistance.
	But if they're wearing a white lab coat or they're coming with a law degree, they completely defer and completely embrace that deferential approach.
	And the very class of people, I mean, the old Shakespeare text where it says, first we kill the lawyers.
	What Shakespeare meant was not the lawyers were a problem, but the lawyers were a key defender for civil liberties in the world.
	And so anybody who wanted to build a tyranny would kill all the lawyers first.
	So it's sort of a misattributed quote over the years from the literature.
	But now, increasingly, the lawyers are protectors of the state, enablers of the state, facilitators for the state, and defenders of the state, rather than the ones questioning it and contesting it.
	Much as a lot of sort of communism that arose embraced the professional class and the professional class embraced it in the countries where it became powerful, we're seeing a statist mindset mentality that now poses real risk to people's civil rights and civil liberties, and it's ordinary everyday people trying to file pro se suits to try to get some sort of relief or remedy under this extraordinary circumstance that we've never faced before.
	In a comparable context, we talked about the Fifth Amendment takings issues, the Fourth Amendment freedom of movement issue really sort of ends up interrelating to questions of quarantine, questions of institutionalizing the dangerous mentally ill, or probable cause for a physical arrest for a crime.
	Historically, the courts have always required, as we were talking about earlier, individualized suspicion that a particular person, so if it's a Terry stop, for example, the police officer believes that that person, he has some reasonable suspicion and objective evidence he has some reasonable suspicion and objective evidence that an objective officer would conclude that person presents a risk sufficient for a minimal level of invasions.
	There is also this proportionality, the degree to which someone's freedom of movement can be restrained, the degree to which their privacy can be invaded is proportionate to the public interest.
	So thus, if all you have is reasonable suspicion, you can only do a little bit of a Terry stop.
	You can stop someone, you can maybe frisk them, you can ask them questions for their identity, and that's about it.
	You can't go further.
	You can't search their car, search their home, physically detain them for longer than a few minutes, etc.
	If you have probable cause of a crime, then you can physically detain, and even then, they have to be released on reasonable bail in pretty quick order, as long as you can secure their presence for trial in future judicial proceedings.
	In the cases of the mentally ill, the decisions of the 1970s, somewhat controversial in the one flew over the cuckoo's nest era, popularized by the film of Jack Nicholson, is where his love of basketball incidentally came from, is that if someone presents a clear, there's clear and convincing evidence that that person presents an imminent risk, and that was the key word you were mentioning earlier, imminent risk of danger to others or themselves, then they can be detained against their will
	Solely for the purposes of protecting them from causing that particular harm.
	And they can't be like imprisoned in a random prison facility or something else.
	They have to be received mental health care treatment.
	And in the quarantine context, we've always applied the same standards, the same principles, because they're rooted in that same Fourth Amendment protection of freedom of movement, the same Fourth Amendment protection for privacy.
	And the Fourth Amendment protects both.
	That's why the probable cause arrest analysis is done under the Fourth Amendment.
	why search warrants and unlawful subpoenas are also done under the Fourth Amendment analysis.
	The same because they protect both constitutional interests.
	And yet so far, the only constitutional interest that's been protected under the Fourth Amendment, ironically, has been effectively abortion as a privacy extension.
	In that context, can you talk about how quarantines have always said there has to be individualized suspicion that that person is carrying a transmittable disease?
	We have never had a situation where we basically either a presume everyone is guilty in the whole world and and so we're just going to presume you have the disease and quarantine you.
	Or second said that we know you don't have it.
	For example in this case there's millions of Americans that have been tested that they know do not have it.
	That even they are not given any degree of freedom, separate from anyone else.
	So there's someone who even usually has the antibodies built up in their body so they can't get it, or are highly unlikely to, and yet they're having their same rights restrained and their same rights restricted.
	Can you talk about how the quarantine law has never been applied to justify mass house arrest before?
	That's certainly true.
	I mean, the quarantine case law, there's a bunch of it, especially old case law.
	That goes way back.
	People would be on a ship that's wanting to go into a harbor and there's other people on the ship and they make the ship quarantine.
	That got upheld.
	Or San Francisco had an outbreak and actually there were some successful challenges to that because it was like racially motivated the way they were sectioning off the city.
	But never before has everyone just because of the off chance that you could maybe catch this if you were out and about living your normal life.
	Everyone on lockdown.
	Everyone on home detention.
	I'm a criminal defense attorney.
	A lot of my clients' punishment for crime received home detention from the judge.
	We're all without due process of law lockdown right now.
	It's loss of our income.
	And I think it's particularly important for lawyers to speak up and stand up and challenge those stuff in court, because we're the stewards of liberty in this free country right now.
	Lawyers and everyone.
	Parents, this is our time.
	To preserve what the founders created for us and make sure that it remains the land of the free going forward.
	Exactly.
	We'll be right back with one last question for Jennifer right after the break.
	Join us.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	As we're going to wrap up with Jennifer Bukowski, you can follow her at Twitter, you can follow her on her website.
	You can spell it B-U-K-O-W-S-K-Y.
	Jennifer Bukowski available on, you can follow her both on social media and directly discussing these issues and other legal political issues that arise.
	One question I wanted to ask before I get to the question.
	We'll be taking your calls as the jury, if you will.
	You can call in and I'll be answering those questions for you in the bottom half of the hour.
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	And we'll have your questions ready and we'll try to try to answer them as best we can.
	One last question for Jennifer.
