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Sept. 12, 2021 - Viva & Barnes
02:01:46
September 12, 2021
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Time Text
Two seconds early, people.
If you're not early, if you're early, you're on time.
If you're on time, you're late.
If you're late, don't show up.
Two seconds early.
How's everyone doing?
It's another big Sunday.
The list is not that long for subject matter, but some of them I know we're going to want to talk about for a little bit of time because they are the big news of the week.
The vaccine mandates.
I don't know, it's not an executive order.
The vaccine mandate.
That Joe Biden has come down with that risks or will in fact affect 80 to 100 million workers across America.
So we're going to talk about this because according to many, it's arguably but not so arguably unconstitutional and it wouldn't be the first time and it doesn't look like it's going to be the last that Joe Biden is exceeding the powers of the executive branch.
By empowering administrative agencies with powers that they never had.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, let us do what Porkchop says.
Smash that like, y 'all.
I know it's going to happen sooner than later.
And let's see if I can...
I was not late.
I was two seconds early now.
Okay, while we let everyone trickle in, and I'll do the standard disclaimers.
So first of all, and I want to remember not to forget this.
We simultaneously stream on Rumble.
And I'm going to go there right now.
And just make sure that I see what's going on.
Because Rumble has created something called Rumble Rants, which is like Super Chat for Rumble.
Except Rumble only takes 20%, which some might find to be a lot, but whatever.
They take 20%, which is better for the creator.
And it is better for the contributor, because you're contributing and supporting a creator, but you're also supporting a business.
That respects our fundamental right and core principle of freedom of speech.
So you can feel good knowing where that 20% is going.
So we're simultaneously streaming on Rumble.
Rumble rants are there.
I'm going to do my best to get to all those rants throughout the streams, screenshots.
I can't bring them up because the comments are not synced between Rumble and StreamYard yet.
I think they're working on that.
We'll see.
YouTube Super Chats, they take 30%.
I thank everyone for the support.
I mean, appreciate it beyond words.
But I don't get to take all the Super Chat questions up.
I don't get to read them out loud if that's going to miff you.
Don't give the Super Chat.
I don't like anyone getting miffed.
And it is not a right of entry into the conversation.
It is not an opportunity to be abusive.
But I do appreciate anyone who is so dead set on being abusive that they're willing to pay to do it.
UK just cancelled the vaccine passport.
It's on the menu.
It's on the menu because it is what happens when there is massive, consistent pushback from the population.
And let's see what it says here.
Viva, two days ago, the UK minister said, definitely carrying on with the vaccine passport.
Today, health minister says, cancelled vaccine passports.
Arse elbow comes to mind.
I don't know what that means, but I like the accent in which I read it.
Yeah, we've been having protests in Quebec.
In particular, massive protests week after week.
And yesterday was another massive one.
I didn't get to go to it because I was hanging up massive campaign signs on the streets.
And I mean massive.
The image of me on the billboard sign is life-size.
It's me on the screen.
And I actually kind of look...
My facial hair is right at the same point where it was when we took that picture.
So I was hanging those signs up.
And I want to talk about that, and I want to talk about the Friday night stream that I did with Maxime, because I think we made Canadian political history in what we did, and I'll get there.
I will be offended that YouTube takes 30% of the Super Chat.
Rumble rants?
You know what's amazing also?
Rebel News was doing a live stream, and I'm watching them on YouTube, and I wanted to support them, and then I forgot they're live streaming on Rumble.
And I went to Rumble and I dropped two 20s on them.
And I felt good about supporting Rumble Media.
And I felt good about supporting Rumble.
Rumble.
Rumble.
Rebel.
Rebel and Rumble.
You know what I meant.
Alright, let's see what we got here.
Okay, we got that.
Alright, so Friday night, for anybody who doesn't know, we did something unique.
I've talked about it many times.
You know that I'm running for office and yada yada and the campaign I think is going well.
I'm getting emails, messages, people saying they voted for me.
People who I am surprised that they say they'd vote for me.
That they say they have voted for me.
One person said, I support the vaccine passport, but I still voted for you.
And I said to this person, you support what you think the vaccine passport is now, but I guarantee you, you will come a day where you will not support what the vaccine passport has become.
And when that happens, because it's not an if, it's a when, I will be there to represent you and we will be there to represent you because it's coming when you see what the...
Vaccine passport that was sold to us is going to turn into like every other goalpost that has been moved along the way over the last 19 months.
It has been established that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for children 12 and up.
When can it be added to infant vitamin K shots?
I sense sarcasm.
Sarcasm translates poorly sometimes on the interwebs.
CB, you see that video out of Canada of the people arguing on the street about who owns the children?
I did not.
If someone can send that to me, I'd love to have a look.
And then we got, I don't know what that means, but thank you very much for the super chat.
That's an interesting avatar.
I can't exactly see what's going on in there.
Okay, so what do we do Friday night, by the way?
I've been talking about it for a while.
The Canadian media...
If it hasn't been bought off by the Trudeau government, it is at the very least severely spiritually indebted to the government.
The government subsidizes the CBC Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Canada, to the tune of about a billion dollars annually.
A few years ago, the Trudeau government promised a bailout, if you can believe it, a bailout of $600 million to certain mainstream media outlets, the big ones.
Some media outlets like Rebel Media do not take that subsidy.
They don't take government funding because it empowers the government to dictate influence, have some sort of control over the media, even if they're not supposed to.
To the point where you had Justin Trudeau at some gala making a joke about how the mainstream media lets him off the hook.
And some people say they don't know why, there's no good reason.
And he said, I find that insulting.
There's a very good reason why they let us off the hook.
Because we paid them $600 million.
Ha ha ha.
And then he went on with the punchline.
You don't get stellar headlines like this if you don't grease the wheels a bit.
And then he put up some allegedly unfavorable headlines coming out of the media.
As if to suggest that despite the $600 million that he's paid them, he still gets unfavorable headlines.
Which is the sick irony of the whole joke is that it's not a joke.
It's just an admission of reality that he knows he was greasing the wheels.
He knows that...
That's what people think.
And he knows that despite it, he occasionally gets some bad headlines, but who knows how much worse they would have been but for the greasing of the wheels.
So the media does the government's bidding, and if anyone has ever listened to CJAD or seen my video, you know.
And what has the media been doing?
Let's see this here.
I saw the debate between these really awesome guys on Lauren Chen channel.
You should get her on for a sidebar rooting for you from Michigan.
Thank you.
So what does the media do?
The media ignores Maxime Bernier and the PPC when they're not demonizing them.
And they ignore them to the point where, you know, nobody knows what they stand for, so everybody thinks that they stand for stuff that they don't.
The politicians, exploiting this media blackout, get to say whatever they want about the PPC because nobody's there to counter it, because it takes some serious arm-twisting to get Maxime Bernier on CJAD, and then even when you do, they badmouth him before and after they air the pre-recorded interview.
So it's been a blackout.
And despite the blackout, the PPC has been gaining popularity.
And so what did we do Friday?
The PPC said, we're not going to go...
Oh yeah, sorry, that's right.
Small detail.
Maxime Bernier in this media blackout was...
He was pulled out of attending the leaders' debate, which turned into a gong show of epic proportions.
He was not invited to participate in the leaders' debate because the criteria, the eligibility are...
You have to be polling above 4% as a weighted average of the average of multiple polls taken from reputable pollsters for polls taken 9 days before the election is called to 5 days after the election is called.
So it's a formula that's so nebulous you can use it to get whatever results you want.
And they got the results that Maxime is not going to attend the debate.
They had them averaged at 3.27%, not the 4% threshold.
They conveniently seem to have excluded.
Six polls from their 16 or 15 reputable pollsters, and they included a poll that had the party at 0.2%, even though the party got 1.6% of the popular vote in 2018.
So he didn't get invited to the debate, probably for the better, because anybody who watched that debate or attended that debate feels and is dirtier for having done so.
And so what did the PPC say?
Well, we were going to do a debate debrief.
Address every question or all the issues that were brought up during that debate in a meaningful and substantive manner and broadcast it simultaneously on multiple people's channels.
Lauren Chen, my channel, PPC, Instagram.
And we did it.
And it was a meaningful, longer-format discussion about policy issues that affect Canadians and not this 30-second countdown.
Comic relief, gong show of a Jerry Springer federal debate where all that anybody wanted was their five-second gotcha so they can take the clip and run it on Twitter.
And Justin Trudeau was posting highlights of that debate on Twitter, thinking it made him look good.
And I thought it was just they were the most preposterous things I've ever seen.
But we did it.
And, you know, I think we reached 100,000 people in 24 hours.
Maxime apparently on his Instagram had 35,000 likes.
We had a...
I think we're up to like 45,000 views on my channel and Rumble.
Lauren Chen had it on her channel.
You know, tens of thousands of views.
It was on Facebook.
We managed to find a solution to systemic political suppression that is both politically motivated, politically enforced, and media enforced.
And I mean, I think it's going to be something that people are going to do, parties are going to do going forward.
To get around this media censorship.
And it was beautiful.
I didn't air it on my channel because of the politics.
I ran it on my channel because I think it was something so novel.
First of all, I would have done it.
I would have been the host for Maxime if I weren't a candidate.
So I would have done it on my channel in ordinary circumstances.
But it was great.
And I hope everybody watched it.
And I hope everybody shares it if they did.
Let's get some super chats here.
What is the PPC and or Viva opinion of nuclear energy in regards to using less fossil fuels and addressing climate change?
I don't think anybody...
Would ever write off nuclear, write off the bat.
I mean, it has a scary name and it's had some scary incidents, but as has all other forms, and we have Lake Megantic disaster here to attest for it.
So nothing's off the table.
You just have to look for what makes sense and what is ultimately very green.
People talk about lithium as though it's the ultimate green, but they ignore some important carbon footprint issues and environmental footprint issues that go into that.
I saw, okay, there we go.
I saw that.
I'm going to bring up some super chats before Robert is here, and then we're going to just get into the menu of the evening.
That video at CB mentioned is from Bernier visiting St. John.
Bernier SJ, St. John's PPC candidate, Nicolas Pereira, and supporters were confronted by New Brunswick's educational minister, Dominique Cardi, who apparently...
I'm going to have to look this up.
And we got glad to see you again.
Good luck with the election.
If I were unlucky enough to be Canadian, I'd vote for you.
Thank you very much.
Is John Pierce hiding out with Jimmy Hoffa?
Jeez, actually, I want to know.
We're going to have to follow up on that.
Oops.
Apologies, I am feral668 from Locals.
Okay, so you know who's tossing out memes.
Oh, amazing.
Thank you.
If anybody, feral or anyone else out there, wants to make a meme of David versus Goliath, but it's David versus Garneau, who is the liberal candidate in my writing, I would love it.
Nothing with anything that can be misconstrued or interpreted as violence.
Something just David versus Goliath, because it's what we've got, and it's coming along.
So, all right, with that said, apparently said to PPC supporters, the province owns the children, and it got heated.
The audio was bad, unfortunately, so I don't know.
Okay, well, that's very...
I'll look for it.
All right, and now, on the menu tonight, Biden vaccine.
Epic versus Apple.
Mask mandates bans in Florida.
FDA lawsuit.
Very interesting.
I need Robert to clarify that for me.
Texas censorship.
Dog Whisperer versus Queen Latifah.
I did not finish all my homework, people, so we're going to have to work around that, or at least take that into consideration.
All right.
Good enough.
Let's do this.
I see Robert's in the house, and he looks like he's on the road.
If I'm not wrong.
Robert, how are you doing?
Good, good.
So, we're on the road.
Yeah, in Greensboro.
I have a trial here this week in North Carolina.
Okay, excellent.
Are you prepared for the trial?
Are you nervous?
I mean, no, no.
I mean, it's not nervous.
I mean, it's a criminal tax trial so that you always have some hurdles, but it's the kind of case that has to be tried because the government's position makes it so.
And how many days is it scheduled for?
Between one week and two weeks.
So it might not be over until the end of next week.
So just everybody out there who's not a lawyer appreciates, when you have a trial that is away from home for one to two weeks, You're away from home, on location.
You're probably there early to prepare.
You're going to be staying in a hotel, trial in the day, notes at night, preparing for the next day for the next two weeks.
Yeah, I have an Airbnb here.
