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March 2, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:40:22

Sidebar with Civil Rights Attorney, Jenin Younes - Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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	Legit late, people.
	Legit late.
	And it's my fault because I was trying to give the room a more lively, less bathroom-y feel.
	I'm not in the bathroom tonight.
	We have a guest tonight that is not unusual.
	Not that I don't have respect for Barnes, but Barnes knows of my family situation.
	Yeah, anti-media.
	That's the shirt for tonight.
	So I've placed a nice plastic thingy thing in the back, a plastic plant.
	We've got a good episode tonight.
	This is going to be law stuffs, and what a world it is to be alive with the law stuffs.
	Jenin Yunus, I believe I'm pronouncing her last name properly, but Jenin Yunus is an outspoken civil rights attorney who has been raging against the machine of these lockdown measures for the last little while.
	Doing great work.
	Now, while everyone...
	I hope my connection is sturdy enough.
	We're out in the boondocks, although it's not really the boondocks, it's the mountains.
	So we have internet.
	I just hope it's steady enough.
	And yet, viva chia, pet.
	Hold on, let's bring this one up.
	My wife said, eventually the hair will stop growing.
	And I said, that sounds like a bet.
	So we're going to see.
	So Jenin Yunus is doing civil rights work.
	Her Twitter handle is lefty...
	Lefty lockdowns won, I think.
	I forget exactly what it is.
	Raw told me that I think she considers herself to be a lefty, left-leaning individual who has been fighting this machine that has been put into place.
	So we're going to have some interesting discussion about that while everyone trickles in and while everyone, share the link around so that we can get this out there, but I'll be posting clips and highlights and it's going to be amazing.
	I'm not on the lam from the RCMP, people.
	Supposed to be a ski trip.
	I went...
	I refused to...
	You know what I refused to show.
	Vaccine passports.
	Even though they're going to be revoked on March 14th.
	For now, you still have to show them.
	To go downhill skiing.
	Because I guess when you sit in a chairlift or the gondola, you get too close to each other.
	So I have been doing cross-country skiing.
	And yesterday I did 12 kilometers.
	And today I did 7.5.
	And I'm tired.
	It's an actual good workout.
	So I don't know how long we have Jen in for.
	I'm going to bring her in in about 30 seconds, just so everybody can get the trickle-in effect.
	Standard disclaimers, people.
	Thank you all in advance for Super Chats, for the support, for everything.
	YouTube takes 30% of Super Chats, so if you don't like that, we are simultaneously streaming on Rumble, and I'm contemplating whether or not we move this over to Rumble exclusively at some point, depending on the nature of the discussion.
	Because if I get the feeling that we can't have an honest and open discussion on YouTube, we will move everyone over to Rumble, where we can have free, actual meaningful free speech discussions.
	Superchats are not a right of entry to the conversation.
	If you're going to give a superchat and you're going to get angry with me if I don't bring it up like this, I will not be able to bring all of them up.
	If you're going to feel rooked, miffed, shilled, whatever, grifted...
	Don't give the super chat.
	I don't like people feeling bad.
	Would you guys like to talk with Lieutenant Krohn from the USAF that wrote policy...
	Hold on, let me just get my phone here.
	Interesting, we could talk about that.
	Screenshotted, and I will see about this.
	So, all that to say, this is going to be an interesting discussion.
	Barnes is going to be here in a few minutes.
	I'm going to bring Jenin in.
	And we're going to start the...
	I suspect she's seen enough live streams to know.
	We're going to go back to childhood.
	And it's going to be a deep and meaningful conversation.
	Jenin, how goes the battle?
	It goes okay.
	By the way, my name is actually pronounced Janine, but it's totally understandable from the spelling that you wouldn't get that.
	How do I pronounce your last name?
	Eunice.
	So you got that right.
	Yeah, it's not phonetic.
	Janine.
	I think that's grammatically incorrect because it requires the E. I'm joking, my apologies.
	It's true.
	No, it's, you know, I blame my parents.
	Well, no, so we're going to get into this, but the elevator, and I'm sorry for not being in my good office with my good camera and my good studio, but I got a fake plant behind me.
	I have one too.
	Well, you've got a desk, at least.
	I'm sitting in the corner.
	We're in a chalet, and there's like 13 people in this house, and I've got to find the quietest room away from the action.
	So, back corner of the house today.
	Janine, elevator pitch for anybody who doesn't know who you are, and then we're going to get into who you actually are.
	Sure, sure.
	So I am an attorney at the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
	I've mostly been challenging vaccine mandates at the state level.
	Actually, some at the federal level as well.
	You described my Twitter handle perfectly.