	What do you think the President or Attorney General Barr should do if the mayors and governors continue to flout established policy and protected constitutional liberty Attorney General Barr has talked big to be frank he's talked big about a lot of things over the last several years and sometimes it's been a lot of talk and we've seen only a little bit of action
	I'm hoping you know he stepped in in the Mississippi case but while he talked big about protecting First Amendment rights and put out a good memo that's helpful to cite in court he is yet to meaningfully intervene in a single case yet and And I've seen a continued aggressiveness by various political officials across the country who don't seem to take him seriously, at least at this point.
	What do you think the Attorney General should do and the President should do to require these mayors and governors to protect people's rights and conform to the constitutional constraints on quarantines, where we've effectively have a lot of politicians quarantining the Constitution, Quarantining the economy rather than quarantining sick people.
	Well, he has a lot of options available to him.
	And I think that there's a lot going on behind the scenes.
	For example, gun stores, they were getting shut down in places like California and New Jersey.
	Then the federal government amended its definition, its recommendation for essential services to include gun stores.
	And lo and behold, New Jersey changed course.
	On that and allowed those doors to stay open.
	I think it's telling that Whitmer is not arresting protesters.
	You haven't really seen too many arrests of protesters so far.
	So I think there is advice going on about potential exposures to lawsuits that is getting the government to stay reined in a little bit.
	But he has said, as you said, I've never been a fan of the DOJ for a long, long time.
	It's not just with the Trump stuff, but for years before that.
	I think they have too much power.
	But with Barr's statement that he would consider bringing action, I mean, they just have unlimited amounts of resources and lawyers.
	If they decide they have a bug up their you-know-what about something, they can really come after anyone.
	So I think that it is Encouraging that he seems to care enough about civil liberties to make that statement that, look, if you are violating these rights, we may bring an action against you.
	Because it's so hard for individual citizens to bring actions against the government.
	I mean, they have extraordinary amounts of resources and power.
	Even if you have law firms involved, I mean, it's just very expensive and time-consuming.
	So it's nice thinking of the DOJ working on the side of the little guy, for one.
	Exactly.
	I mean, you're right.
	The president can include the exercise of constitutional liberties as essential activities, like he did in the Second Amendment context.
	He can expand that to the church context.
	The DOJ issued a memo in that regard as the church context, but it'd be great to have it included in essential infrastructure, that if you're engaged in any first constitutionally protected activity, period, Whether it's free speech, whether it's political expression, whether it's the press, whether it's peaceable assembly in a non-threatening manner, whether it's freedom of religious expression, whether it's privacy protection, whether it's freedom of movement, freedom of travel, whether it's property not being taken without just compensation or anything else,
	That if you include the exercise of constitutional liberty is by definition essential activity period, that would be a very powerful thing for the president to do, just as the Department of Justice can issue supportive memorandums along that regard.
	The second I think also is a good idea is that a whole bunch of cities, counties and states are about to come begging to the White House and to Congress for bailouts.
	For the, I mean, they've got, and he has always, just like he did with sanctuary city policies, he constrains, he says, look, we're not going to bail anybody out because a lot of these problems predated, as he was talking about today in the press conference, a lot of these problems in New Jersey and California and New York City predated the pandemic.
	Exactly, Illinois, where Pritzker is clearly going to be extending the 30 days, the shutdown, and where they have huge pension underfunded problems in Illinois.
	They all want to get bailed out and want to use the pandemic as the pretext to getting bailed out.
	Part of the strings that should be attached to those bailouts is no money goes to a city, county, or state.
	That is in violation of the constitutional protection of the citizens of that state.
	That would be an extraordinarily easy, powerful way for him to get sudden conformity from a lot of these politicians when they're going to have their hand out begging for federal taxpayer cash, along with the DOJ taking meaningful action, not only in memorandums, but civil suits.
	We saw under Obama's administration, when he wanted to go after police departments, the degree of power they have to change even the policy of the smallest little government official.
	So the conclusion They could do that here.
	Instead of looking to see the police power of the state, whether that's being abused, they have those same remedies and statutes available to them to do that.
	I hope they don't bail out the state though.
	You're right.
	these problems predate this pandemic and why should my money go to their irresponsible spending and their irresponsible pension plans?
	They're not working on the interest of their people in the long term.
	And there should be consequences for that.
	You're just going to condone bad behavior if you bail out these cities, these universities that have been not making wise choices with the dollars that they're supposed to be stewards of from the people.
	And especially, why should we be giving money to universities, cities, counties, or states that are violating people's constitutional rights in the case of either public universities or governors or mayors?
	That makes no sense at all.
	Thanks, Jennifer.
	The Title IX stuff is a great example of how the federal government could write one dear colleague letter and have them all create their own whole new prosecution units at every university now.
	It's great for criminal defense attorney business, but not so great for due process rights of students, but that's a whole other topic.
	Exactly, but it goes to the point of it's time that the police power be exercised to protect people's rights, not violate people's rights.
	Absolutely.
	Thanks, Jennifer, for being with us.
	Tell people where they can find you on social media and in the web space.
	I'm on Twitter at EsquireOnFire, ESQOnFire, and my website is JenniferBuchowski.com.
	Perfect.
	Thanks for being with us.
	Thanks.
	Bye, Robert.
	That is the world in which we currently reside and one which the mayors and governors and various politicians, while they violate people's basic core protections, go begging to politicians for our taxpayer cash for their own financially created problems.
	Going back to the empirical evidentiary basis, or the lack thereof, for what's taking place today and how it correlates to the constitutional analysis, The Navy did a study of the USS Roosevelt, and they found that 840 sailors tested positive, but very few, in fact it appears only none ended up in intensive care.