So I was here all week this week, for the most part, because the court decided to order us to appear twice.
I won't comment on that further.
All right, now, actually, one thing I wanted to mention, there's early voting in Canada, and apparently they're asking, Robert, you'll tell me what you think of this.
It's going to lead into our first discussion.
They're asking for the telephone numbers and names of people showing up to vote in case there's an outbreak or in case for contact tracing.
And people are rightly freaking out.
And I'm saying, like, what do they even need your number for?
They have your address on the back.
They know exactly who showed up there.
It's just another way to make you nervous, make you scared, to intimidate you when you show up to vote.
Nuts.
Yeah, well, it's a good way of helping Trudeau, I presume, because it's a way of saying, hey, you know, scary, scary viruses out there, so you better vote for the guy who's as terrified of the virus as you are.
And you know what the funny thing is, though?
Ordinarily, that would be the case.
I think people now are getting really pissed off because they think that some of them are terrified, and they're saying, if this is so dangerous that I need to give my number, why did this nincompoop?
Call an election at this point.
He did it for political purposes.
He's going to eat some crow for this because there's going to be some political backlash.
But, Robert, look, we've got to do the number one subject of the week, the vaccine mandate.
And, I mean, I guess everybody knows about it at this point.
Grueler did a great analysis.
And Gruller pulled up some great stuff about the hypocrisy, the overt speaking out of both sides of your mouth, depending on the month of this administration.
You know, months ago saying we don't have the authority to do a federal vaccine management.
We're not going to do it.
It's a state issue.
It's an individual employer issue.
Every level of the Biden administration, as early as his presidency started, basically saying that.
And in as much as Trudeau at one point said, we're not a country that makes vaccines mandatory, six months later, I believe vaccines should be mandatory for air and train.
Biden administration comes out with it.
And the tool that they use to enforce it is the OSHA, the Occupational Safety Health...
Safety Hazard?
What is it again?
I get mixed up every time.
Yeah, it's about safety and health of workers.
So they create this mandate which basically says any employer with over 100 workers, they have to be vaccinated.
OSHA is going to enforce it.
And it doesn't seem like many people think that this is constitutional, including Jonathan Turley.
Who everyone knows was the expert during the impeachment.
A leftist lawyer, if there's ever been one, not on the side of this time around.
I mean, I guess, so if I'm missing any details, explain how that works.
The federal government comes in now and says, we're issuing this mandate.
Who gave it to us?
We don't know.
What's our authority?
We don't know.
And we're going to empower an administrative agency to enforce it.
Elaborate, how does that work?
And what do people make of that?
So effectively, there have been orders for the Coronavirus Task Force to issue the actual orders.
So we don't have the actual vaccine mandate rules yet.
And it appears there's going to be three different ones issued.
One to OSHA, for OSHA to issue an order to all employers with more than 100 employees.
A second one issued to all federal employees.
And a third one issued to all federal contractors.
The ones involving federal employees and federal contractors, under federal law, the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act requires that religious accommodations be granted to any federal employee, including religious accommodations to a vaccine mandate.
Anytime that's been litigated, the religious accommodation seeker has been vindicated and won in court, including to the prior flu vaccine mandate.
That applied to some limited hospital workers.
And Biden acknowledged that certain exceptions would have to apply for medical, disability, and religious reasons.
That's because of the laws that govern and limit the federal government.
Whether that would apply to the OSHA mandate is yet to be seen.
It most likely will.
There was always the Title VII argument for religious accommodation rights under Title VII.
But the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act can be even stronger than Title VII, and since this is now a federal mandate, presumably it too would apply.
To a certain extent, the OSHA rule is actually a testing mandate with a vaccine exemption.
So what it is, is everybody has to be tested once a week, unless they're vaccinated, and then they don't have to be tested.
And the assumption is a lot of employers will try to forego the cost of weekly testing by mandating a vaccine in lieu thereof.
That's how they're trying to weasel out of it.
The three big questions on the federal employment side, they have to make religious accommodations, and that will be the main limitation on their conduct.
The other will be certain other issues applicable on the federal side, union contracts, other provisions that may be applicable.
For federal employees, they don't even have the mandate out yet.
He issued a similar kind of mandate of testing or vaccination several months ago for federal employees that never got implemented meaningfully.
And so we'll wait to see what implements here.
But a lot of federal employees who are worried should know that the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act gives them a robust right of a religious accommodation.
That I would be surprised if the federal government tries to get around in the way the state governments of Maine, Washington, and California are currently trying to get around.
And some private employers, like Tyson Foods, it's probably not a coincidence that we now know that Tyson Foods was clearly working with the Biden administration, at least at some substantial level, because they were mentioned.
They said, look at this great result we got from Tyson Foods when they mandated it.
They went from less than half to more than three quarters.
I will be bringing suit against Tyson Foods because they've been wrongfully denying people their religious accommodation, wrongfully denying people their medical exemption for natural infection, previous natural infection, natural immunity from prior COVID infection, and also, in my view, discriminating against them under the Merits of Disabilities Act.
So that takes us to the question of this OSHA rule.
And there's three major legal questions.
One is, does Congress even have the constitutional power?
Under the Interstate Commerce Clause to mandate to give this power to OSHA in the first place.
And that really the Interstate Commerce Clause analysis is the same as the Tenth Amendment analysis.
Because the Tenth Amendment analysis is if Congress doesn't have the power, then that power is reserved to the states and local governments.
So that will be the first question as to the constitutional scope of whether or not Congress even has this power.
And the Obamacare case sort of looms in the background on this.
Because the court recognized that they could not mandate insurance coverage.
They could, under the taxing power, tax someone for not having insurance, but they couldn't require everyone to have insurance.
And there they made a comparable argument.
They made a similar argument that was about, because the insurance market was in interstate commerce, they could require things to make sure the insurance market worked effectively.
They honestly had a better argument than they do here for mandating a vaccine.
And of course, as you noted and as other people noted, not only have they previously said they did not have this constitutional power, they were busy retweeting and liking tweets that said this was just an end run around their constitutional problems.
It's fantastic.
It was Klain, who's the White House Chief of Staff, retweets a tweet.
Some people say it wasn't an endorsement.
He might have been retweeting it because he disagreed with it.
Who knows what he meant by it?
Clip after clip after clip saying, we're not going to do this.
We don't have the authority to do it.
And then they do it.
And it strikes me, Robert, it sounds a lot like the Jacobson rationale where they're saying, we're not making you do it.
If you don't, they'll pay you fine.
Here they're saying, it's not compelled vaccination.
It's going to be compelled testing in the absence of vaccination.
And if anybody has never had the test, it's not pleasant.
It's actually quite painful.
I found it painful.
And others have said it caused certain irritations where they stick that swab up into the nether regions of your brain.
So the idea is it's not compelling vaccination, the rule.
It's compelling weekly testing.
But employers, for the cost, for the inconvenience, for the facilities, the ease of control are going to say, just get vaccinated.
And that's what it amounts to.
That's the practicality, but not the constitutionality.
So then I guess go on to the second point.
So even assuming Congress has that power, we run into the CDC case problem, which is, did Congress explicitly delegate this power to OSHA?
Because it's not clear this was ever the intention of Congress to cover these kind of employee safety issues, even if they had the power under the Interstate Commerce Clause, which itself is seriously problematic.
And if Biden had been smart, he would have tried to tie this in and limit this to interstate commerce, but he did not.
He tied it to the size of employer, even if the employer is simply intrastate.
So it runs into a problem there because it's not clear Congress has given this kind of power to OSHA to use it in this manner.
The third aspect is, does OSHA have the power to do this in implementing their rules?
So the legal predicate for all of this is that this is an emergency action by OSHA.
OSHA has the right to issue an emergency rule and circumvent the notice and comment period that is otherwise required for a rule or regulation that it passes on employers if they establish two facts.
First, they have to establish there is a grave danger to employees without this rule, and secondly, that the rule is necessary to meet that grave danger, and the legal analysis in court is much stricter.
Then it is under traditional, arbitrary, and capricious standards of the Administrative Procedures Act.
They have to produce, they're limited to what their statements are, so when they give their statements for their reasonings, they can't go outside of that.
They're stuck with that.
That's the limit.
If they can't substantiate that, they're done.
The second part is they have to show a substantial evidentiary record that there is a grave risk and that this is the necessary means to meet that risk that does not in and of itself create other risks.
And the grave risk is where, I mean, I don't know what has been the traditional legal jurisprudential threshold for grave risk, because we know the statistics.
Even if we operate on, like, the most gravest of these stats for the most vulnerable group, you're like, if it's 97%, 98%, is that a grave risk?
If you aggregate for the people who are going to be the object of this vaccination policy.
If it's 99 plus survival, I mean, is that the grave risk?
How have the courts, if you know offhand, ever interpreted this particular criteria for this particular exception?
They've been very strict on OSHA.
In fact, OSHA, in the first 10 years between the mid-70s and early 80s that they applied this rule, they lost half a dozen cases on this rule.
It was one of the highest success.
Challenge rates and biggest failure rates of administrative regulatory action anywhere.
So much so that they have not even tried to use this rule in almost 40 years.
So they lost even in asbestos cases.
And, you know, when you're losing in asbestos cases, you're really losing.
And to give people an idea, I mean, there they documented, they did a substantial...
I won't try to say the word epidemiological because I'll get it wrong, but those kind of studies and surveys, extensive, expansive, statistical data that backed it up, and the court said that was insufficient because some part of it at least was speculative and it was not sufficiently substantial to justify the application of an emergency rule that couldn't await six months of notice and comment.
I mean, in here, it's not like they could get it done in probably a shorter time.
They could probably go to the notice and comment period in a month or two, given the FDA managed to approve a vaccine in three months from the time of application.
So just because traditionally it takes them longer, there's no reason why it couldn't be shorter here, because what they're really trying to short-circuit.
is the notice and comment period.
They want no citizen participation or citizen review.
And that's the other problematic aspect of this sort of rush to issue a vaccine mandate on individuals.
The other component is as to the great risk They're going to have to produce stats that even the FDA and CDC don't want to produce.
So by historical metrics, they have to produce a stratified individualized risk portfolio that says, here's how many people are going to die unless we issue this rule.
And I'd like to see that because we're now talking about employees.
We're not talking about retired people with three comorbid diseases.
Who probably are vaccinated in any event and don't need this type of coercion to get vaccinated given their risk factors.
Or can't get vaccinated because of their health condition.
So the vaccination mandate wouldn't help them.
So you're now going to be looking at people between the ages of 18 and 65, almost exclusively.
I mean, there'll be some over 65, but not many in this workforce.
They're supposed to study this workforce.
Look at their individualized risk.
And not only that, the other important factor here is, in terms of meeting the necessity standard and assessing the graveness of the risk, you're looking at asymptomatic spread.
Not symptomatic spread.
Because if someone is symptomatic, they already have the remedy already in place that they're supposed to self-quarantine.
Almost every employer already has that rule in place.
So they have to stay at home if they're sick.
Or for many, if they've even been exposed to someone who's sick, they have to self-quarantine.
So you're talking about people who have not been exposed, who are showing no symptoms.
So what's that calculation?
My latest calculation is that's about a million to one risk that they definitely, and some people would say in court filings in California, they've said there's no risk.
But let's say even on the high side, even Fauci has said the risk is very, very rare of asymptomatic spread occurring at all, least of all that it occur in a deadly way to an otherwise healthy population.
That's problem one.
Then problem two, of course, is going to be how is this necessary?
Because according to the latest big UK study, when it comes to the Delta variant, the vaccine doesn't dramatically reduce transmission risk.
It reduces severity of symptoms, but it doesn't reduce transmission risk.
And the only grounds for this is to reduce transmission risk.
And which ironically almost flips the script on who is at risk and who's the threat.
Because if you can transmit just as easily...
But don't have any symptoms.
You don't even know that you could be potentially carrying it.
It makes you actually the risk to the unvaccinated, which is the ultimate irony in all of this, is that if you're prone to show more symptoms, which would be your own decision and risk to take, you'll know when you're sick and you'll not go out when you're showing symptoms.
Whereas if you get vaccinated, you can still transmit it maybe a little less easily, but you don't show symptoms.
You don't even know when you have it to know not to go out.