	The story behind that was I didn't understand how Twitter worked when I created the account in September of 2020.
	So I tried to make my name Lefty Lockdown Skeptic because I was anonymous at that time.
	And I didn't get that the handle was really important, so I cut off and made it Lefty Lockdown's one, which sounds so stupid.
	Because I didn't get Twitter, I was like, oh, well, that little at thing at the bottom, who cares?
	Well, now I'm wondering two things.
	You're either much older than you look, or you have a good excuse for not getting on Twitter before 2020.
	I would think young people are all on Twitter, so I'm actually torn.
	How is it that you never had a Twitter handle until 2020?
	Yeah, so I was sort of anti-social media, actually.
	I had been on Facebook at some point, but I thought it brought out all the worst in people I found on Facebook.
	Real-life relationships fraying over this electronic form of communication.
	And I actually, as my handle would imply, I sort of have a left-leaning background.
	And when John McCain died, a lot of my friends were...
	Celebrating that.
	And I was like, this is disgusting.
	You might disagree with Sean McCain, but he was an honorable man.
	So I was like, I'm done with this social media thing.
	So I deleted it.
	But then I became very active against the lockdowns, which I suppose I can get into more how that happened.
	And some of the people, including Martin Fuldorf, who was one of the great Barrington Declaration signers, who I was in touch with, really encouraged me to get on Twitter, saying that was really the best way to...
	Get my views out there.
	Okay, so now there's a lot to unpack, but we're going to get there in a second.
	I'm going to talk about Tamara later.
	This is Tamara Lich.
	I don't know if you're following what's going on in Canada.
	She's been locked up now in jail for 12 days on mischief charges from that illegal Ottawa protest.
	And the judge, after spending an entire day rehearing the bail hearing, said, I've been sitting since nine, so I'm going to render my judgment on Monday.
	In the meantime, Tamara is going to have spent over two weeks in jail on mischief.
	Oh, jeez.
	Wow.
	So you're from New York, correct?
	Well, I lived in New York for a very long time.
	I went to law school there, and then I was a public defender there actually for 10 years.
	And then I moved to D.C. for this job last May.
	So now I'm in D.C. Okay, and upbringing.
	Like, you say, when I see Twitter handles that have the word lefty in them, I think that it's a conservative or a right-wing making fun of the lefties.
	What was your upbringing?
	Like, you know, where were your parents from, childhood growing up, and how did you get into that?
	Oh, you're asking such deep questions.
	No one's actually asking.
	We do this every time, because for the first time I meet someone, you can tell a lot about a person by their, you know...
	Family situations growing up and how it's crafted to be who they are.
	But if I ever pry too much, let me know.
	No, no, no, I don't mind.
	So actually, I was born in Saudi Arabia.
	My father is Palestinian and my mother, but my mother's American.
	So they met here, my father.
	Actually, both my parents were in a linguistics PhD program, and they ended up going back to the Middle East for a bit.
	I don't understand why.
	My mother found Saudi Arabia unbearable for obvious reasons, and so they came back here when I was two.
	We were in California for a bit, but then I mostly grew up in Ithaca, New York.
	My father is a professor at Cornell.
	And so I would say I identified a lot with...
	Left politics in a lot of ways because of where I grew up, Ithaca is extremely liberal.
	And it was sort of the viewpoint that I was exposed to.
	And then, you know, you're like, I went to Cornell, and then I went to NYU Law School.
	It's sort of everybody was around.
	And then I became a public defender.
	I would say I have some views that probably would be considered sort of leftist, but...
	I was always a free thinker.
	And actually, my mom has a really strong libertarian streak.
	So I was always like, disagreeing with my left friends about like free speech and various other issues.
	A lot of the, you know, canceling people because of accusations that, you know, weren't really that big.
	You know, big of a deal to me.
	So I always had these disagreements.
	And then when COVID happened, I completely disagreed immediately with everything.
	I was like, this is insane.
	You're, like, telling people they can't leave their homes, they can't send their kids to school, they can't run their businesses.
	Like, and you think that's okay?
	You want the government to be able to tell people to do this?
	And this is, like, a liberal position?
	So I disagreed immediately and vociferously.
	And I was, nobody, like, I was punished.
	You know, I was basically excommunicated from left-leaning circles.
	Janine, I can't not ask the questions on this.
	Your dad was Palestinian Muslim?
	Which part did he come from?
	He actually comes from a city near Janine.
	That's why your name makes a lot more sense now.
	So your dad was born and raised in Palestine?
	In the West Bank, yeah, exactly.
	And did he...
	Fled?
	Well, first of all, how old was he when he left?
	And what conditions?