	Only four ended up in the hospital, and there was only one apparent death that may be attributed to it.
	What does this mean?
	It means the mortality rate and the lethality rate is far less than expected and believed.
	the hospitalization rate, the ICU rate, all of that is nowhere near what the doomers and gloomers predicted and forecast.
	Indeed, by contrast, state advisories increasingly note that hospital discharges and admissions to nursing homes and assisted living communities was a particular risk.
	And yet you had people like the governor of New York and other democratic politicians sending discharging people that had COVID right back to the nursing home or assisted living community to spread it at record levels And that's why as many as half or more of the deaths are attributed to that.
	The data is in, according to this article in The Hill, stop the shutdown.
	It's time to end the total isolation.
	Indeed, it says the tragedy of the pandemic appears to be the Policies behind the shutdown more so than the pandemic itself.
	It again notes the serology studies that show in fact this lethality rate was much much lower than expected.
	More like two to three times rather than 10 to 30 times the rate of the flu.
	And that the danger of ICU and hospitalization rate was equally and comparably much more limited than they said or suggested.
	By contrast, as Congressman McClintick put out today, the unseen death toll is of the COVID-19 measures, not of COVID-19, reflecting the risk to public health from rising unemployment, from rising poverty, from, in fact, what could be considered a global health care crisis.
	Similar, another expert today came out and said the coronavirus peak is past and the lockdown is worse than the virus.
	Another, this was Carl Hennigan, the director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University.
	So more doctors, more scientists, more medical analysts, more biostatisticians coming in saying no, the conventional wisdom was wrong, the lockdown is a bad policy, it's time to reverse course before more death occurs.
	Well, meanwhile, of course, the Chinese refused to allow full and free access to what happened and how the virus spread, even from the get-go, as this headline, coronavirus, China bars safety experts from the Wuhan lab.
	In that case, those are people from France trying to simply take a look at what happened at the lab, and China's not allowing it to be investigated, even by friendly governments and regimes.
	Meanwhile, more doctors continue to say that the risk is from the shutdown, not from the virus, as Bakersfield doctors dispute the need for a stay-at-home order.
	Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Masihi of Accelerated Urgent Care calling for Bakersfield and the area to reopen.
	They held a press conference and went into great detail as to the risk that was posed by continuing the shutdown, noting that medical care that's needed and essential is not being met and that there are alternative methods of dealing with the virus and the pandemic that would be much more effective and much less risky to public health than the shutdown.
	As another article describes, shut up.
	That's what the experts explained.
	And it goes into detail about how the experts were almost universally wrong and how their policies of shutdown have caused more harm than good.
	Indeed, another article today, there is no empirical evidence for these lockdowns.
	Comparing states within the United States, as we did earlier on this show, shows there is no relationship between lockdowns and lower and lower COVID-19 deaths.
	Indeed, they go through, they talk about John Iannidis' studies from Stanford.
	They go to the world of meters data kept on the virus itself.
	And what they did is they compared cities, counties, and states by the timing of their shutdown to see to what degree did it reduce the mortality rate, reduce the hospitalization rate, reduce the infection rate.
	And they find no evidence that the shutdown had any effect on reducing the rate of infection, reducing the rate of death, reducing the rate of hospitalization or intensive care use by using a shutdown.
	And indeed, as more and more evidence shows, as the actual empirical chart showed to the degree there's any correlation at all, it's that those that did not shut down saw no spike, while those that did shut down did see a spike or did see enhanced or increased problems.
	Likely due to places like New York City forcing people to stay indoors, forcing more mass transit use, forcing, releasing people that had COVID right back into the nursing homes.
	That's how it spread, by bad decisions and bad policy makings from the shutdown supporters, not from those who refused to shut down at all.
	Indeed, as this article notes in the New York Post by Matthew Goodwin, Andrew Cuomo's coronavirus nursing home policy proves tragic.
	Indeed, describing how the failure to focus on nursing homes, as we were calling for six weeks ago, many of us on this side of the aisle, that his failures in that capacity is what led to the rate of lethality in New York City.
	It was not the no benefit from the shutdown occurred.
	In fact, detriment occurred from the policy choices and preferences made by the governor of New York.
	Similarly, in The Spectator, noted in the United Kingdom, this message of protect the NHS, like here, protect the hospitals, has become a dangerously effective message because it distorts the political policy preferences in favor of a panic response to the pandemic, rather than more reasoned reaction that would benefit people's health over time.
	Indeed, we're not alone in this capacity.
	Tom Fitton, the founder of Judicial Watch, detailed some of the reasons and problems with this shutdown in a video that he put up earlier today and yesterday.
	Let's take a look at video clip number three.
	I let you go.
	I'm sure you want to hear the latest on the coronavirus from our perspective, or frankly, just more my perspective.
	You know, I've long been concerned about the coronavirus in China.
	I thought there should be steps taken to restrict access.
	And the president did that pretty darn quickly, relatively speaking.
	And we need to take it seriously in terms of restricting travel and things like that.
	And there have been some steps that have been taken that I don't necessarily object to.
	But what I do object to is the whole country being shut down.
	Our economy is being killed as we speak.
	The government is talking about tens, hundreds of billions of dollars in just writing checks to people, delaying the payment of taxes and things like that.
	You know, some of which may be work and may be useful to some people who are facing economic disastrous consequences.
	But it isn't enough.
	We've got to get the country moving again.
	And the president and the governors, you know, and it just goes to show you that, you know, we.
	It's reassuring to see the president, you know, the president's doing a good job.