It's a double whammy, actually, in terms of exacerbating the problem.
The other thing they did, I think politically it was a mistake.
Because I get he, Biden, feels under pressure to change the topic from Afghanistan where he's been busy bombing innocent families.
We have to get to that often, Robert.
People have questions about that, but we'll get there.
No doubt.
And it probably wasn't a coincidence that the exact same day this story, that story broke, that he was not ISIS people, but an innocent family, actually an aid worker that he killed with a drone bomb, is the same day he decided to come out with this dramatic story, hoping to...
It changed the headlines, and of course it did, but I don't know if it changed it in ways that they think it's going to be as helpful to them as they think.
Like Trudeau in Canada, like Newsom in California, like Cuomo in New York, a lot of people assume that they bought into the media hype on this, that this was very popular.
Richard Barris, a people's pundit, has done extensive surveys, and 75 to 80 percent of people oppose any adverse consequences to people for not taking the vaccine.
And not only that, he also shows from his survey, 3-4% of the country reports serious significant adverse events from the vaccine, which would be the typical 10x ratio to VAERS that historically, VAERS data understates injury rate by about a 10-fold ratio.
It's been as high as 100-fold, but that was a Harvard FDA Commission study that concluded that.
For people out there, what does a serious adverse reaction look like?
I mean, a really sore arm or lasting nerve damage doesn't necessarily require hospitalization?
Richard Barris used the CDC's own definition of that.
So he used the CDC's definition and said, has this happened to you?
And he used how they define a serious injury.
And basically, it's disabling.
Something that has been very severe for you, that it's disabling.
Not death, obviously, because if you're dead, you can't answer the survey.
The only time dead people get to vote is when it's the presidential election.
Hashtag joke, YouTube overlords.
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Yeah, completely, completely.
But what he did is he woke up a lot of people that frankly were asleep.
A lot of people in the Republican Party were asleep on this.
A lot of people, I mean, the so-called Conservative Party in Canada is still asleep on this.
They're not asleep.
Now they're on board.
Now the vaccine passport, they're full on board.
I mean, it's crazy what happens when a government thinks a policy is popular, and especially when it allows them to grab more power.
That's the win-win.
When grabbing more power looks more popular, man, even the Conservatives jump on that overnight.
Sorry.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's exactly right.
So but I think you have over 20 states have announced they're going to oppose this and they're going to litigate against it, including Texas and Florida, the big ones.
So there's going to be a lot of high power, politically influential actors now going after vaccine mandates, which is for those of us that have been opposing this for a while is a great relief.
Because we were kind of out on a limb, you know, without a lot of support.
So Biden did us a big favor by putting this front and center.
And then a lot of big businesses that, you know, even businesses that were considering doing it didn't like the way they understand the precedent that's being set here.
They understand that, okay, before long, I no longer run my own business.
The government runs my own business.
And if I don't want the government to run my own business, I got to stop this precedent now, even if I was going to do a vaccine mandate myself.
Because it creates a much bigger blowback and much potential risk precedent-wise.
I mean, as one person put it, if the government can do this, what can't they do?
Once individuals lose control of their bodies in this, that you become a vessel, a receptacle of the state's dictates.
You're not free anymore, period.
When you can be compelled, coerced under deprivation of civil rights.
To have something physically injected into your body, it's not free anymore.
But Robert, has OSHA...
Someone told me, I don't want to name names because I don't want to put them on the spot, that OSHA had been in fact used to require flu vaccines for healthcare workers once upon a time.
I mean, had it ever operated in that field, to your knowledge?
There have been those kind of requirements, but to my recollection, it wasn't OSHA that did it.
I thought it was state agencies that typically did it.
Sometimes it's Medicare and Medicaid.
The Department of Health and Human Services that does it.
But in those contexts, when they have tried a flu vaccine mandate, they've had to do a religious exception or they've lost.
They've also lost cases on grounds that have violated the ADA, what they did.
And it's been much more limited and restricted.
It's always only been in the healthcare context when there's been a real big, bad flu outbreak and there's been lots of rigorous exemptions and exceptions put in.
So this is much broader than anything like that ever has been done.
And before, Biden was trying to limit it to healthcare workers because there he had the most political leverage.
At the very least, like it or not, you have the biggest logical justification, like where you're working with sick people, vulnerable people, and whatever.
Okay, for the healthcare workers themselves, maybe it makes sense.
If you have the required exemptions, all the better.
But now it's any business.
And private businesses, at first I thought it was just federal employees, and then I realized it's private businesses of 100 employees and more subjected to these requirements, these inspection rights, or OSHA can come and enter and do whatever, and the fines, which are not insignificant.
Jonathan Turley, in his blog about it, mentioned that he thought it strategically a big mistake for obvious reasons, but one of which was that...
Apparently, they could have tagged along through amicus to existing lawsuits.
What existing lawsuits are there out there that they could have tagged along to that would have addressed this question in due course?
Well, I mean, there's about a dozen, at least a dozen that I'm aware of, challenging vaccine mandates in a wide range of contexts, either the university context, state actor context, or private employer context.
The LA Police Union filed suit, I believe, on Friday.
Concerning the vaccine mandate there in LA.
There's a San Francisco Union suit.
Apparently they may sell it by allowing the firemen not to take the vaccine or giving them a broad exemption.
Several state of Washington suits pending.
Several New York suits pending.
I have a suit, and I guess probably fair transition, with Bobby Kennedy, Children's Health Defense, against the FDA for pretending that they have an approved available...
We're going to get to that one, Robert, because that's another one.
I need the details to be broken down.
So it certainly could have been referencing that because part of our grounds for challenging, and as we're saying, the injury is that people think they're mandating a fully approved vaccine when that fully approved vaccine is not available.
And so the FDA should have to come clean with everybody, quit lying in its advertising.
And admit that they don't actually have available yet the FDA fully approved vaccine.
In the emergency use context, the word approved has a different legal meaning than it might in other contexts.
So approval means full FDA biologic license, whereas authorization means emergency use authorization only.
And we're going to get into this in greater detail in a few minutes because this is a separate lawsuit and I have my theory about...
Some of the distinctions, but we're going to get there.
That may be what Turley was talking about.
Turley, by and large, thinks this is objectively as unconstitutional as the CDC declaring an eviction moratorium.
The executive basically delegatis non potes delegare that they're delegating to an institution power that they never had in the first place.
Lawsuits will fly.
It'll be declared unconstitutional.
It should be.
We'll see.
There's an ugly history of the federal judiciary cowering and acting like cowards when it comes to emergencies that the executive branch declares.
We're going to find out whether the judiciary is going to make our tripartite system of government work or if it's utterly useless, as it has at times in crisis in the past.
What was the other question I had about the vaccine mandates?
I think we've covered this.
And for everybody out there, get the actual policy.
Practical advice.
We do it every week, but do it again.
And then the letter template that floats around our locals page.
Yes.
For the first of many.
Yeah.
FieberBarnesLaw.locals.com.
Pinned at the top is an example of a letter you can send to an employee.
It's not legal advice.
You're free to do with it as you wish.
You're free to edit, but no copyright asserted.
You can borrow it, copy it, change it, whatever you want to do.
There's a lot of other great information there.
I'm also breaking down all the different lawsuits and other legal information that gets into some of the medical detail we can't get into here.
Robert Gruler pointed out how people were lying about Joe Rogan and YouTube suspended him for a week.
So for the great detail about all of these vaccine cases, particularly the medical and scientific information that YouTube doesn't like to be shared here, it will be at vibabarneslaw.locals.com.
The politicization of everything we have witnessed in the past years stem from the left's overreaction to Trump, and in particular, the Billy Bush tape.
Well, I think it started before that, but...
Yeah, it accelerated under Trump, but it's...
Arguably, really, the big sort talks about it.
The 2004 election was the real hardening of the culture war in America.
Sorry, and ScroggGWCW...
Can't get Rumble Rants to work.
Barnes, is USPS exempt?
What about equal protection?
This is one question.
It's not clear that they really are exempt.
So here's the issue.
Watch for the feds to play games on this.
Watch for them to slow play, slow roll out their own mandate.
So a lot of federal employees are really nervous and I was like, just wait.
You know, two months ago, a lot of people were supposed to be getting tested or vaccine and they never managed to roll out those policies because they understand more than anybody their legal risk.
They understand a lot better than a lot of private employers, their legal risk, than some local and state governments, their legal risk.
And so they're going to slow play it.
And so that's why it looks like they may try to mandate it as well to U.S. Postal Service workers.
Here's their problem.
A lot of U.S. Postal Service workers are already at retirement age.
There's a bunch that have no interest in taking this.
On average, about 20 to 25 percent of the country has said in Richard Barris' poll.
Which has been the most accurate by far, going more than half a decade now.
The People's Pundit, you can find them at People's Pundit daily, both on, and People's Pundit on Locals, is that about a quarter of the country, at least a fifth, and usually a quarter of the country, said they have no interest in taking this vaccine.
Then people have a lot of reasons for that.
A big one is some of them already had COVID.
And so they don't see any upside.
For many, they have religious objections based on the use of aborted fetal cells and the development or production of these vaccines.
And I should just stop there so that nobody gets confused about this.
There's a distinction between the vaccine itself containing actual fetal particles as opposed to the research having gone into it, having been done with.
So people who have a religious objection or a moral objection, it's not necessarily to the vaccine itself containing this because...
It doesn't, but it has been used in the research and development of which people take objection to.
Exactly.
I mean, and there's a lot of people for strong, even people who are pro-choice, many of them have religious problems with actually using aborted fetal cells in scientific experimentation of any kind and don't want to be part of that.
And to me, it's sad and disturbing.
It's not only state governments, but also Tyson Foods not honoring those religious objections.
I mean, they're trying to make employers not only being able to control your body, but to decide for you what is a legitimate religious belief.
They're trying to become your pastor and your priest.
I mean, they're really trying to bring back the Inquisition-era kind of style of power.
And so I think that's why all of that is deeply problematic.
I think it violates Title VII.
We'll get into it a little bit later.
The horrendous conduct of Trader Joe's in a comparable context.
And someone had asked in a chat, you know, like, what about atheists?
Are we second-class religious citizens?
Because we may have beliefs that are objections, call them moral objections, that are not standard religious objections.
And it's a legitimate point.
Like, you don't have to be Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu to have a religious objection.
You can have a deep moral objection and be atheist or agnostic.
But Robert, someone had said, I don't know if it's true, and I'd like to verify with you, that apparently Congress was exempt from the mandate or would be exempt from the mandate?
They would have to be because the executive branch has no authority over either the legislative or judicial branch.
So the executive branch cannot mandate this for any member of Congress or their staff and cannot mandate this for any member of the judiciary or their staff.
And so that's why there's a different set of rules.
It's interesting where they recognize their limits.
They recognize their limits as to other branches of power.
They're not recognizing their limits as to some other areas where a lot of us think there are such limits.
Amazing.
And postal workers also needed by Dems for 2022-2022.
Well, that was actually the joke I was going to make.
You have AOC in 2020 talking about how to save the postal workers, send out a letter, and now they're basically going to push them into early retirement through their policies.
The problem for them is apparently some internal estimates from what I heard is that up to 20% of postal workers may choose early retirement rather than get the vaccine.
The problem for them is that level, they're already running thin.
Amazon depends almost entirely on the postal service to be able to deliver their products on a timely manner.
So it would not be just a huge problem with the mail.
It'd be a problem with companies like Amazon wouldn't be able to function.
So it would be a massive, massive problem.
They will probably try to avoid by delaying ever rolling it out for them, but it appears they won't be as exempt as they were led to believe initially.
I think they led them to believe that, so there would not be massive resignations.
And we're having the same problem in Canada now.
Our healthcare system is already understaffed, and they're rolling out a vaccine passport that will apply to healthcare workers of all functions.
Well, and that speaks to another irony.
The excuse Biden used for mandating on federal contractors, and by the way, the language appears to be new contracts, not existing contracts, because there would be issues with that.
But putting that aside is that it will make procurement go smoother and more efficient to mandate this.
There's no factual basis for that.
In fact, the evidence is just the opposite.
I mean, as a New York hospital found out, a bunch of nurses, maternal nurses, Quit rather than take the vaccine.