	In his 20s.
	So he went to the university.
	His parents were like peasants, actually.
	So they were illiterate peasants.
	He grew up in a village.
	They didn't read or write.
	But he always had this desire to get an education.
	So he sort of pushed for that, even though it wasn't really what they wanted.
	Because they just wanted him to work with the sheep or whatever.
	So he ended up...
	Going to the University of Jordan, and then he got a scholarship to UT at Austin for a linguistics PhD program, which is where I came at my mother.
	Okay.
	Now, again, I'm fascinated by this because having a dad who was born in the West Bank, I mean, raised, and then fled, what sort of lingering or lasting impact did that have on him?
	I mean, how did he react towards the West and moving to New York?
	New York has a certain demographic that might...
	It would be a good premise for a comedy movie here, but as a matter of reality, what was your dad like growing up and what impact did his childhood and being brought up in the West Bank have on him?
	So he's a very interesting person.
	He grew up a fundamentalist Muslim.
	He really questioned a lot.
	And one of the things he said that actually led him to come to the West was he...
	Question the fact that his sisters were treated differently than him.
	And, you know, he grew up with them when he was little, obviously.
	And he, you know, he thought they're like me.
	And then they got taken out of school at the age of, you know, nine or 10 or whatever, married off at a very young age to men that, you know, older men that they didn't necessarily.
	And he hated it.
	So he said this made him really question the culture and question the whole thing.
	And he actually, I'm not sure, I think it was when he met my mother, who was pretty agnostic.
	He gave up the belief in God.
	So I was actually raised without religion, per se.
	I mean, my father's retained some of the cultural beliefs, which I think it's hard not to do that.
	But, you know, he was a bit strict growing up.
	And I actually think...
	That's one of the things that made me immediately question the lockdown.
	When someone tries to tell me what to do, I'm like, well, why?
	Do you have a good reason for that?
	This is fascinating.
	I'll leave this issue after this one.
	I'm sort of thinking, is there any chance he's ever going to see this?
	Especially now with this Russian-Ukrainian conflict and it drawing passions from both sides and I always likened it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to some extent where anyone who has a history one way or the other is going to have very strong beliefs and then a great many other people will not even understand the history enough to understand the nuance and it's just going to be black and white one way or the other.
	From my own personal perspective, did your dad?
	Have a nuanced approach to this?
	Does he have what many would think would be the vehement hatred for the one side given where he grew up and was brought up?
	You mean Palestine-Israel, I take it?
	Yes.
	No, so he's actually, I mean, he does not have vehement hatred for Israel.
	He actually has, you know, he appreciates education, women's equality.
	Right for everybody.
	So that's actually not his perspective.
	And he's not a two-state solution person.
	He actually wants one state.
	He thinks that the Palestinians should just be given equal rights, and it should be Israel with Palestinians having equal rights.
	Of course, that poses a problem to the idea of a Jewish state, because it won't be Jewish majority anymore if that happens.
	Okay, now I will leave it there, because it's very interesting.
	It'll work well.
	At this point we'll discuss, we might touch on the Russia-Ukraine stuff, but it's an amazing thing where the history, the memories, the life experience that your dad must have had, and how that translates to you growing up.
	How many siblings do you have?
	So I have three brothers, actually.
	I'm the oldest.
	Okay.
	And may I ask, did any of them go into law as well?
	No, no, I'm the only lawyer.
	I have an economist and a sort of data analysis and an engineer.
	Okay, very cool.
	So you study law.
	Where did you study law and when did you graduate?
	I was at NYU Law and then I graduated in 2011.
	2011.
	So you've been practicing.
	My goodness, it's 2022.
	You've been practicing for 12 years now.
	I know.
	Oh, it's amazing.
	First of all, and I was sworn in before you, so now I feel very old.
	Practically speaking, out of the U.S., you get your law degree.
	Do you have to do what they call, we call it a stature, an internship before you can become a lawyer?
	And do you get that job at a small law firm?
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, so typically in the U.S., you work in law organizations between, like in the summer, so between semesters.
	Sorry, between the spring and the fall semester.
	So it's very common to work at a non-profit or a sort of public interest organization.
	Your first year, normally firms won't hire you.
	And then after your second year, you work at a firm if you want and you can get the job.
	And then after your third year, you study for the bar and then you go to your job.
	Okay, now people in the chat are saying that the internet is lagging.
	So I apologize.
	Yeah, it is.
	I see one, two of the three little bars, and now I see four.
	Okay, we're good.
	So where did you start working out of law school?
	So I clerked for a judge for a year in New Jersey.
	I did appeals, and then I went to the public defender's office.