	You have Democratic governors who we may disagree with on all sorts of issues, but Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, they seem, you know, I don't agree with everything they've done, but they're obviously taking it seriously and they're trying to work to protect their people.
	I may disagree with the specifics, but it goes to show that when there are serious issues, the government needs to take things seriously, no matter whether Democrat or Republican.
	And that sometimes the party that you disagree with, and I'm talking to you, Republicans, and the party you disagree with, and I'm talking to you, Democrats, they may do the right thing, and you've got to acknowledge that.
	But I think things have gone on too long in terms of suppressing our economy.
	And we've got to take into account the dire consequences of the continued shutdown of America.
	I don't want people to die unnecessarily from the flu.
	I don't want to get people sick from the flu.
	Or the coronavirus.
	But if people don't have jobs, if businesses are destroyed, That has health consequences as well.
	A poorer country, a country in the deep recession or depression, people will die from that too.
	And there have been these advances with this malarial drug and other drugs that seemingly can treat the worst aspects of the coronavirus symptoms, especially those who are facing acute situations.
	I think that's more than enough reason to start reopening the country.
	I appreciate the efforts of the public health officials, but Dr. Fauci, for instance, was saying it could be several more weeks before we get the country open again.
	That simply can't be allowed to happen.
	We've got to get the country moving again.
	It's the only way to rescue the economy.
	And frankly, when it comes to the long-term public health of the nation, a strong economy is the best way to protect it.
	And it doesn't mean you can't take significant steps and continue significant restrictions to secure the public health, whether it be at the border or internally.
	But we've just got to get people moving back to their offices, back to work, back to school.
	In a regular, organized way, while taking into account the public health risks.
	Because I don't want the cure to kill the patient.
	Which is what I'm concerned about.
	So those are my quick thoughts.
	And of course Judicial Watch is doing Freedom of Information Act requests and other things about the coronavirus and we've been investigating it.
	My colleague Chris Farrell had a great interview.
	Steven Hatfield, who is an expert on epidemics like this and pandemics, and I encourage you to watch that YouTube video.
	So we're tracking in as carefully as we can.
	Judicial Watch, as I can show you, we're still trying to do our work.
	I think our work is essential, don't you?
	I don't want to shut down Judicial Watch for weeks and months.
	The FBI told us the other day, no FOIA.
	Their FOIA operations are shutting down at least until March 30th.
	So no government accountability.
	Well, I don't like that.
	I don't like that at all.
	I mean, we're seeing reports of people's businesses who have been, they put their lives into just being snuffed out.
	And every day this happens adds to the calamity.
	It's got to stop as soon as possible.
	So I encourage the president and the governors with the silver lining of this coronavirus is it exposes the fact that we need, we have a federalist system and the genius of that federalist system.
	But the governors and the president and members of Congress to the degree they're considering all of their spending proposals, they need to take a deep breath.
	Make informed judgments.
	Yes, listen to the medical experts.
	But remember, there are a variety of views about whether or not to continue this suppression of our nation.
	There may be constitutional issues about restricting people's movement after a period of time here as well.
	And we'll be looking at those.
	But this can't go on forever.
	It simply can't.
	And by forever, I mean Any day past today is too long in my book at this point.
	We've got to get people back to work.
	I fear for the future of our country if we don't do it soon.
	And he's not alone.
	Let's take a look at Tucker Carlson's statement about what's really behind this in clip number six.
	Welcome to Tucker Carlson's nightly overview.
	Here's where we are as of 8 p.m.
	Eastern, which is to say right now.
	In many places in this country, Americans cannot go to the park with their children.
	They can't go to church.
	They can't have family dinners with their relatives.
	They can't go to the dentist.
	They can't get a knee replacement.
	They can't get married.
	Tens of millions of them can't afford to do much of anything right now because they're unemployed.
	But they'd better not complain about it.
	If they voice their complaints online, they're liable to be censored by the tech companies.
	If they complain in public, they could be arrested, and a number of them have been.
	The whims of our political leaders are now unquestioned law.
	Dissent has been banned, and that ban is relentlessly enforced by the willing stooges in our media who have finally stopped pretending they don't hate you.
	They definitely do.
	What country is this?
	Well, it's a country in a lockdown.
	We're told we have no choice but to do this, to stop our lives completely.
	Mass quarantines, they tell us, again and again, are the only way to save lives.
	But that's a lie.
	They don't know it's true, despite what they claim.
	Has it worked?
	there is no scientific record to consult.
	It's never been done.
	We're currently living through the largest and most expensive experiment ever conducted in human history.
	We have spent trillions of dollars and crushed millions of people purely on the guess that a nationwide lockdown would save us from the coronavirus.
	Has it worked?
	Was the guess correct?
	Let's look at the data.
	That's where we should always begin.
	It's what our leaders should be consulting daily.
	Here it is.
	As of tonight, eight U.S.
	states have not issued statewide shelter-in-place orders for their citizens.
	Those states are Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.
	The question is, have these states suffered for not locking down?
	And the answer is no, they haven't, at least not yet.
	Currently, all eight states are below the national average in coronavirus cases and deaths per capita.
	That's not to say they've been immune to the virus, they haven't been, but they definitely have not been hit harder than other states.
	Now, as a matter of social science, those eight states are, it is true, on average smaller and less dense, in some cases much less dense, than the hardest-hit states.
	But you can adjust the numbers.
	In a recent article, journalist and professor Wilfred Reilly did the math on this.
	He compared states that are locked down to states without lockdowns.