And now they won't even be in a position to be able to deliver babies there over the next several weeks.
So this doesn't make things smoother.
I mean, it's not like there's a bunch of people not going to work because other people are not vaccinated.
That's not happening.
And nor is there any evidence that there's tons of people getting sick because of unvaccinated people at work.
There's not evidence of either one.
But OSHA is going to have to produce evidence of both or it's not going to be able to meet even that low level, that first level of test of whether or not it's even a grave risk that requires this as a necessary tool.
All right.
So, I mean, I guess it's going to be a matter of time before the lawsuits get filed if they haven't already been filed against this.
They're waiting for the actual rules.
The actual rules haven't been issued yet.
All right.
Excellent.
I mean, how long are we- The Daily Wire said they're going to sue.
Turning Point with Charlie Kirk said they're going to sue.
And a bunch of state attorney generals said they're going to sue.
And we're putting together an informal coalition with Children's Health Defense, the National Civil Liberties Union, I think it's called, replacing the ACLU.
Some other groups that are the Rutherford Institute, the Pacific Institute.
The other thing was this woke up a lot of people.
There were some people in Washington sitting on their hands who weren't going to do anything about this.
And once Biden mandated it, they suddenly woke up.
And there were some big institutional actors and some big donors on the sort of the big corporate think tank side that woke up and realized, oh, you know what?
This is a serious problem for us running our business down the road.
Is Joe Biden going to be our CEO moving forward?
And would anybody make Joe Biden their CEO?
I mean, it's sad enough he's president, but no private company would put a dementia candidate in charge.
They made him, what is the word?
What's the word?
Commander-in-Chief.
CEO is nothing by comparison.
All right, that's amazing.
Someone said if they made Congress exempts, shouldn't they make their constituents exempts?
I said don't expect consistency in any of this.
Yes, indeed.
And one thing I love, You know, everyone hates the states because it's a litigious society.
You fall down someone's cracked steps and you sue for $10 million.
This is where I love it.
In Quebec, we rolled out the vaccine passport.
I'm searching for any organization with a legal interest to file a lawsuit.
I'm not seeing very many.
I'm going to find something.
But the states, vigorous defense of rights and especially the God-given constitutional rights, they take them a little more seriously and they are still...
Despite all their other foibles, a beacon of light for the rest of the world and an influence of how people should defend their rights.
Okay, this might be a good segue into the, because I need explanations on this, Children's Defense Fund is suing the FDA, I don't know who else is in the lawsuit, and the basis of the lawsuit is that, I'm going to use the word of the lawsuit, a bait and switch, in that the FDA approved the, I forget the word, the Pfizer vaccine.
So apparently giving it full authorization, but what is authorized is in fact, this is where I have trouble understanding what's going on, is no different than the emergency authorization use vaccine.
And they've sort of what has been called a bait and switch in that purporting to have gotten full FDA approval for what they were administrating, which is not fully FDA, but it's still under the EAU, but it's the same vaccine.
Explain this away because I don't understand the distinction between the vaccine itself and I think I can understand some of the legal reasons why they want this, but explain exactly what's going on and I'll try to step in if I don't understand the explanation.
Sure.
So the conundrum they face is that if they gave a biologic license, and that's what FDA approval means in this context, if they gave a biologic license to any of the COVID-19 vaccines, then they had to revoke the emergency use authorization for all other vaccines.
Because once there is any biologic license for any COVID-19 vaccine, then you can't do emergency use authorization for any other vaccine.
And they wanted to get around that.
So what they did, but on the flip side, the military and many other people, apparently including this mandate by Biden, is to get the FDA-approved, biologic-licensed vaccine.
But the problem is, for them, was that means they would have to revoke the emergency use authorization for all the others, including for Modernos and J&Js.
And instead, what they did is they said, yes, we're giving a biologic license to this COVID-19 vaccine.
However, it's not available yet.
And consequently, we're going to continue with the emergency use authorized ones that are legally distinct, but medically interchangeable in the FDA's language.
And so now whether it actually is medically interchangeable is subject to debate.
The thing is that when it's a fully biologic licensed product, it has to meet certain manufacturing standards, certain distribution standards, and certain marketing standards that are different than what an emergency use authorized vaccine.
That has to meet.
So from some scientist's perspective, they're not medically interchangeable.
But at a minimum, they're definitely not legally interchangeable because it is clear that an emergency use authorized vaccine is completely immune.
Everybody connected to it cannot be sued.
Whereas it's not clear, it's a subject of debate whether or not the FDA biologic licensed vaccine shares that same degree of legal immunity.
Okay, and back it up just for one step.
Let's just say there's four EAU or EUA?
Emergency?
EUA.
EUA.
Yep, it's like the European Union with an A added on it.
That's how I remember.
Okay, so I'm never going to forget now.
EUA.
You got Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson& Johnson, whatever.
So if any one of them, and they're different, some of them are mRNAs, one of them is an actual vaccine.
If any of those that are out there now that are EUA, Exactly.
That's what the law requires.
That's the federal law.
And so now the argument here is that...
They've approved one, and I think it was Pfizer, correct?
Yes.
So they approved the Pfizer one under a different name, the name that's used in Australia and some other places where it's been approved.
But they are pretending it's not available.
So they are not widely available.
So they say, we have one approved, but it's not widely available.
But it's really kind of the same thing as this other thing.
In fact, as far as you know, Robert, no medical advice, no nothing.
Is it the exact same thing?
Is there any practice?
It depends on who you talk to.
Some people would say there's significant differences.
Others would say there are minor insignificant differences.
The FDA has said there are minor insignificant differences.
And I guess it actually doesn't make a difference.
Let's even assume that there are significant differences.
They say we got FDA approval for the Pfizer.
We'll call it the Pfizer 2.0.
But it's not widely available, so we want to retain the emergency use authorization on all the other vaccines, which we will continue to administer, but now people are potentially under the impression that what is being administered, although in fact an EUA, has gotten, and not in fact gotten, FDA approval.
That's exactly right.
And so for the military, they're only being required to take the FDA approved one.
What the soldiers are not being told is that's not the one they're being given.
The FDA is advertising on Facebook and other places that the FDA-approved one is available to them locally.
That's false.
So the different marketing, different manufacturing, and most importantly, different potentially legally.
So people may believe, okay, I'm getting one that has, I can sue somebody if something's wrong.
It's up in the air.
It's not clear whether you can or not, but there's at least a chance of it, whereas there's no chance of it if it's an emergency use authorized one.
I mean, right now they're continuing to medically experiment on people.
That's what the emergency use investigational drug is called, while pretending that they're not.
And that's where our objection was, look, Judge, they got to, you know, crap or get off the pot.
They got to either say, yes, make this available or admit it's not available and quit lying to people.
And we requested a temporary restraining order.
The judge said he wants to wait to hear from the FDA first before he grants any restraining order.
So we'll see how that goes.
So that'll be a couple weeks away.
That is the lawsuit.
I don't think we need a detailed breakdown because it's a short lawsuit, which I like.
It's right to the point.
12 pages?
Yeah, my question to the judge is, are we going to hold people responsible for lying to the country or not?
Is the judiciary going to step up to the plate or hide?
This is the question I had, is that even if we operate on the basis of the Pfizer approval, there's still Moderna, there's still Johnson& Johnson.
And people, I guess the argument is, or the fact is, that people are under the impression that if you get the Moderna or the Johnson& Johnson, it's received FDA approval as well, which, as a matter of fact, even if we set aside the Pfizer distinction, it has not?
Correct.
Correct.
It is not.
And here's the game they're probably playing.
They're probably trying to wait to make the Pfizer-FDA biologic licensed one only available after they put it on the children's list.
Because once they put it on the kids' mandatory immunization list, then it has full immunity.
What it is, is there's this legal questionable land they're in right now.
If they put out that one under that label, the FDA approved one, maybe they can get sued if they've made a mistake.
Whereas that's why I think they want to keep the EUA one in for as long as possible until they can stick the Pfizer one on the child's list so that it has definite immunity from suit.
And it's kind of strange, this very safe and effective drug that everybody's worried about nobody being able to sue over.
Is there an issue that they want to deplete the inventory of the EUA before...
Before going to a fully approved FDA?
That's a partial explanation, but it's not part of the legal excuse for the word available.
Especially if they're going to claim it's truly medically interchangeable.
If it's truly interchangeable, then we're just debating a label.
We're back into low papa high rum, high papa low rum.
That's what I understood now.
Even if we then say that there's minor differences, or even if we accept that there's major differences, that would actually be...
A bigger issue.
If there are, in fact, major differences between the FDA approved and the EUA, and people are being represented to that what they're receiving now got FDA approval, but it's the EUA inventory, which has major differences from the one that just got FDA approved.
They're under a factual and relatively serious misunderstanding.
And I must say myself, I was under the impression that it was not just Pfizer, but that all of the vaccines that were being administered had, in fact, gotten FDA approval.
Because that's how they misled people.
It was a massive deception campaign.
Okay, and then the legal ramifications, for anybody who's wondering, I mean, we know now that everyone under the EUA umbrella, full immunity, left, right, and center, maybe up to the exception of employers who compel it for adverse effects.
Under the vaccines, there's...
Not immunity, but there's a fund that limits liability for the manufacturers, so you can't go sue them for a billion dollars, but you can go make a claim with the vaccine fund for any damages, and therefore you could in theory be made, not whole, ever.
And that particular vaccine fund is almost never paid out.
They have a whole different set of standards of causation than they do for COVID and other things.
The standards radically shift when you try to make a demand for what is relatively small amounts of money.
I think the cap is $250,000.
So if you have lifetime medical problems, you're not going to get anywhere close to compensating it.
All right.
That's very cool.
So the motion itself has been presented to a judge.
Now, what stage of the file is it at?
Yeah, so we had sued and served him and filed an ex parte motion to try to get what's the equivalent of a temporary restraining order.
We're filing a petition to stay under the APA, so it's a separate, but it has the same analogous standards as temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions.
The court issued a ruling saying that he was going to deny the TRO because he wanted to wait to see what the FDA had to say.
And he wasn't sure what the injury was yet.
So we're going to be filing lots of declarations of a bunch of soldiers and other people to explain what the injury is.
The injury is that they are at imminent risk of dishonorable discharge or being forced to take a drug that's different than the one they're being told it is.
And it's really about how much are the courts going to defer to the executive branch in times of emergency, perceived emergency.
The fact that we have now, what, a two-year emergency going should have been a warning sign to everybody.
That's one of my political talking points.
If you can't pass a law after 19 months of an emergency, the government is the problem and not the emergency people.
Exactly.
And the same thing here with this mandate.
If Biden believed in it, why didn't he go through Congress?
Make it clear.
Have Congress give the authority directly to OSHA to be able to mandate vaccines.
He knows it wouldn't pass.
And so it shows you that our fundamental tripartite system of government has failed for the last two years.
And that's the legislative branch being ignored and the judiciary branch playing coward.
And the only question is whether the judiciary branch is going to earn their paycheck or not.
David Individual says, Robert, can I, I'm presuming, sue my county to try and block county employee mandates if I'm not a county employee?
I guess that's locust standing.
It depends.
Yeah, that's a standing question.
Well, again, I don't like standing, so I would consider that an injury question.
It would be a legitimate injury question.
How are you individually injured by it?
So generally, you need to be someone with a threatened injury to be able to sue in general.
But it's called standing in the courts.
Standing is so badly abused that I don't like it.
But injury has always been part of the law.
I'm going to read Lisa Schuplein from Rumble.
Rant says, are there penalties for lying about the approved vax being the one being given today?
Well, that's my argument, is that there should be, and the penalty should be that the FDA should be prevented from saying that there is an approved available vaccine when it isn't available according to their own terms, or they should revoke the emergency use authorization for the other vaccines.
So they should do one of the two to be able to get away with deception is dishonorable of our entire public health apparatus, and the question is whether the judiciary is willing to step into the breach.
So that should be the consequence, but otherwise there's none.
It's the problem when only the government can deal with the government.
I mean, for example, to sue directly under any of these immunity provisions, the government has to join the suit to say it's a willful misconduct.
Well, they've never joined one ever in history.
So, I mean, asking the government to take care of the government has never worked.