	So I was in the public defender's office for nine years.
	COVID, I was there.
	Yeah, and then when COVID happened, I started there in 2012.
	COVID happened in 2020.
	I kept working.
	But I was, you know, I became public about my views over the summer of 2020.
	And it was made clear to me that my colleagues were not impressed.
	Nine years as a public defender.
	Yeah.
	What sort of, I mean, I guess you saw everything, but if you had like a three or let's just say one to three of the most memorable cases that you had to do, like what type of public defense were you doing?
	That's it.
	So I actually do appeals, which is unusual because actually not every state provides for the right to appeal, so you don't always have public defenders.
	So I did a lot of serious felonies because it was mostly people who'd been in prison for a long time or were facing on prison sentences.
	Let's see.
	Most interesting.
	I mean, I had some very interesting cases.
	I had a guy who had ostensibly...
	allegedly murdered his wife, had had I'm actually not sure what I should say.
	He had, he had, well, It's all in the record.
	He'd been having a lot of...
	He was a teacher.
	He was supposed to be getting his master's degree.
	In the U.S., most systems, you have a certain amount of time to get your master's degree or you can't keep teaching.
	So you can do it while you're teaching, but then you have to, you know, within whatever, two or three years.
	So instead of doing that, he was seeing prostitutes and not getting his master's degree and his wife and spending all their money.
	So his wife found out about it.
	According to the prosecutor, I was his defense attorney.
	According to the prosecutor, he stabbed her to death.
	There was no hard evidence, though.
	It was all circumstantial.
	They had gotten in a public fight the night before and stuff like that.
	That was a very interesting case.
	I also had a number of clients who, and actually I would say this in the COVID context, who had been stabbed or shot in the course of robbing someone or Another one.
	Raping somebody.
	And they, you know, they got treated at the hospital because I've heard so many people say things like, if you didn't get the COVID vaccine, you shouldn't get treatment.
	And I'm like, I had clients who were literally stabbed while they were raping someone and we treat them, but you want to let someone die who, like, didn't get the COVID vaccine?
	I don't mean to laugh at the tragedy.
	I mean, I'm laughing at the irony.
	I know someone whose wife, they're unvaxxed.
	The wife broke her ankle and they wouldn't operate on her ankle until she took a test, which she refused.
	And then they finally agreed to do the surgery, but they weren't happy about it.
	I see Barnes is in the house.
	So hold on.
	Actually, I'm going to bring Barnes in because I got one more question before.
	Robert?
	Ginny, you might have to move your camera now that we're certainly going to be off center.
	Or you, yeah.
	But Ginny, so you're literally defending the worst of the worst.
	We had Dershowitz on explain how he goes about doing this, but...
	There's going to be some other preconceived notions here.
	You're a woman, you're young, and you're defending the most violent of criminals who are stabbing their wives to death.
	How do you do it, and what's the strategy of defending someone who's alleged or accused to have done that particular example?
	Well, I mean, it very much depends on the fact pattern.
	So in that case, there were a number of issues related to the evidence that came in.
	So in that case, I argued.
	The evidence about him seeing the prostitutes, the evidence about him not going to class, that was prejudicial and not probative.
	So, you know, it very much depends.
	My position was that, you know, everybody deserves a defense.
	These are the most vulnerable people.
	And the state often does abuse its power.
	And it's many of the things that have brought me to the position that I am in now, really questioning the state.
	But, of course, you do see some difficult things.
	Yeah, and I mean, to what degree, what would you say that, in terms of your trajectory, politically, in terms of questioning the state, when did, you know, I grew up, you know, doing a lot of civil rights work and criminal defense work, and it was a fair amount of the bar that was doing that work that was skeptical of the state.
	But at some point, a large number of them became, you know, statists themselves, turned to embrace the state, which we saw a peak of during the lockdowns and all the rest.
	What led you to stick with being skeptical of the state rather than embrace the state when the pandemic politics came about?
	Well, yeah, that's a really good question.
	So as I was actually telling Viva earlier, I have a little bit of a contrarian and question authority impulse that I think probably I had a very strict upbringing.
	So I think when people are like, you can't do this, I'm like, but why?
	So when they're like, you have to stay home.
	It didn't make a lot of sense to me logically, too.
	I'm like, okay, you're sending college kids back to live with their older parents.
	Like, we can see the risk profile here.
	The essential workers still have to keep working.
	So, I mean, this is really just benefiting a lot of people who can sit at home on Zoom.
	And frankly, the disease doesn't pose a risk to most people.
	I mean, it's really, you know, I understand measures should be taken to protect nursing homes, places like that.
	But apart from that, it didn't really make a lot of sense.