	He then performed statistical regressions that accounted for population, density, income levels, age, and racial diversity.
	He put his formulas right up there and challenged people to run the same numbers through those formulas or change them, come to a different conclusion if they could.
	No one has so far.
	Here's what he found.
	He found that a state's lockdown strategy had virtually no effect on how severe its outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus was.
	Are you surprised by this?
	Maybe you shouldn't be.
	You can see the same trend at work in other countries.
	Sweden, most famously, has never locked down.
	Restaurants there have never closed.
	That country is still suffering from coronavirus.
	Suffering more, in fact, than we are here in the U.S.
	But the country's epidemic appears to have peaked.
	And without locking down, Sweden, and this is the key, has fared far better than other European countries that did lock down.
	That includes Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium.
	How can this be true?
	It seems to contravene everything we hear all day long.
	Lockdowns stop the virus.
	That's what they tell us, almost always at high volume and with maximum outrage and self-righteousness, daring us to disagree.
	But in fact, there's not much evidence that it's true.
	Consider the state of California, which is one of the first states to shut down.
	In a televised statement, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti bragged that his city was under his absolute personal control.
	And for that reason, the coronavirus would not spread there.
	Anyone who disobeyed him would be hunted down.
	That's literally the phrase Garcetti used.
	Watch this.
	This has really been marvelously embraced by 99.9% of people.
	We see it in the traffic data, we see it in the cell phone data, but we're gonna hunt down that last 0.1% and say, you gotta get inside, you gotta cut it out, and you gotta distance.
	We're gonna hunt down people who are outside?
	They spent years calling Donald Trump a fascist, if only.
	Garcetti, you may have just heard, bragged that he was surveilling people's cars and tracking their cell phone use.
	But even that wasn't far enough for him.
	Garcetti also intentionally ruined at city parks in Los Angeles just so that nobody could use them without his personal authorization.
	We saw this week for instance at the skate park at Venice Beach and people were there so we had to put sand into the skate park to make that unusable for now.
	When we come out of this we'll clean that sand out.
	No modern political leader in this country has ever talked like this, ever.
	And yet suddenly, in cities across the nation, so many of them are talking just like that.
	It's authoritarian.
	Has this new authoritarianism produced results, apart from a surge of power for the politicians exercising it?
	Well, let's see.
	Again, to the numbers.
	A new study by researchers at USC, University of Southern California, tested large groups of people in Los Angeles County for coronavirus antibodies.
	They found that as of early April, up to 5.6% of the entire county had contracted the illness.
	That means up to 320,000 adults in Los Angeles apparently had already had it.
	At the time, the official number of infected people was about 8,000.
	City officials had no clue.
	They weren't even close.
	The virus had spread throughout a huge population, right in the middle of the most restrictive quarantine in American history.
	What does that tell you?
	It tells you the lockdown didn't work.
	The question is why exactly did it fail, and we don't know.
	We can only guess.
	Maybe people ignored the requirements of it, or maybe full enforcement of it was impossible, despite the fact they were tracking people's cars and cell phones.
	Or maybe forcing people to stay inside all day isn't actually a good way to contain a virus.
	Whatever the reason that it failed, it did.
	Our leaders guessed wrong.
	They claimed that a lockdown would halt the spread of the virus.
	It did not do that.
	Not even close.
	And they need to admit that.
	And then we need to change our approach based on the science.
	Not on their whims, on the numbers, on what we've learned.
	But we're not doing that.
	Public officials are instead, by and large, ignoring any evidence that indicts their policies, or critically, that might threaten their new and much-loved power.
	They don't want to know what the facts are.
	Indeed, some of them are even now, right now, promising even longer lockdowns, ones that extend maybe through the end of the summer.
	And even tougher punishments for those who disobey them.
	They're deploying drones to catch people who dare to go outside.
	Americans!
	This is insanity!
	It is definitely, and this cannot be stated emphatically enough, it is definitely not science.
	This is not science.
	It has nothing to do with the public's health, much less the broader public interest.
	This is instead what happens when mediocre people suddenly find themselves With God-like power.
	Deciding who can go outside, when people can get married, which medical procedures you're allowed to have.
	That's a feeling of omnipotence, and they like that feeling.
	It fills an empty place inside.
	They don't want to give it up.
	They want it to last forever, even as the country dies.
	But it can't last forever, because it's not their country.
	It's ours.
	It's ours.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	We'll be taking your calls here in the bottom half of the hour.
	You can call in at 877-789-2539.
	That's 877-789-2539.
	Internationally at 512-646-1776.
	877-789-2539.
	That's 877-789-2539.
	Internationally at 512-646-1776.
	That's 512-646-1776.
	My sister reminded me, my sister Martha reminded me that during the Spanish flu, that because the recognition of the benefit of sunshine, that they actually had hospital and other medical facilities outside because they recognized its value in defeating the flu.
	Indeed, now it's recognized increasingly by the president himself today, by the CDC and other public health officials, that indeed the surveys conclude that the sunshine is a great disinfectant of this virus, that the heat and humidity can help facilitate the suppression of this virus.
	Indeed, that goes back to the value of things like vitamin D. There are ways in which we have lived healthy for a long time and ways that improve our health.
	And the idea that we should continue to follow those paths, whether it's physical exercise or good vitamins or other products that we put into our bodies.
	And we should be able to control that.
	We should be able to have the choice of it, whether it's a form of medical care or a vaccine or anything else.
	We should get to choose what goes into our own bodies.
	Given the history of medicine being abused for positions of power, we should not be subject to dictate and command.