And, no, it's an amazing thing, because actually, I think probably if you ask anybody, they're under the impression that whatever they're getting now is FDA approved.
And it's one of three things.
It's either it is, in fact, what was approved is identical.
No problem, at least for the one vaccine.
Either it's somewhat different, in which case the differences might be not major, so it might be interchangeable, or the differences are major, in which case they're basically depleting the already built-up inventory of the EUA vaccine, which is materially different than the one that was approved, and warranting that everyone's getting it.
It's overnight magic.
Now, all that inventory just got the blessing of FDA approval when that's not the case.
So that's an amazing distinction.
And the pieces of the puzzle, in my mind, of understanding just fell together.
So I hope everyone else now fully appreciates that.
That's very interesting.
Is there a timeline on the lawsuit?
Do you have a schedule?
I'm hoping the court will schedule now, on the stay motion itself, an expedited hearing and briefing schedule so that a hearing is held within at least two to three weeks.
But, you know, it's up to the court.
I mean, if the court goes slow, then we'll look at other suits that we're going to be looking at bringing anyway.
And I think once the feds really push something through, an actual rule, which is supposed to be forthcoming within a week or two, then there's going to be a lot of litigation there.
So the courts can't hide forever on this.
And Michael R says, what about remote workers?
How would a vaccine mandate affect the company if I work remotely?
I mean, I read a story about a student.
A remote student was required to take a vaccine or show proof of vaccination in order to access online classes.
Couldn't verify the details myself, but it sounded preposterous.
Well, I've received emails from workers who are in that exact position.
It's insanity.
It's just insanity.
Okay.
Now, what does this one fit into?
So that's the Children's Defense Fund lawsuit.
Or Children's Health Defense, yeah.
Children's Health Defense, sorry.
Children's Health Defense.
Sorry, and ultimately, what are the sanctions that you're looking for in the lawsuit?
I mean, it's...
Oh, what we're asking is to stay the FDA's approval of the biologic license unless and until they revoke the emergency use authorization for the others.
So, you know, just put them to their test.
They couldn't approve it if it wasn't available.
And if it is available, then revoke the EUAs.
But quit lying to the American people.
All right, and here's Stephen F. says, Honorable Discharged USMC, familiar with UM...
Uniform Code of Military Justice.
All right, says, Unvaxed, more likely to get other than honorable discharge, not dishonorable discharge.
That was a distinction people pointed out last week, so point well taken.
Some are being threatened with dishonorable discharge.
Some are being threatened with jail time.
It's insane.
There's a lot of supervisors in the military that should be...
They've clearly been given directives to coerce the soldiers into doing something without full information, and they're often making illicit threats to do so.
And they are sowing distrust inside the military.
But, you know, when you have a guy like Millie running it, what would you expect?
What was I just about to say about that?
Oh, no!
Oh, yeah, they're receiving instructions.
On the idea of receiving instructions, someone had posted a clip of a politician, I don't know who it was, caught on camera, not wearing the mask behind the stage, puts on the mask to walk out on stage, to take off the mask to start talking, and I posted a...
It's a video that when you watch it, you say you have to be hallucinating, it has to be a joke, we have to be living in an alternate universe.
It was Chrystia Freeland, who was being recorded for a CPAC, it's a...
Canadian Political Action Committee.
I forget what it is.
Not wearing a mask.
Laughing around with the person she's talking to.
Someone nudges her.
She puts on the mask.
And then they announce it.
They go live.
And she pulls up.
Oh, hi.
And you watch it.
And you're like, what did I just watch?
It's quite clear they all have these instructions to put the mask on before going public, even if they're not wearing it before.
And you have to think you're going crazy that nobody else is going crazy watching this and realizing this.
And it's...
There's no other words.
It's flabbergasting, mind-numbing nonsense.
As bad as it might be to work for the military, you could be stuck working for Trader Joe's.
Okay, so now, you are a counsel in this, correct?
No, no, I'm not.
It's brought by the Pacific Institute.
But that paragraph 21 was one of the most shocking, extraordinary.
I mean, it just shows what a bum company Trader Joe's is.
Now, hold on.
We've got to back it up.
Were you, at one point, we had discussed representing someone in Trader Joe's who was...
Yeah.
That was on the mask.
Okay.
And those mask suits are pending still.
All right.
Now, explain the Trader Joe's and then explain paragraph 21 because it's...
Astounding.
Yeah.
So, I mean, this guy that he'd worked for, he was a captain at Trader Joe's.
He'd worked for them for more than a quarter century, 26 years of loyal work.
The vaccine mandate came down to Trader Joe's, but they recognized, as they had to under Title VII, a religious accommodation.
He explained in details religious accommodation, and it was formally accepted.
And then they decided to secretly discriminate him and fire him on sort of bogus ground.
So what they said was...
Well, because you're not vaccinated, you can't come to the gathering of senior leadership.
But by the way, if you don't come to the senior leadership, we're going to penalize you in terms of your working.
So he started playing that game.
And he explained objections and the rest, thought that it was going to be worked out.
His brother apparently died within a few days of receiving the vaccine shot.
So this reinforced his own concerns.
And a few days after that occurred, after his brother had died, One of the executives for Trader Joe's said, hey, I'd like to come by and meet you.
And came by and said, man, I really feel bad at what's happening.
So he purportedly there under the pretext, pretense of commiserating with him and sympathizing with him.
And in the middle of the conversation gives him a form that says, oh, by the way, you're fired.
And that's what he was really there for.
I'm going to read it.
I was just pulling it up as you were talking.
It says, VP Martin.
Called again the next day at 7.37am, July 30, 2021.
He said he was in the Riversdale area and asked to meet.
The meeting took place at 10am at the Riversdale Plaza.
When he arrived, he asked how Mr. Crawford was doing.
He knew Mr. Crawford's brother had passed away unexpectedly a few days ago, shortly after taking the Fauci juice.
Sorry, and I don't mean to be glib about this.
This is terrible.
Mr. Crawford said it was a tough week.
VP Martin then read an employee incident report telling Mr. Crawford he was fired from Trader Joe's.
Can you imagine?
What a bottom-barrel bum.
Whatever people think of the vaccine or religious accommodations, that is a horrendous way to treat an employee for more than a quarter century.
And VP Martin should be ashamed of himself.
It is.
And again, you're like, don't want to run afoul of YouTube rules.
This is an allegation in a lawsuit.
No one's making any...
The idea that regardless of what his brother did before passing away, his brother passes away and they don't make the business conscious decision, the business savvy decision to say, maybe we'll wait a month.
Maybe we'll give this guy a few thousand dollars of salary and let him grieve before firing him.
This is when society loses its mind, it loses its heart.
I don't know if it's before, after, or contemporaneously with.
So he filed suit under Title VII because it was clearly because he asserted a religious accommodation that they discriminated against him.
It's obvious what they were really up to.
There's a lot of pressure on the left to get rid of religious accommodations for vaccines and also just to get rid of religious accommodations in general and to punish people for having religious beliefs they don't like.
And that's really what Trader Joe's did, in my view, based on the allegations of the suit.
And so very smart, very well-crafted, very well-drafted suit brought.
And hopefully Trader Joe's is held liable and responsible for the back pay, future pay, cost, reasonable attorney's fees that you should owe if you do that to somebody, especially an employee of 26 years.
Now, in Quebec, we have a certain condition that you also factor in the likelihood of getting employment again.
This guy's 25 years.
The likelihood of him finding any equal employment?
Yeah, it's going to be difficult, especially when you've been fired, because you have to put that on your resume.
And so almost nobody wants to hire you under that circumstance.
So that's the hard part that a lot of people are being put in.
Do I risk waiting to get fired?
Do I quit so that I can just still keep good references?
People are being put...
Credit to Governor DeSantis, who gave an excellent speech.
There's a certain other person in Florida who should be giving these kind of speeches, not just going to boxing matches, my good friend.
But DeSantis gave a great speech.
He said, you know, to put people at the choice of feeding their families or taking something that they and their doctor don't believe they should is a morally horrendous choice, and it's not one that the people of Florida are going to put up with.
And it's the same thing in this context.
I mean, what people are being put to is just an outrageous.
And that's why 75 to 80% of the people, when they're asked an honest question, not the ones the media ask, but an honest question of do you think someone should be fired for not taking the vaccine?
Do you think someone should be denied education if they don't take the vaccine?
Do you think someone should be denied public accommodation if they don't take the vaccine?
Overwhelmingly, the American people say no.
And that's what Trudeau might figure out in a couple of weeks.
When he doesn't win by the landslide margin, he'd be predicted when he called this election.
One week and one day, people.
And it's on on the 20th.
No, it's...
Oh, jeez, I just lost my thought again.
No, I see people on the...
I mean, I see city workers on the street and now my face is everywhere in the city.
So some of them watched the channel and honk and one person came up to me and said, I'm going to lose my job.
Like, I'm going to lose my job because I don't want to get this vaccine.
And we're penalizing.
I mean, in Canada, we're not at 25% who refuse to take one shot.
We're at 18% who are not fully vaccinated.
We're over 80%.
It's over 82, I think.
Wasn't that the number that Fauci said we'd have herd immunity, Ed?
Oh, I think they said 70 at first.
And then two weeks to two years, 70%, 80%.
Now it's 115% for six months straight.
We've reached it.
And now they're going after the 18%.
Which includes people who can't get a vaccine.
Not just...
Throwing around the term anti-vaxxer now is making me want to puke.
I shared an article with somebody.
It was the exact one, I think we mentioned it earlier, but that teenage boys were six times more likely to be hospitalized from...
The juice than from the COVID.
And I flipped this to an individual, and the individual says, oh yeah, my other anti-vax buddy sent me that already.
It's like, if you're calling that anti-vax, you have shut off your mind where there is nothing that is going to cause you to question anything but everything all the time whenever we say.
And it was never, the person knows my status, the person knows my position.
It's still, dare share any information that might make you think twice about...
Compelling a vaccine passport on kids aged 13 to 17. Anti-vax, I don't have to listen to it or listen to you, like my other neighbor.
But people have lost any ability to think critically and to assess risk objectively.
We're demonizing 18% of the population in Canada for something which there has been no scientific evidence, no statistical evidence to show that they are even responsible for any meaningful or risk whatsoever.
It's just...
Willy nilly, if it's easy to understand, it must be right.
What mask mandates in Florida?
What's the status of those lawsuits?
So yeah, we have multiple suits all over the place.
There's a suit in Pennsylvania over the mask mandates there that's pending.
There's a suit in Minnesota to force all the rural schools to impose a mask mandate.
There are suits in both Texas and Florida about who gets to control.
The governor had passed.
In Texas and Florida said no mask mandates allowed at the local level.
The local governments were still doing it anyway, so a dispute arose.
In Florida, the local judge originally said that somehow the governor didn't have the power over a municipality whose power is derived from the governor in some form.
That's how state governments work.
Local governments are a branch, effectively, a lower branch.
Division of the state government in terms of their legal power, source of power, with all sorts of power ultimately coming from the people.
But originally the state court judge said that yes, you have to do the mask mandate and overwrote the governor's ban.
Went up to the Court of Appeals.
As we predicted, the Court of Appeals reversed that.
Said no, the governor gets to decide, not the division of the state government.
And in Texas, same outcome.
Texas Supreme Court said this isn't about the wisdom of mask mandates one way or the other.
This is about who gets to decide.
And the governor still is the one who gets to decide, not the local branch or state government.
And so the governor says no mask mandates, which means that lower down the totem pole, they can't say, well, at the local school level, we're still doing a mask mandate.
So it is still issued by the governor a matter of choice for the individuals and the parents.
And the school cannot override that gubernatorial decree?
Correct.
Now, in Minnesota, they were suing to try to force the governor to issue a decree to force everybody to wear masks.
That's a double whammy mandamus.
That's like, suing to force him to issue it because they knew that if he does it, if he bans it or does not issue it, nobody else can be compelled to do it on a...
And especially it's these affluent urbanites in the Twin Cities.
It's this constant culture war where they want to dictate their policies to rule Minnesota.
They see where they see Nick Mercatus out there, and he's a troublemaker, and they need to mask those kids.
And so they're suing to take governor, go in there and mask them.
Luckily, the judge at the initial hearing was very skeptical of that lawsuit, noting their standing issues amongst others.