	To me, it was obvious that there would be costs to this.
	A lot of people don't still question that.
	Psychological costs.
	You're telling young children they're vectors of disease.
	You're telling them they can't see their friends.
	This is not something that a civil society should be doing.
	It was very odd to me that that was embraced by the liberal left, that way of thinking.
	It's funny.
	Actually, Robert, in the early stages, Robert, it was one thing he said, and it made sense at the time, and it came to fruition.
	Locking people down, you know, keeping kids at home, the kids who, if they think they are the vectors that they are, with their parents who are the vulnerable ones, if the kids have to stay home, parents are working, they get the grandparents to come babysit.
	So none of it made sense, and Robert had brought that up from day one.
	But Janine, when you say you consider yourself a political left, I mean, what does that mean?
	Have you voted Democrat?
	I did.
	I wouldn't call myself on the left anymore.
	I voted Democrat my entire life until 2020, and I won't say who I voted for them.
	Let's say they were not pro-lockdown.
	I'm sympathetic to the idea that there should be certain things that...
	We need government for it.
	I don't want my lakes full of pollution, for instance.
	I don't think that the way that we're doing it right now works.
	I don't like the administrative state.
	They have way too much power.
	They have myopic views of things.
	I think a lot more should be done through the legislative process rather than administrative agencies.
	But I'm not anti-government per se, although I've become a lot more skeptical of government over the last couple of years.
	And I'm socially liberal.
	So, but I'm extremely, you know, I'm extremely pro-civil liberties, so free speech, you know, Fourth Amendment, which was one of the things that led me to become a criminal defense lawyer, those sorts of things.
	And where do you think the, or when were you first sort of introduced that members of the left had become more about state power and protecting it, coming up with excuses for it?
	Privileging it, giving it a prerogative over core civil liberties.
	You have now leaders of the left who are for censorship, leaders of the left that are for the ability and the right of the state to grab people, grab property, seize people, seize property.
	We're kind of seeing it right now all over Europe, and people are cheering as you're not allowed to vote.
	You can go to jail in some European republics now if you simply voice a pro-Russian opinion, up to three years in the Czech Republic.
	And this is being cheered by many people by the left and the West.
	When were you first kind of exposed to that shift of the left away from civil liberties and towards a state prerogative in the name of whatever just cause, if you will?
	Yeah, that's a really good question.
	So it was pre-COVID, I would say I had some sort of...
	So, I've never actually said this, so it could be very controversial.
	There was a New York Times op-ed, probably 2015, that said, like, maybe transgenderism doesn't make that, or, like, infringes on women's rights a little bit.
	And I was like, you know, I put it on Facebook, I think, and I said, you know, she makes some good points.
	They're kind of taking, you know...
	Well, okay.
	I'm not going to go into it.
	And I just got slaughtered.
	Slaughtered.
	And people wouldn't talk to me.
	And then another one was when all the controversy around Woody Allen was coming out.
	And I was like, well, actually, you know, I read a lot about it.
	I'm kind of skeptical of the allegations.
	Like, child, like, there are issues with memory and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And again, I was completely slaughtered.
	And no one wanted to listen or discuss it.
	It was just, you know, you're wrong.
	You're a bad person for having this view.
	So I had some brushes with the left, and I wasn't totally, like, on board with them.
	But then when COVID happened, it was, like, complete break.
	And, you know, because it wasn't even the sort of core civil liberties issues, but it was issues the left should be embracing.
	Like, this is harming the working class.
	You're, you know, making the working class go out and bring you delivery and be in the grocery stores while you get to sit home on Zoom.
	Not to mention the fact that there was, you know, Oxfam came out with this study that said 130 million additional people worldwide were facing starvation because of supply chain disruptions, because of lockdowns.
	And I thought when that study came out, I think in July or August, I was like, well, that's going to be the end.
	Like, the left will see.
	And I showed it to people and they're like, eh.
	And I was like, you guys are just a bunch of immigrants.
	Like, you're supposed to care about Black people in third world countries and you don't care.
	Janine, not to harp on the 2015 experience, it's curious because you're sort of ahead of the curve on this in that, I mean, I was not paying much attention back then.
	I don't know if cancel culture was what it is today.
	So what was your experience?
	There's a New York Times article saying that maybe transgender rights in the manner in which they're being pursued are infringing on women's rights and you share it on...
	Was it, I presume it might have been Facebook and not Twitter?
	Yeah, Facebook.
	Yes, the Facebook crowd tends to be a certain dynamic.
	And so people who you consider your friends, your political allies, you know, I don't know, whatever else, your contacts, they unleash on you.
	No, yeah, yeah.