	In that capacity, we recommend you go to our sponsor, InfoWarsStore.com, where you can get things like vitamin D, like things that provide the benefits that things like sunlight provide for your physical health, for your mental health.
	You can get things like fantastic coffee.
	In fact, I've been drinking it in the break.
	You can get things that whatever you like, whatever is good for your personal health, whatever you enjoy, you can get at an affordable, accessible level, whether it's storable food, whether it's supplements, whatever you may like and personally enjoy.
	You should get it now while one, it's still available and two, it's still legal.
	Because who knows what's going to happen in the next weeks or months?
	What else they'll be prohibiting and banning?
	After all, the governor of Michigan has prohibited things like buying seeds and flags.
	So go to InfoWarsStore.com.
	Get the products that you like, the products that you need, the products that you want.
	You can get them at discounted rates.
	that are currently available and that are substantially discounted as compared to market competitors.
	Things like storable food for any time period you want so that you are prepared no matter what comes about in the following weeks and months as our governments and politicians go increasingly mad with the power they have seized and attained.
	So go to Infowarsstore.com right now and get what you can, what you want that benefits you and that makes platforms and provides a platform for shows like these that's willing to challenge and contest the wisdom that if you'd been watching this show and others you would know that sunshine was a likely beneficial thing for this virus for the entire time the show's been on we've been talking about it
	So the fact that it was confirmed today formally is just the confirmation on what both common sense and the scientific literature had shown for comparable viruses in the past.
	As the president himself mentioned, he himself had referenced it before.
	So the importance of independent information is no greater than it is right now.
	Especially as we look at the unemployment reports from our politicians' shutdown policies.
	Today, another 4.4 million people filed for unemployment, on top of the 6.6 million last week, on top of the 6.7 million before that.
	We're looking at an unemployment rate that is now approaching the same level as the Great Depression.
	And remember, they were trying to limit these numbers with big SBA, Small Business Administration bailouts, with big paycheck protection programs.
	You know, they spent $350 billion there, trillions overall.
	The Fed has spent trillions more on top of that, all intended going into the corporate debt market, going into the municipal bond market, going into the repo market, going even to buying, committing to buying equities potentially, not just mortgage-backed securities and treasuries, doing foreign exchange swaps and currencies to help Uh, give a rise to various businesses in the United States and around the world.
	So those were intended to limit the number of unemployment claims, and yet still we have 6.6, 6.7, 4.4, basically almost 20 million Americans unemployed despite all of those temporary bailout efforts, which tells you that the real unemployment number may effectively be much higher.
	Now, what will this cause around the world?
	Not only a surge in global poverty, but take this headline from no less a place than CNN in terms of it's a pro-establishment message trying to mitigate the risk of the shutdown policies.
	Even they admit, quote, The coronavirus pandemic will cause global famines of biblical proportions.
	Now, what the headlines should say is politicians' shutdowns will cause global famines of biblical proportions.
	The pandemic isn't causing the famine.
	The shutdowns of their economy and civil society is what's going to cause the famines.
	Let's take a look at video clip number two where they're talking about how severe the scale of this hunger crisis may be due to the politicians.
	This is what happens when you issue shutdowns without thinking about the consequences of those shutdowns.
	Let's take a look at video clip number two.
	At the same time while we're dealing with COVID-19 pandemic, we're also on the brink of a hunger pandemic.
	In my conversations with world leaders over the past many months, before the coronavirus even became an issue, I was saying that 2020 would be facing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II for a variety of reasons.
	This might sound truly shocking, but let me give you just some numbers.
	821 million people go to bed hungry every night all over the world, chronically hungry.
	There are a further 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse.
	That means 135 million people on Earth are marching toward the brink of starvation.
	But now the World Food Programme analysis shows also, due to the coronavirus, that an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020.
	That's a total of 265 million people.
	In a worst-case scenario, we could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries.
	And in fact, 10 of these countries, we already have more than 1 million people per country who are on the verge of starvation.
	Millions are going to starve because of the shutdown.
	So when people say, oh, if you want to do a shutdown, then the only reason you want to do it is, if you oppose the shutdown, then the only reason you want to do it is you want to see people die.
	You want to kill grandma.
	That's been the routine, the repetition.
	Wrong.
	Those people who want to end the shutdown recognize the deaths that will accumulate from the shutdown.
	Not just in the increasing suicides and in the other deaths that accompany social isolation on this scale, unemployment on this scale, but the loss of health and medical access even in the developed world, which is already occurring.
	I talked to people who are nurses and others in medical facilities and hospitals across the country.
	We're talking about people not coming in for needed cancer treatments, not coming in for needed, they may have say appendicitis or something else and they're not coming in until too late and it's exacerbating the problem and in some cases resulting in death.
	So these deaths are happening because of the shutdown, not because of the pandemic, but because of the panic policy responses to the pandemic.
	Now you add to that global poverty amongst children, you add to that the hunger and starvation likely to occur to people around the world, particularly in the emerging markets.
	Not to mention their sovereign debt potentially collapsing, leading to World Bank and Fed and other people having disproportionate control over these governments in an anti-democratic manner.
	You're talking about devastating lives to the point that you're going to have millions of unnecessary deaths.
	And in terms of life expectancy, A life expectancy loss at a rate 10 times what the virus could pose a risk to.
	That's the consequences of the shutdown.
	So that's why the consequences, that's why they say the cure is worse than the disease.
	Because the shutdown here, that's exactly what the case is.
	Indeed, look at this headline from the New York Times.