And so hopefully the Florida court noted the same thing, and the Florida appeals court noted the dubious standing of the people suing to try to overturn the governor.
So hopefully that is sustainable.
But just as we have a local state gap, we're going to have a state federal gap next between Biden.
Because Biden publicly said he was going to roll over any governor that tried to challenge him.
Tenth Amendment, what's that?
If the coronavirus didn't kill the Constitution, Joe Biden is proving he's completely immune from it.
And then we've got Bumbling Joe Biden says that one in 160,000 fully vaccinated people are hospitalized for COVID complications, but also says that we need to protect vaccinated coworkers from their unvaccinated colleagues.
Anti-logic is not just the word.
And it's funny that I don't want to promote or even on a personal level, I don't want to believe in it.
It's just that it's very funny how all of the leaders start parroting the same talking points roughly at the same time.
And I just think it's the blind leading the blind, dumb and dumber.
You got Trudeau coming out and saying the unvaccinated are putting the vaccinated at risk.
You can't get on a train and put the unvaccinated at risk.
You're putting our kids at risk.
You have Chris Kalitsa.
I don't want to mispronounce his name.
Chris Kalitsa puts out a tweet.
The unvaccinated don't get to put my nine-year-old at risk.
Trust the science.
And I respond to him.
Your nine-year-old has anywhere between a 0.00% and 0.003% chance of dying.
Even if they contract COVID, which is actually less than the flu, and their risk of hospitalization, they're not even less, but they're minimal, but trust the science.
They're way below the flu.
They're way below the flu, which people don't appreciate.
I've seen anyone with kids knows you end up in the hospital for a number of reasons.
The United Kingdom even came out and said, no, we should not do the vaccines for children because their risk portfolio of injury from a vaccine is higher than their risk from the virus for them.
Except there was a small caveat in that article that said this should not be used for clinical decision making or whatever.
Right, right, right.
Some people who are smarter than me, maybe not smarter than you, Robert, but very smart doctors nonetheless, have a diverging opinion, but to question this heresy and anti-vaccine heresy.
Yeah, it's insanity, compounding insanity.
It's about a governmental power grab.
It's about whether we control our bodies or the government and private corporations do.
All right, now, do we have anything more on the vaccine, masks, any of those issues?
I think we covered it pretty much for the night.
Yep.
Let's get into one that I also don't think I understand the logic to.
It's the Epic Games Fortnite versus Apple.
We covered it.
We talked about it a while back.
Epic was suing Apple for...
A number of things.
Antitrust violations, breach of contract.
Basically, fact pattern for anybody who doesn't know, Fortnite, very popular game.
You had these in-store purchases.
As you play the game, you can buy stuff.
Any in-store purchase had to go through the Apple App Store.
And Apple charges 30%.
And it was sort of baked into the contract between any app developer.
It wasn't just Fortnite, it's everyone.
Sell on Apple.
Your sales, your in-store app purchases have to go through Apple.
Apple takes a 30% cut.
Fortnite got so popular, numbers are astronomical, but it doesn't matter.
They decided to basically bypass Apple, try to make the sales direct through their own store, bypassing Apple, and either they were charging a premium or they were just charging a discount to sell whatever in-app purchases that were offered through the game.
That would otherwise have to come with a 30% premium that goes to Apple.
Apple then terminated them, said breach of contract.
We're cutting you out of the App Store.
And then Epic sued Apple.
And they got a final judgment.
It's a first instance lower court judgment.
The judgment is sort of like Nick Ricada did a decent analysis where he was viciously attacked by the biggest wasp he had ever seen in his life.
I think he's trying to imitate my fear of wasps.
I'm joking.
So he did an analysis.
He said it's a win-win, but it's a lose-lose.
Both parties lost.
Basically, Epic...
Oh yeah, in the interim of this, there was an agreement between Epic and Apple, and it said if Epic loses, they're going to put money in escrow and they're going to pay 30% of whatever their sales were.
During the litigation process, and they made something like $12 million in sales, so they're going to have to pay 30% to Apple.
That was the loss, because basically, I don't know how the judge sucks and blows at the same time, but I think they do.
They said Epic breached the contract with Apple.
It was in there.
They weren't allowed to do it.
There was no antitrust violations.
There was no monopolistic behavior, even though Apple has 55% of the market share.
It's not monopolistic, and they can't be penalized for their success.
So they were within their rights to terminate the contract, but at the same time said under California law that Apple was engaging in unfair business practices by baking into their contract the fact that these app developers could not use workarounds to directly contact their own clients, their own users, to offer things for sale.
You're going to have to clarify for me how the judge said basically there was a breach of contract by Epic such that Apple was within its rights to terminate, but the terms of that agreement that Apple enforced were themselves in violation of California law, and they are permanently enjoined from imposing those terms of conditions as contractual obligations on a going-forward basis.
Yeah, so what she did is she gave Fortnite what they really had to have, but not what they wanted to have.
So what they had to have was the ability to sell directly to their consumer without having to give Apple its 30% all the time.
And she just found a creative way to give them that.
She went under the California unfair competition law, which is very broad, rather than the antitrust laws.
She didn't give them what they wanted in big, which was to say this is a monopolistic practice and should be stopped altogether.
She didn't go there.
Now, what she basically said is that Apple and Google have a duopoly.
Because they have over 90% between the two of them.
To me, you know, the old understandings of monopoly, what Apple is doing is a monopoly.
And so a lot of people from the monopoly side were disappointed in the ruling from that side.
However, the developers were still mostly happy because what they wanted some means to get out of this control by Apple.
It's like people who got a local subscription initially, if they got it through an Apple phone, they paid $7 rather than $5.
And I was like, what do you mean you paid $7?
I was like, oh, you went to the phone.
Two bucks and went to Apple.
That's what that was.
If you do it online, it was only five bucks.
So that was causing a problem for a lot of developers.
So she gave a big boost to developers ultimately, but she didn't give the death nail to Apple that it feared.
So that's where it was very much a Solomonic split-the-baby outcome.
And it was only under California law.
So Epic was asking basically for a global injunction.
They said, no, only under California law.
But Apple's based in California, so it applies to everything they do anyway.
Okay, so there's no way they're going to change their choice of law, their venue out of California.
I mean, they could try.
They could try on a go-forward basis, but there's issues with them trying that path.
Same with Google.
I mean, all the big tech companies are in California, so they all have to...
This will likely apply to them, and trying to get around it will be tricky.
Okay, interesting.
But now, so they enjoined Apple from...
Doing it on a going-forward basis or enforcing it in their existing contracts?
Enforcing their existing contracts, but also that they have to make accommodation to allow the developers to be able to circumvent Apple in going direct to their consumers.
So that was the big financial bonus to all the other developers.
Yeah, there's people who don't like both Apple and Epic.
The impact on this is mostly smaller developers now that don't have to kick back to Apple all the time.
So, I mean, that's very funny.
It's like Epic has gone through the costs, through the litigation.
They're going to have to pay 30% of their $12 million.
And every other independent app developer is going to reap the benefits of what Epic did, but not Epic itself.
Although the question is going to be, you know, does Apple let Epic back on, given that it was ultimately very, you know, financially beneficial for both?
Or is Apple going to maintain their deplatforming of Epic?
To cut their nose off to spite their face.
I think they wanted to send a message, but since they partially, since they lost a key aspect, I don't know if they'll continue that path or serves their interest to continue that path.
But is it as big of a deal for Apple as one thinks?
It is, because it's a substantial change in their ability to exercise what I think is their monopoly power.
It's just considered unfair competition rather than monopolistic.
The bottom line is it's going to allow app developers to basically gather user information and contact them directly without going through Apple.
Whether or not they can do that as efficiently as they can by using Apple, fine.
Maybe it's the best of both worlds for everybody, but in theory could cost Apple a little bit of money.
It's going to cost Apple a lot of cash over time and empower a lot of your smaller developers, particularly, for whom those margins to Apple were crushing.
Does Apple appeal?
Do they think of appealing, and do they have grounds of appeal?
There's risk.
I think there's risk for both sides appealing.
So the nature of her ruling would be hard to overturn.
Except on the monopolistic side in part, because that's really a legal determination, so Epic would have a stronger appeal than Apple.
By the way, I skimmed through the judgment because it was 185 pages, but does this one thought that I had?
Does this encourage anybody to go to file suit against YouTube or any of the other social media platforms for violating California law?
Because California business laws seem to be very favorable to the consumer, to the weaker end of the business relationship.
Is this going to inspire them to take suits under similar bases against YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter?
They've always distinguished between contract relationships and consumer relationships.
So when they're vendors is when they hold big tech accountable.
When it's consumers, it depends on the grounds.
If it's something like privacy or CP or something like that, they are allowing suits to go forward.
For pure censorship issues, it's going to depend on additional state law provisions.
And that's probably a good transition into the Texas new anti-censorship law that just passed this week.
All right, we're going to get there in one second.
I'm just going to read this one.
Florida here, school board making kids wear masks.
My seven-year-old is a nonverbal and autistic kid.
He will not tolerate masks.
At school, they will put him in detention until I pick him up.
Advice.
I think that's a violation of the anti-discrimination laws concerning perceived disability or actual disability.
There are specific ones that apply in this educational context.
So I think that's a violation.
They should be more sympathetic for autistic kids in those circumstances.
Generally, that's some of the disability that he's referencing potentially on the vaccine mandate context.
So that should be crystal clear because that's discrimination based on disability.
All right, what's going on in Texas?
Ah, so the state of Texas passed a law like Florida's, but a little bit better.
So it basically does two things.
One is if you discriminate based on viewpoint discrimination, anybody that has 50 million or more subscribers, so basically the big tech monopolist, the oligarchs, then you can sue in Texas and the attorney general can sue in Texas.
The second aspect is that they're requiring them to keep records.
So big tech must keep records of people that they are banning, why they are banning them, whether Viewpoint had anything to do with it, provide access to those records to the Texas State Attorney General's office and others in Texas, and including about their internal rules, what their real procedures are.
So I'm sure both parts will be challenged, like the Florida one was, but I think it will be much harder for them to prevail on the record-keeping part of it.
Because the record-keeping part of it is not censorship at all.
So their argument will be that they have a publisher's right to censor so that the law is a First Amendment violation for them, for punishing them if they, in fact, deplatformed someone based on viewpoint.
The question will be, there's a good op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on this, is that really they're more like common carriers.
They're more like conduits for speech than their own speech.
They're less like newspaper publishers and more like the telegraph and the telephone.
And in that context, then they can be governed like common carriers were governed, which allows for discrimination laws to limit what they can do.
I mean, imagine if back during the phone company days, Ma Bell said, oh, you know, we're a private company.
We're going to not allow you to make phone calls if we don't like the candidate you're making phone calls for.
I mean, that would have been shocking to people.
So in this context, really what they're doing, and they made a good argument in the Wall Street Journal piece, that really the whole purpose of Section 230 was predicated on the idea that they're not...
Really, newspaper publishers.
They're not analogous to newspapers.
They're much more analogous to common carriers.
And as such, there's always been constitutional authority to limit their ability to discriminate based on viewpoint or other forms of discrimination in that context.
So I think it has a fighting chance in the courts, probably still uphill, but given the court's deference to big tech in the Section 230 context and the First Amendment context, where only big tech speech is the only one that matters.
Unfortunately.
But I think the other part of the law will definitely get upheld.
I don't see how that's violative at all.
But hopefully it and the Florida case combined will present a good opportunity for the Supreme Court to clarify what big tech limits can be imposed.
Because this is the beginning of limiting big tech's ability to monopolize the public square for favored speech.
When has the common carrier or has the common carrier argument been raised yet?
In any of these big tech censorship lawsuits?
This is the first time.
Now, the Ohio Attorney General brought action to have them declared a common carrier under the law.
That case is still pending in the state of Ohio.
And for those of us who don't know, I think we've discussed it previously, to be declared a common carrier, what judicial legal threshold requirements have to be met?
Well, really, it's more by analogy.
So it's not so much that they would be declared a common carrier, but they're analogous to a common carrier for the purposes of speech regulation.
So in my view, like for example, when they say for the phone companies, you can't cut off speech based on viewpoint, they're not controlling the phone company's speech.
So I don't see how it's a First Amendment violation at all, such a law.