	I mean, they just, there was no debate.
	It was like, you're a transphobe, you're a bad person.
	You know, and there are just, I'm not...
	Transphobic.
	Everybody should do what they want with their bodies, whatever.
	But there is a tension in the logic here, right?
	You're saying that somebody...
	That your brain...
	Something about the way your brain works means that you should get surgery to make yourself a certain gender.
	So that, in my opinion, sort of crystallizes the idea of differences between the genders.
	It's not pro-women's rights.
	You're saying like...
	You're saying that wearing a miniskirt makes you a woman.
	So there's something about it that doesn't make sense to me.
	And I was just questioning that.
	And this was before the sports issues.
	The crux of the discussion became much more apparent with the sports issues.
	Nobody deserves to be discriminated against, period.
	However, fine.
	When a certain aspect becomes determinate in terms of respecting the rights of both women and transgenders, and there's a, call it a block of sorts, then you have to start asking the more thorough questions.
	So you had this experience in 2015.
	Did you recoil off social media?
	Did you say, I'm just going to shut my mouth now?
	Or did you say, I'm going to be a little more defiant and a little more vocal in what I believe?
	I think at that, you know, I can't quite remember.
	I think at that point I decided to keep my mouth shut.
	And there was, you know, there was another article, and this is actually something I feel strongly about, and I think I can, you know, there was one in the New Yorker about a 13-year-old who wanted to get to transition, and I criticized that.
	And, you know, I think it's crazy to be performing operations on children.
	Children, you know, I said all sorts of things when I was 9 or 13 about what I thought.
	If my parents allowed me to have surgery about those ideas, I would be horrified, and I would be extremely angry at them now.
	So there's a lot of craziness around this issue, and I don't mind if people disagree with me.
	That's fine.
	I want to have a discussion about it.
	I'm happy to have a discussion.
	The thing is, they don't want to have a discussion.
	They just want to shut you off.
	And how much did you experience anything like that?
	Because I'm trying to sort of trace for a lot of people where things went off the rails with the left to some degree.
	In other words, there's this allocation by some scholars that a lot of what we're seeing now and censorship issues and this response, that we don't have debate.
	We just have, you have to have a certain opinion to be a good person.
	And if you're not, you must be shut out.
	You must be silenced.
	You must be shamed into submission or alternatively silence.
	And so some people tie this all the way back to...
	The kidnap culture of the 1980s where safe space culture kind of first originated.
	Parents didn't want kids out playing randomly in the street or with others.
	And that sort of then, you know, a certain trend happened in high schools and colleges with the entire safe space culture taking over.
	I saw glimpses of this.
	But I didn't see anything like the scale of this.
	And when this sort of went off the rails so quickly, not only extreme ideas being interjected and pretended to be mainstream since about 2014 or so, give or take, in terms of the degree to which New York Times and other publications suddenly started covering these things.
	Even in 2010, a lot of these things would sound crazy to most people then.
	But all of a sudden, by 2014, 2015, you couldn't challenge it or contest it publicly, even if you thought it.
	Do you remember, like, in terms of upbringing, do you remember this kind of response to debate, discussion, so-called controversial topics happening at any of the academic levels, high school, college, or law school?
	Or was this interaction in social media the first time you were fully exposed to it?
	Thank you.
	So, yeah, it's hard for me to pinpoint.
	I feel like by the time I went to college in the early 2000s, and I think by then it was actually already happening a little bit.
	It was...
	Very much like safe spaces and you're, you know, you had to sort of tiptoe around.
	I felt a lot that I wasn't supposed to say certain things.
	And frankly, to my, you know, I'm embarrassed to say as a whatever, 20, 20 year old, I sometimes participated in it, you know, like young people are kind of whatever.
	And I would say something offended me and storm out of the room or something.
	But, you know, it's for adults and for professors to say, actually, you know, you're.
	You need to listen to this, and you need to debate it, and storming out of the room isn't the appropriate way to do that.
	But now the professors are part of this whole thing.
	And frankly, I have former friends who are professors who are feeding into all of this, which I think is just despicable.
	Janine, so your defense attorney, I forget the word now, for nine years...
	COVID hits, how do you transition out of that position into what you're doing now?
	I presume, based on what you alluded to earlier, it was an abrupt ending, but I presume...
	No, actually, it was sort of slow and torturous, so I disagreed immediately, and I made my views known to colleagues and people in the office.
	I was like, I want to be able to go back to the office.
	I don't agree with this.
	It was immediately like, you're crazy, you're crazy.
	I sort of tried to keep my mouth shut at some point, but I kept...
	So I had a lot of time, like everybody.