	Says, quote, instead of coronavirus, it's hunger that will kill us.
	A global food crisis looms.
	The world has never faced, never faced a hunger emergency like the one the shutdown created.
	Indeed.
	It could double the number of people, double the number of people facing acute hunger and near starvation to 265 million people around the world by the end of this year.
	That's 265 million people who will now be on the verge of starvation thanks to these shutdown policies.
	Where is the concern for them?
	In the name of quote-unquote saving grandma, these people haven't really saved grandma, but they are going to kill their grandkids.
	That's the effect of these shutdown policies.
	Those continuing to push and promote and protect these shutdown policies in the name of protecting lives are in fact endangering lives, whether they realize it or not.
	Not only are they sacrificing the quality of life in terms of material economic well-being and purpose in the employment and world in the everyday world, they're also, and at the same time, increasing the health risk that comes with a declining and deprived economy.
	They are literally depriving people of the food they need to live because of these shutdown policies.
	To the point, I mean, when you're talking about an extra 130 million people are going to be on the verge of starvation just by the end of this year because of these policies?
	That's the true deathly policy.
	It's the shutdown policy themselves.
	In the same context, we see what's happened to the U.S.
	healthcare system.
	As this article is entitled, instead of flattening the curve, we flattened hospitals.
	We flattened doctors.
	We flattened the U.S.
	healthcare system with our shutdown.
	Indeed, across the country, hospitals shut down non-essential procedures in preparation for a surge of COVID patients that never appeared.
	Indeed, they're going through the consequences of what I was talking about earlier.
	People with medical conditions not seeking medical care or not even having the opportunity for medical care.
	It's important to remember, elective procedure doesn't mean optional.
	Elective just means not an emergency.
	And so all of those procedures of people who needed treatment aren't getting it, weren't getting it, haven't got it, and the consequences are a severe loss potentially in the quantity of life, not just the quality of life, all in the name of the government powers.
	That be seeking and obtaining this power and grabbing this power for their own personal partisan political purposes, not for the purpose of protecting the public as the evidence continues to build.
	Not only was the virus not the threat they said it was, their policies are going to lead to far more deaths and far more harm to both quality and quantity of life than their measures ever could have prevented, even if they were accurate in their doom and gloom estimations of the virus from the inception.
	So we are going to take your calls as members of the jury, if you will.
	And that number is 877-789-2539.
	That's 877-789-2539.
	Or internationally at 512-646-1776.
	Let's go to Johnny in Denmark.
	Hi again, Bob.
	Greetings.
	I hope you remember me from last time.
	or internationally at 512-646-1776.
	Let's go to Johnny in Denmark. - Hi again, Bob.
	Greetings, I hope you remember me from last time.
	I had the 22 NWO goals well served by this fake pandemic based on a fake diagnostic test for a fake or at least unproven disease.
	And I just have, before I ask the question, I have four quick technical observations.
	When that call ended, I was unable to hear any answer.
	When I went to review it on YouTube, I couldn't find it.
	Also, in general, it's the only show that I cannot do a full screen on reliably.
	There's some feedback for your technical department.
	Also, the only show I'm in for is that I can't do a parallel screen on it.
	And on this call, there was about five minutes of silence.
	Those are just technical points.
	But before I ask my question, I just have an amusing observation just based on your nickname for Joe Biden.
	I came up with creepy, sleepy, dopey, gropey, pedo, quid pro quo, joker joke joke.
	I guess you figured out how that was based on your nickname for him.
	In any case, Trump has mentioned repeatedly in his pressers that he has the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus.
	So I was wondering to what extent you believe that basis might be
	Since he keeps talking and emphasizing that it's a Chinese virus, that according to Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, that it is actually an invasion by China, and therefore he can't suspend it for the cause of public safety, and second, to what extent that would be supported by so-called case law.
	Sure, so thanks for the call in.
	As to issues of habeas corpus, that's the right that if the government has you in any sort of possession or physical custody or detention, you have a right that your body, the corpus, you have a right to seek a habeas for the freedom of your body, if you will.
	It's most commonly dealt with in the modern environment of prisoners claiming they're being unlawfully imprisoned due to some aspect of their criminal trial or criminal sentence.
	The only president to ever suspend the right of habeas corpus of the people was President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
	And doing so is still, and is still, controversial.
	It is my position that, in fact, the president does not have the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus.
	That was an unconstitutional action, though without legal consequence at the time, for President Lincoln to take.
	And hopefully President Trump would never go down that path.
	Uh, and I think that the, uh, in the case precedent though, there is very little of it because it was never meaningfully dealt with in the court process.
	Uh, and of course the civil war lasted only a few years and then went off the books.
	They also passed an income tax during that time period that had some constitutional questions that were also never addressed, uh, because it was gone by the time the war ended.
	And unfortunately, the courts in general tend to turn a blind eye to public crises and to what governments are doing during so-called public crises.
	So that's the sort of constitutional contours of the issue.
	And that's where the precedent currently stands.
	And a lot of it is unprecedented.
	It is what we're witnessing across the country is an unprecedented power grab by local politicians in ways we've never witnessed before at this scope and scale.
	The closest example to a mass habeas corpus, if you will,
	Would have been the Korematsu case, where in the 1940s, the United States government rounded up people of Japanese ancestry on grounds that they presented a threat to the public solely because of their ancestry, and took them away from their homes, their schools, their neighbors, their friends and their family in many cases, out of their businesses, deprived them of their property, placed them in detention camps around the United States, in some instances denied them the right of religious expression at their church,
	Deprive them of the right of full peaceable assembly.