That's where it applies.
I don't think they're limiting big tech speech by saying that when you're carrying speech across your platform of other people, you can't discriminate based on viewpoint.
That argument never would have been upheld for telephone companies or the Telegraph, or for Western Union, so I don't know how it would be upheld.
Now, for big tech, if it was properly applied.
What the federal court did in Florida was say, nah, big tech is like a newspaper.
No, they're not.
They're not a conduit for other people's speech.
They may have other people's letters printed, but it's their speech fundamentally.
And that's why they can be held liable as if they were.
The whole point of Section 230 was big tech's not really a newspaper, so they shouldn't be held liable as if they were if somebody committed defamation or something else on their platform.
By that same logic, they don't have the same First Amendment protections when they're discriminating against speech.
Of other people, because that is not an action that's First Amendment protected when they are acting analogous to a common carrier that's simply a conduit for speech, not the speaker of the speech.
All right.
I mean, it's great.
We've seen a bunch of arguments fail now.
So we've seen Section 230 fail.
We've seen the corporate town argument fail.
This is a new one.
Texas is a favorable jurisdiction, I presume.
I mean, it'll be the Fifth Circuit.
But I mean, the utility is, it's not saying they're a state actor for holding them responsible under those standards, which was the Town Square argument and the Pruneyard Doctrine argument.
It's instead saying that they are not...
It's not their speech that's being regulated.
It's the speech of other people being protected.
And you have no First Amendment right to control other people's speech, for example.
So you have a First Amendment right to speak yourself.
And when you're simply acting as a conduit for speech, that's not your speech.
I mean, nobody really confused Trump's speech with being Twitter's recommended speech.
So that's how I never saw this as their First Amendment rights.
And, you know, the David Frenchies of the world and the others were misapplying First Amendment analysis in this context.
All right.
Now we've got a new case, National Football League versus Viva Barron's complaint.
NFL loss of revenue due to common sense.
That I presume, I didn't even know there's football on tonight, but I presume that's because nearly over 10,000 people watching this and not football.
Robert, Texas abortion law, while we're on the state of Texas, what's the situation with that?
So the Biden administration was clearly quite unhappy that the U.S. Supreme Court did not get involved and step into the Texas abortion law because the Texas abortion law is only a private cause of action.
But the lower court had recognized and the Supreme Court recognized that a declaratory relief could go forward.
There's already a suit pending for declaratory relief.
So the Justice Department just jumped in on top of that and brought their own suit.
I don't see how it's any different.
I mean, they're not going to get injunctive relief because that's already been denied by the Supreme Court.
So all they're doing is just adding their name to the equation and everything's a civil rights violation these days.
Pretty soon they're just going to say political disagreement with us is a civil rights violation.
This might be the perfect segue.
Unless there's more to add, this might be the perfect segue.
Robert, you sent me the lawsuit and I can't believe what I'm reading sometimes.
This was the Georgia voting laws which were being challenged as constitutional violations.
You know, I say this and I don't know.
Maybe there's a good reason.
Why this lawsuit stood a chance of success.
But bottom line, I'll add details if I miss them.
The Georgia voting laws, which allowed for mail-in voting, asking for mail-in ballots to send them back to vote early.
I don't know who filed the suit.
Just remind me in a second.
They filed suit on the basis that it was unconstitutional violation of rights because it didn't provide for the postage, for the envelope to be mailed back with the vote.
And I don't know what mail costs in the US.
Maybe it's much more than I think it is.
I presume it's 50 cents to a dollar.
And that's not to undermine 50 cents to a dollar.
But I don't know who would take a lawsuit on this basis to argue constitutional rights violations because your request to mail-in vote did not come with a prepaid postage return.
Okay, so who filed the suit?
Do you remember offhand?
So it was a Georgia voting rights group, and their argument was that it was a poll tax.
It was a secret poll tax, a 50-cent poll tax to vote by mail.
So, of course, the suit failed in the 11th Circuit.
The court noted that you don't have to mail it.
You can go in person and vote.
You can go drop it off at a drop box.
You can go drop it off at the voting precinct.
Frankly, all it really does is make sure there's not a bunch of free ballots out there floating around.
This is where I don't want to get cynical.
A site that puts equality in the sense of equality of outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.
Thomas Sowell, we should have him on as a sidebar one of these days.
Reading it, Robert, they want to not only facilitate mail-in voting, but make sure that all of the requested ballots have prepaid postage on them.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
Is there any world in which that does not look like...
A request for abuse.
That's exactly what it is.
And the court saw through it as such.
Said that this clearly is not a poll tax.
The old poll tax was a way to keep poor people from voting.
It's perceived to have been primarily racially discriminatory.
However, if you studied in detail, it was actually discriminatory on a class basis.
That most poor and working class whites in the South could not vote because of the poll tax.
It was so onerous.
What was the poll tax, just for those of us who don't know?
You had to bring money with you to vote.
Based on what?
Based on income?
A flat amount.
But it was usually a sufficient amount to discourage people that didn't have a lot of money to not vote.
And so, I mean, the example of this, 1900, it was one of the many.
They had grandfather clauses and other ones, too.
But this was the one that was the most onerous.
Mississippi, for example, had more voters in 1860 than it did 1900.
And so that should tell you something.
So it's one of the myths out there that it was only African Americans and black voters who were blocked.
It's not true.
A lot of poor working class whites were blocked as well, and intentionally so, because of the populist movement of the late 1890s that took fire throughout Dixie, including where I'm at right now in central Piedmont, North Carolina.
But the idea that a poll tax you're paying to the government.
And it's usually meant to be prohibitive.
Here, there's no cost to go vote, no cost to drop off your ballot, just a cost if you choose to mail it.
And that money goes to the post office.
It doesn't go to the local state government.
So by no means was it a poll tax.
So the court made the right decision.
Yeah, well, I mean, I read it and it's like, this is where one might laugh at the litigious nature of the United States, that an organization would actually file suit for the aggregate cost of a stamp, of an envelope.
If you chose to request a mail-in ballot, it looks...
Now, what is it?
If you're organizing those ballots, that might get expensive, right?
I mean, you might be looking at $100,000 times the dollars or a million maybe.
Always 4D level chess.
I hadn't even thought of that.
So you're poisoning my mind, Robert.
Okay.
Someone had asked in the chat, any Rittenhouse updates?
No, no Rittenhouse updates.
I was supposed to be up there this week, but didn't get a chance to because of the Deer Courthouse here in North Carolina.
What do you want to work into now?
Because I don't know anything about the Dog Whisperer versus Queen Latifah.
I just saw the headline.
Apparently the Dog Whisperer's dog killed Queen Latifah's dog.
And then they apparently, according to the lawsuit, covered it up.
But it'd be amazing if the Dog Whisperer's dog whacked Queen Latifah's dog.
I just thought it looked like a fun suit.
I haven't seen any more details than that.
That one might be a good distraction from what's going on in the world to cover.
I'll do a vlog on that at some point this week.
The next week is not just horrendous in terms of booking.
It's a 24-7 thing when you're running for office.
There's never a moment where you're saying, oh, I can just relax and do something.
Can I be doing something for this?
There was an incident in Montreal, actually, at one of those doggy kennels where one of the dogs...
A bigger dog destroyed a smaller dog, literally, like, pulled it apart.
And then in order to cover it up, they said, oh, the dog ran away.
And the owners of that dog, who were very steadfast owners of the dog, got the police involved, got, like, got the community involved who were going to go on the streets and look for this dog.
And then after that, they finally had to admit the kennel that, you know, the dog had effectively gotten eaten by a bigger dog.
Well, whenever I think of the dog whisperer, I think of South Park, where he trains Cartman.
But the other big case this week, or the case that may be starting to come undone, is the January 6th case.
Yes.
Go ahead.
So unconstitutional charges potentially in the January 6th?
What's the latest?
They have very few people that they have violence charges against.
I think it's around 600 people that they've indicted.
And I think the number they have violence charges against, you could probably count with both hands.
Almost everybody's most serious charge, including the QAnon shaman who pled guilty apparently to this charge, is obstruction of an official proceeding by corrupt means.
The problem is, as soon as a lot of us that saw that statute thought that that was not applicable here.
To give people an idea, this has been a statute that's been analogous statutes, misused and abused for a long time by the Justice Department, and the courts have constantly corrected them on it.
Years ago, John Poindexter was charged with corruptly impeding Congress based on perjury claims, and ultimately it was set aside because the issue is you need to have clear notice.
to the public as to what conduct is criminal.
And even some liberal, then so some smart criminal defense lawyers had already raised this in their motions to dismiss Robert, stop there for a second.
John Pierce is out of hospital.
Off the ventilator and responsive?
He didn't explain what he was in there for.
He just said, I'm out.
Everything's fine.
We're back to it.
And the NPR was like, where's this whole team you keep talking about?
He's like, oh, they're coming.
They're coming.
It's official that he's out of the hospital, off the ventilator, and responsive now.
Yeah, he's out of the hospital.
He never said whether he was on or not on a ventilator.
He said he was in there for 12 days, and he's now been released.
He didn't give any further detail.
And the NPR piece was mighty interesting in some of the details it did have about maybe some other things that might have inspired that visit.
But the actual competent and capable defense lawyers in the case have filed smart motions to dismiss.
Pointing out that this law either doesn't apply to these defendants or the law is clearly unconstitutional because it's void for vagueness.
In other words, if it could be used to apply to them, it's obviously too vague.
And some of the judges started asking the prosecutors this week, including the Justice Department had appellate counsel present, as the Washington Post made note of, which, for those that don't know, appeals counsel.
Almost never appears at the district court level.
So when they do, it means the Justice Department is nervous that they have a problem with their cases, potentially.
And so because the appellate branch is the one that really understands the nuances of the law because they handle...
In the Justice Department, the trial lawyers almost never handled the appeals and the appeal lawyers almost never handled the trials.
They have them in segregated, separate divisions within the Justice Department.
And if you read the law, you read the history of the law, you know it's analogous laws.
It talks about corruptly impeding, and it's in the same statute that's about witness tampering.
So to give you an idea, what this was about was if, and usually by official proceeding, they mean like administrative and quasi-adjudicative proceedings.
As applied to Congress, they've just said a proceeding before Congress.
So one of the motions to dismiss were one of the grounds was...
You know, this Electoral College meeting is not really the kind of official proceeding that the law intends, part one.
Part two is that if you get to the substance of what the law is about, it's about things like perjury.
You know, it's really meant for anyone to frustrate and to basically render useless a proceeding that already took place because now it had been invalidated for whatever the reasons, fraud, misrepresentation, so you have to either do it again.
And violence isn't even part of it.
Right.
It's not about protest, not about violence, not about any of that.
It's about somehow corrupting the investigative fact-finding function with some sort of corrupt action, like a fabricated document, a fictitious document, suborning perjury, intimidating a witness.
That's what it's been meant to be about.
They weren't in a fact-finding mission as part of a congressional official proceeding.
They were meeting as a separate electoral.
College confirmation.
If it could be expanded to such a degree, then it's void for vagueness because it captures too much conduct.
That you're not put on fair notice of.
And some of the judges were like, okay, what if somebody comes in?
And they started talking about, and this is good use by the defense lawyers, comparing all the other circumstances where this happens as a regular basis in D.C. Somebody tries to stand up and protest in the middle of a hearing.
Someone locks themselves to the door.
So that was the number one argument is, okay, now do everyone who interrupted the Kavanaugh hearings for the exact same charge.
Whether or not you think one was more violent and more insurrectionist than the other, effectively, as far as the charge goes, they were both one and the same.
Exactly.
And the reason why that was always an effective political point is courts don't want to...
It's mostly liberals that do that, number one.
And number two, they don't want to start locking up everybody for 20 years that decides to protest inside of Congress, because that's effectively how that law is being interpreted as applied to this group of people.
So I think the law is unconstitutional.
Three different judges raised questions about it this week.
That suggests that the entire Justice Department theory of the case, because all the rest of the charges are misdemeanors for almost everybody, are falling apart entirely.
And so that means that they're in serious trouble.
That's why they're trying to force feed as many pleas as possible before this can get fully litigated.
Even Obama judges ask this question.
They're like, hold on a second.
There's problems if we follow this through.