	Well, I don't have children.
	So my evenings were totally free.
	Everything was shut down.
	So I would just read at night.
	I was very curious because this didn't make a lot of sense to me.
	So I just read and read and read.
	I stumbled across Jeffrey Tucker, Alex Berenson, some of the scientists like Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya and Unitas.
	And so I did a lot of research and I was like, this just makes no sense.
	And at some point I couldn't stop myself.
	And I wrote an essay, like, why the left should have poor lockdowns or something like that, documenting all the harms this was doing to people in third world countries, the poor of the working class.
	And I sent it to Jeffrey Tucker at AIER.
	He was the only person I thought would publish it.
	He did.
	And then I was invited there for the Great Barrington Declaration.
	So I was sort of, I don't want to say I participated.
	I didn't actually do anything other than talk to the scientists and drink some wine.
	So, you know, I got involved with them.
	And then my people at my office had started to stumble across my stuff.
	I had started the Twitter account.
	And I, you know, got some calls like, look, you're not being fired, but people are very upset about what you're doing.
	And I was like, okay, well, this is like...
	First of all, I'm spending a lot of time on all of this because I'm doing my day job and then doing all this stuff at night.
	And then also, I don't really want to go back to the office.
	I thought at that point maybe we'd go back to the office in the spring of 2021.
	I don't really want to go back to the office with all these people who hate me.
	And someone told me about the new Civil Liberties Alliance, who was doing a lot of lockdown-related litigation at that time.
	So I applied, got the job, and ended up moving to D.C. from New York to do the job.
	So I started in April.
	And by then, lockdowns were like, More or less a thing in the past.
	And then the vaccine mandates started, so I started doing a lot of vaccine mandate litigation.
	But you're going from public defender to civil rights.
	I appreciate that law is law, and you can learn another bit.
	Yeah, I know.
	You have nine years in public defense, which is criminal law, and now you're moving into civil rights, civil actions.
	What sort of curve did you have to go through in order to get into that job once you got there?
	I have a few colleagues I should really thank by name here.
	Jared McClain, Caleb Kruckenberg, and John Vecchione, who held my hand through my first couple of lawsuits because I really didn't know anything about...
	So I went from, like, state-level criminal appeals to trial civil, federal.
	So, like, in every way different.
	So they were very kind and patient with me and gave me their time.
	So, yeah, I think I sort of have a little bit of a handle on it now, but it took a few months.
	What was, so were you in New York City when the lockdowns?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So I was actually, I was in New York and it was, I was with my boyfriend at the time and he's actually a teacher and he was teaching on Zoom.
	We were in a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and I was like, I can't do that.
	So we actually ended up going.
	He had a family house in Cape Cod, so we ended up going there.
	It was much bigger.
	I didn't have to listen to his Zoom lessons all morning.
	But yeah, New York was quite crazy.
	And then we went back to New York, and then it was crazy.
	What was that like?
	Because when I was up in New York, because I was representing Amy Cooper, so I went to the city.
	And I'd been to the city on and off many years.
	I was a kid.
	I was introduced to New York City.
	We were taking the bus, riding the bus for me to work at my grandparents' diner.
	We took it from Chattanooga all the way up to New Hampshire.
	As part of that, you go through New York City.
	I told my mom, I think it was 10, 11, whenever it was, my grandfather was a big fan of child labor when he found out how cheap it was.
	It was legal because I was related.
	But we're on the bus, and I told my mom, make sure to wake me up.
	This was, I think, the Greyhound portion.
	At some point, we got on the Trailways portion, which was the New England side.
	I was awake when we got to New York, because I wanted to see New York City.
	And my mom said, oh, here we are.
	Wake me up.
	It woke me up, and it was the middle of New York City.
	The first thing I do is I look out, and I see some guy urinating on the wall.
	And I'm like, oh, that was an introduction to New York.
	But my, been back and forth New York City many years, more of, you know, I describe it as more of a breakfast at Tiffany's kind of city potentially, or that side of the city's life.
	Used to wake up at like, whenever I went back, used to wake up at 5 a.m., 6 a.m., go out where Tiffany's is and watch the whole city wake up, you know, get the vendor, get the coffee, get the donut, talk to the vendor a little bit.
	Got street vendors all over the city.
	And you'd see the city just come alive.
	And it had a certain liveliness, a certain vivaciousness, a certain sort of hunger for life.
	And that was my experience with New York.
	And so when I went back to sort of make investigations on the Amy Cooper case, I go back and New York felt more like what the most recent Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix was like.
	I mean, it felt dark.
	It felt heavy.
	People seemed angry at each other.