	Deny them the right of political expression.
	Deny them the right to bear arms in their own defense.
	Deny them the right of privacy and the freedom of movement protected under the Fourth Amendment.
	Deprive them of their property without due process or just compensation under the Fifth Amendment.
	So the closest analogy to what we're witnessing today, a form of mass habeas corpus, home detention is a form of house arrest in reality as to what many people are facing.
	That's evidenced when somebody goes for a swim and gets arrested.
	Someone goes for a walk along the beach and gets arrested.
	Someone goes skateboarding and gets arrested.
	Someone goes surfing and gets arrested.
	Someone goes paddle boarding and gets arrested.
	Someone goes fishing or out on a lake boat gets arrested.
	Someone goes swimming in their pool and gets arrested.
	All of these things, someone simply plays t-ball with their daughter, or takes their kid to the park, and they get arrested.
	All those things have actually happened in the United States in the last two weeks.
	So in that context, this is a form of mass habeas corpus, theoretically, that people should could bring.
	Now the 1983 laws permit an alternative remedy.
	And habeas corpus is generally considered only a contingent remedy that is available only when other legal remedies are unavailable.
	So in the criminal context, for example, you have to exhaust all appeals first before you can usually go to habeas corpus.
	A petition of habeas corpus, as it's called.
	The same is true in this context, that even though theoretically there's a habeas corpus right, that habeas corpus right wouldn't generally not be triggered as long as the civil rights laws under Section 1983 of Title 42 of the United States Code provide an adequate remedy, which would they appear to do.
	So that's sort of the background and the case law of the habeas corpus and how it applies.
	So thanks for calling in.
	Let's go to Joan from Michigan.
	Hi, good evening.
	Thank you so much for all you're doing.
	Yes, ma'am.
	Yeah, I feel like there's a little hope when we know you're on the case, literally.
	I was primarily wanting to find out if there's anything new that you can share with us about the case you filed against Gretchen Whitmer, our governor here.
	We do have a vote coming up on the 30th with the legislature, and what I'm seeing when I dig around on the internet is that The legislature, which is still primarily Republican, only barely they held on in 2018.
	They're siding with her.
	It's just mind-blowing.
	There's a little pushback, but not enough.
	And she's talking about extending it even longer.
	Like you mentioned earlier, some other governors are doing, like Illinois, I heard, came out with that already.
	We're just, you know, dying out here.
	Literally.
	I mean, it's just insane.
	The mental strain.
	It's really getting bad.
	And then she tweets out something hideous like, we're going to provide free resources online for mindfulness and meditation, which is just this weird, you know, cult-like stuff that they push on you, especially over in the UK with their civil servants and the common purpose program.
	It's all about the mindfulness cult.
	So you just see these common threads from leftists all over the world.
	With these same things that they're doing, and it's just so sinister.
	So I'll stop talking and let you answer my question, if you can.
	Yeah, yes ma'am.
	Thanks for calling in.
	No question.
	It's sort of like the exercise scene from 1984 is the kind of mindfulness that the dear governor, dear leader, dear queen of Michigan has recommended for people.
	And there's no question the statism that has infected so much of the political class and the professional class has even impacted many people on the so-called political right in the party, Republicans, in their approach in many contexts.
	And this includes governors and mayors and state legislators and congress members.
	When Congressman Massey from Covington, Kentucky, merely suggested there be a recorded vote, some of my friends on the right were calling for his eviction from Congress, which was sort of unsettling.
	That this was the mindset and mentality that so many of our political and professional class folks had embraced.
	There's no question that what's happening at this point for the governor of Michigan or anyone else to continue with these policies when they have less and less and less empirical and evidentiary foundation and they have more and more and more evidence of disastrous consequences from these policies, both in terms of civil liberties and in terms of human interest.
	For example, just today you had an organization from the European human rights recognize that these policies violate the human rights of people around the world under human internationally recognized human rights legal standards.
	So if that's the context, how can it be the case that what the governor is doing is OK?
	For example, additional study today out of the Telegraph, vulnerable children should be in school, especially during a lockdown.
	Here's the European article I referenced, a disproportionate interference.
	The coronavirus regulations and the European Commission on Human Rights and the conclusion was this article examines the legal provisions that accompany the restriction on individuals under these guidelines and it determines that it violates the human rights of people around the world and this includes a deprivation of liberty.
	Deprivation of religious liberty.
	A violation of freedom of assembly and the maintenance of relationships between parents, children, and siblings.
	The restriction on gatherings that prevent the right of worshipers to attend or gather in any place of worship.
	The inability of people to even get together for funerals or have last rites.
	The interference with the political rights of association and assembly, a precious freedom as courts around the world have recognized.
	One of the paramount values of a democratic society as courts around the world have recognized.
	It is in fact a core constitutional principle in the United States and is recognized as such around the world.
	All of these are violations.
	The isolation required by these various instructions clearly violate and potentially infringe on people's mental and physical illness, increases the rate of domestic violence, locks in abusers with their abused, and disproportionately hurts poor and disabled children.
	The closure of business decreases their goodwill and crushes their economic opportunity on a move forward basis, often removing something that cannot never be restored while children are denied the most basic education in their local public or private institutions.
	So that's what's happened.
	So let's move forward so far as we filed suit against the governor.
	We're looking at adding plaintiffs to those cases.
	More people have made inquiries and added one of their claims added to it.
	There have been some attempts by some people to bring what's called a class action.
	It's very difficult to bring a class action in this constitutional context.
	So I think generally speaking just the more suits the better.

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