It's our people that will be locked up next.
And so now that they're recognizing that, I think that those cases might be completely collapsing quicker rather than later.
Because the idea would be that if protest is...
Let's just...
I see what you want to call an insurrectionist protest.
If protest is enough to...
Warrant charges and condemnations for obstruction of official government proceeding left, right, and center for peaceful protests.
And to give some examples, United States v.
Aguilar, a federal judge, lied to two FBI agents in the middle of a grand jury investigation.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously determined he could not be charged with obstruction because he didn't know that they would repeat the lies to the grand jury.
Arthur Anderson knew that an SEC investigation was coming, so they went and found the shredder and went shoot, shoot, shoot before the subpoena could get there.
Nine to nothing.
U.S. Supreme Court said that's not obstructing your proceeding because you weren't notified of the proceeding yet.
So the courts don't like efforts to convert obstruction into this catch-all that can throw everybody into jail and prison.
And as you know, this would be applied to protesters in particular.
It's actually amazing.
Which lawyers raised this argument for the first time?
Historically, I guess, how has this provision of law ever been applied?
It's almost new because the old version of this was only a five-year statute, not a 20-year statute.
And again, prior versions of it have been struck down as unconstitutional in the Poindexter case and some other cases.
They've never liked the corruptly impairing thing.
It's just too vague.
What does corruptly mean?
That's the problem.
Now, you can tell by analogy what they're getting at.
They mean, through deception or some illicit means, you muck up the ability for the investigative fact-finding function of some aspect of government to perform accurately.
Now, what they should do is they should say that.
Whereas, obviously, riotous, raucous protesters, put it this way, if what they did can be called criminal obstruction, Every BLM person could be in jail across the country because there's state law analogous versions of this in every state.
Well, that's the issue.
The term corrupt has to mean something.
So it can't just mean interference.
It has to be corrupt interference in a way that involves an underlying corruption, not just deception, forced perjury, witness tampering, nothing like what happened here.
And so as a matter of procedure, how does that then work?
Do they raise that as defenses to the trial itself, or does it come up beforehand?
It's beforehand.
Several of the defendants have brought, with three different lawyers, including some federal public defenders, have brought motions to dismiss that charge on the grounds that it is unconstitutional, either as applied or because it's void for vagueness.
And I presume a lot of these people have been in pretrial detention for some time.
Yes, yes.
I mean, you're going on eight months, some of them.
That's shocking.
Barnes, do you think it is a good move to decriminalize homicide at state and Fed levels for express contract purposes of mutual combat?
Okay, sorry.
Thank you.
The old Southern remedy.
Let's go back to honor duels.
I don't mind honor duels.
There's something to be said for them.
This is going to be something that all of the other defendants, if they haven't already filed these motions, are going to pick up on quickly.
If it is granted for some defendants, is it just automatically granted for all?
No, they all have to bring their own ones.
If John Pierce is listening, learn how to use copy and paste.
Before we forget, we've got 10 minutes left.
There's a few things we want to catch up on.
The drone strikes in Afghanistan, Robert, a lot of people now know it.
Again, it's the fake news cycle over and over.
The initial reporting, the truth comes out, move on to another story.
What was initially reported as being enemy combatants killed by drone strikes turns out to be innocent civilians and even an aid worker and some young people.
The two questions are, you know, going back to Obama's drone strikes, when any president issues these orders for, they're nothing shy, no other way of saying it, extrajudicial executions.
What is, is there any constitutional protocol, is there any legal protocol to issuing these acts in, I guess it's in the absence of a state of war?
I mean, what are the legal protocol that you need to employ before issuing these types of orders?
Well, I mean, they are kind of war crimes and may be considered such under international law.
In the presidential context, this might fit the definition of impeachable conduct.
I'm not a fan of using impeachment very much at all.
Unless it is someone that's committing a high crime or misdemeanor, number one.
And number two, the kind of crime that removal is the only real option for because they'll continue to do it or get away with it unless impeachment is taken as an option.
You can't wait for an election.
I think certain kinds of war crimes do fit that definition.
And if Joe Biden knew that he was killing innocent people...
And did so anyway, then I do believe that is an impeachable offense.
And if they're looking for an impeachable offense, rather than some of the smaller political stuff they want to make impeachable, this is what they should impeach him on.
For the deliberate homicide of a family to cover up for his political scandal and the way he's handled Afghanistan.
And then on the allegation that he knew that was the case before it happened.
This came out so fast that he almost had to have known.
At a minimum, he didn't think he was killing ISIS, because if that was there, that information would have come out.
Instead, there appeared to be no basis to believe this was ISIS.
That was a made-up excuse afterwards.
So it appeared to be nothing more than changing the story for a few days to look like he got retaliatory revenge, and he did it like an old-fashioned sacrificial killing, and he did it to an aid worker and his family.
So that truly is unpardonable, in my view.
And, I mean, we've talked about the impeachable offense.
I mean, a lot of people are clamoring for his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, blocking private efforts to save or extract Americans.
Is that...
Once we've seen how the impeachable offense was used on Trump twice...
Well, yeah.
This seems like a no-brainer, but I mean...
By the Trump standard, it's an easy impeachment, by the Trump standard.
But Iowa is not in favor of the Trump standard.
So my view is a lot of those other decisions are within discretionary choice.
I didn't see them as necessarily a high crime or misdemeanor, number one, and number two, the kind of high crime that could only be remedied by impeachment and not an election.
But, you know, deliberate homicide is a different thing.
And this has that hallmark to it.
And this is like when Clinton bombed that...
But at least I think it was empty when Clinton bombed that so-called factory.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know if he killed anybody in it, but I mean, here he knew he was killing people.
It's amazing.
I mean, I don't...
I'm not president.
I'm not the commander-in-chief.
I don't have access to all this intelligence, but it seems that you, before, you know, remotely dispatching bombs via drone...
You've got to have a bunch of damn good information to know what you're striking.
And if you don't, then it's negligence at best.
And if you do know that it's questionable, then it's something more...
It's at least reckless homicide.
And that does meet the definition of a high crime.
And it's the kind of high crime you could only commit as president.
That's the second standard that I have.
And the third is it's not something easily remediable by an election three years from now.
All right, well, it's horrible.
You hear it?
It's beyond incompetence because what it is is it's hiding the corruption through more corruption.
You mess up each and every step of the way on Afghanistan.
How do you distract from the news?
Well, let's feign that Time Magazine strength where we're staring down Putin with our reflective Top Gun sunglasses.
And what do we do?
Go bomb something.
Just bomb something.
And it doesn't matter what it is, because if it's a family and five children, we'll get the news cycle to switch stories a few days later, and everyone else sitting from the comfort of their own home is not going to give one sweet bugger all in a few weeks.
They'll just move on to something else.
Yeah, we have a president who thinks he's the actor from, was it Hot Shots with Charlie Sheen?
The president says, a complete nut job and derelict, and that's what we have.
Was it Leslie Nielsen who was the president?
Or was the other guy?
It was the guy that was in the airplane movies with...
But he was like the captain or something.
But I forget his name.
I can see him.
Someone in the chat probably was.
We're going to get it in five seconds.
Okay, the other one that I know people want to talk about before we end.
Larry Elder, Gavin Newsom, recall.
When is the D-date on this recall?
I think that it's already over, unfortunately.
I think that the big gamble that Newsom took...
Which was to have no other Democrat on the ballot.
And the idea would be that it would rally Democrats to realize it's either Newsom or a Republican, not Newsom or another Democrat.
If Bobby Kennedy had been on that ballot, if any other Democrat, major Democrat had been on that ballot, Newsom would have been recalled.
It looks like Democrats are rallying in fear of just Republicans in general.
Though the funniest thing has been them accusing Larry Elder of being the black face of white supremacy.
I mean, that's the insanity.
But also the money has been overwhelmingly in Newsom's pocket.
So, you know, the money is about 10 to 1, maybe more has been spent in favor of Newsom.
So while the passion is still on the recall side, it looks like enough Democrats or Biden supporters are rallying to Newsom that Newsom will win pretty, will beat the recall effort.
Not win by anywhere near the 26-point margin he won before, but may still even be double digits by the end of the night.
Or the end of the month that they count ballots in California.
Hold on a second.
When you say outspend 10 to 1, what amounts of money do we know?
Are we looking at here?
Oh, tens of millions for Newsom.
Tens of millions.
And so the process now for counting the recall, why does it go on for so long?
Because the ballot can even come in after Election Day.
So, you know, the ballots can come in for days after Election Day.
In California, I don't think is – I think the quickest they've made a result has been like two weeks.
Usually it's like a month.
We'll have a pretty good indicator, but the early vote tracking suggests that there's enough Democrats voting and that Democrats are united enough behind Biden that – I'm sorry, behind Newsom that he'll hold.
But it put in a good scare.
So it was still a very great effort to even put him on the ballot in the first place.
But it just shows that California is a very democratic state right now.
Though I think my current best bet that's paying off well politically was over 3.7% for the PPC in Canada, and that's looking like it's going to cash.
This might be the most optimistic thing to end on, Robert.
We're thus far polling at 10% to 12%, and that's notwithstanding.
Which would be incredible for a third party, new third party, to increase vote by tenfold.
That would be a fantastic outcome and a great message to Trudeau and the rest of the West about how popular or maybe not so popular some of their vaccine mandate ideas are.
All that I know is that if the internal stats that I'm getting are accurate, 100% of my district is going to vote for me because the only people who have said they voted for me have voted for me.
There you go.
Okay, so Robert, I think we did good.
We got to almost everything.
But actually, one last thing with Newsman Larry Elders.
When did the count start?
What's the process?
Everyone's been mailing in their votes.
When did it start and when does it officially end?
So they don't start counting ballots until the polls close on election night.
But what they do know is they know who voted.
So they know the party, they know their demographics, their age, their race, and there's people who track this for a living.
And so there you're able to estimate, get a good sense of, I mean, Republicans are going to turn out more than Democrats.
Pro-recall constituencies are going to turn out more than pro-Nusom constituencies, but not enough to overcome the Democrats rallying behind Newsom.
All right.
And you know what?
While I say we're at 9,300, everyone drop a comment if you do it in the section right now, and we'll see the chat get disabled with activity.
We did good, Robert.
I'm looking at Rumble, and I don't see any more Rumble rants there, but we're at over 2,300.
So another massive night.
We didn't miss anything, and if we did, we'll get it next week.
Who do we have on for Wednesday?
Do we know?
Oh, and nobody for this Wednesday because I'm in trial.
Ah, okay, good.
The goal is that next Wednesday we may have Matt Stoller, the big antitrust expert.
He's a Democrat lefty guy, but he's great on antitrust issues.
So he's loosely committed.
I got to confirm, but it looks like we'll have him for next week.
All right, awesome.
And maybe I'll do something Wednesday if you don't mind, Robert.
I'll find someone or something.
People want us on Friday.
Oh, and coming up will be Lauren Southern.
We didn't get to her Patreon case.
We'll get to that next week.
But she may be available sometime soon, too.
So she'd be another fellow Canadian, though she's escaped Canada, too.
Can you imagine?
I think to Australia or someplace.
Can you imagine what bad luck she's had?
What's going on in Australia is next level, literal New World Order coming out of that person's mouth.
I don't know who she is, but whenever she talks, I'm terrified, especially when the audio is off.
But then when I hear what she says, Even more terrifying.
They may finally get the...
A lot of them are descendants of prisoners and whatnot.
You'd think they would wake up to all this, but they're starting to cut off the beer.
So maybe they'll start to finally protest in Australia.
All right, Robert, leave us with something good for the week, then we're going to say our proper goodbyes.
Yeah, the PPC.
If PPC gets more than 5%, that's a win.
If they beat 0.7%, then folks who took that bet have already cashed in their bet and hoping that they get over 10%.
They get double digits.
It's going to shock.
debates and it will shock much of the Western world.
And that's the kind of shock they need.
From your mouth to the political god's ears, Robert, stick around.
We'll say our proper goodbyes.
Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
Enjoy what's left of the weekend.
Stay tuned.
We'll do something Wednesday, everybody, so don't worry.
We will not go into withdrawal.
I've got some radio stuff and television stuff for the campaign, but we will see each other on the interwebs.
Everyone else?
Take care.
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