	You know, that Spike Lee movie where it's a hot day in New York and everybody wants to kill each other.
	It felt like that.
	When I went into Central Park, those massive, famous New York rats.
	I mean, I was going to go look at a place where the Ramble, where that incident happened with Amy Cooper.
	I was about to go down, and I see this trash can with a whole bunch of...
	I was like, man, why are all those squirrels in that trash can?
	And then I realized, those aren't squirrels.
	Those are just rats.
	Size of my head.
	I mean, those things were massive.
	And the whole city was just like, man, if I was stuck there in one of those...
	You live in New York not to live at home.
	You live in New York to go out.
	You go to the shows, the plays, the restaurants, the theaters, etc.
	And those people being locked up in their tiny little apartments, often big...
	They make Parisian apartments look big.
	I mean, it's like an overgrown closet.
	I thought, and then I realized how much tourists really gave a lot of levity to New York.
	A certain brightness and lightness to New York.
	And they're all gone because the city shut down.
	I found the city a very dark, dark place to be compared and contrasted to whenever I went there.
	Was it like that?
	How quickly did it get that way?
	After the lockdowns, what was your experience?
	Yeah, so, I mean, it was very immediate with the lockdowns.
	And the lockdowns were scary.
	You know, you felt like there was, oh, God, I can't quite articulate it.
	It felt like something really bad was happening.
	And, you know, I think at that point, I can't quite remember, but you weren't supposed to leave your house for more than an hour.
	And, like, I mean, you can't, this is not, you know, this is not a place where you have, like, a five-bedroom house and three acres.
	You know, you're, like, in a one-bedroom with, you know, someone else.
	Whatever.
	Family.
	And it, like, it would go back and forth.
	I mean, the summer of 2020 was okay.
	Everything closed early because, you know, COVID goes to bed at midnight or 10 or whatever.
	But, so it didn't have, like, the kind of nightlife vibe that it usually has.
	But there were, like, so they had the outdoor drinking and dining things.
	So there were, like, the streets were full of people.
	So it was okay in that respect.
	But then the winter, both winters, well, all three really, 2021 and'22 have been quite bleak.
	I go there a lot'cause I have a lot of friends there.
	So I was there like over New Year's Eve and the streets were dead, which I've never seen.
	I mean, I imagine it will probably come back.
	They got rid of the vaccine passport the other day, which is good.
	That should help with tourism.
	I think it really hurt tourism, frankly.
	Can you imagine?
	I mean, it's so preposterous that these are the same people saying trust the science.
	They implemented this vaccine passport barely a year ago, and it's achieved its purpose.
	Okay, so Janine, you get the job.
	What's the entity that you're working for now called again?
	It's called the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
	So the sort of core mission is to fight the administrative state.
	Which, you know, for people who don't know in America has, you know, really way too much power.
	Administrative agencies are basically taking the place of what, like, legislator and, frankly, the judiciary as well should be doing.
	So, and, you know, we see this in various respects with COVID.
	I mean, the CDC, for instance, enacted this eviction moratorium, which, thank God, the Supreme Court struck down.
	But there's, I mean, the CDC is an agency.
	It doesn't have the power to...
	Say landlords can't evict their tenants throughout the nation.
	That's completely insane.
	And there's a lot, you know, the CDC issues all this guidance about mask rules or vaccines.
	They say even if you have natural immunity, you should get the vaccine.
	Everybody should get the vaccine.
	Everybody should get a booster.
	Not science, by the way.
	Masks work, not science, because, well, they keep issuing studies that are cherry-picked and whatever, but that's another story.
	But, you know.
	This is guidance.
	It's not laws.
	You can't actually go to court and challenge it.
	You can't say, "The CDC didn't go through the right process here," or whatever, to reach this conclusion.
	You know, that's a huge problem.
	But at the same time, everybody relies on it as though it's law.
	So every time I try to challenge a vaccine mandate, it's usually against universities.
	They say, well, the CDC says that naturally immune people should get the vaccine.
	They get it both ways.
	And, you know, these are unelected officials.
	There is something to be said for the legislative process where it's like elected officials who represent the people, where there's diverse viewpoints, people, you know, different experiences.
	Bureaucrats, for the most part, who have, you know, they have one thing in mind and one goal, and it's to stem the spread of COVID.
	And frankly, as we know, these measures don't even work.
	But even if they did, they're not taking into account the mental health effects or the economic effects or anything else.
	They're just thinking, you know, stem the spread of COVID.
	So this is a huge problem in this country, the amount of power these agencies have.
	And it goes back to this case called Chevron, where the Supreme Court gave agencies an enormous amount of power by saying that if there's any ambiguity in the statute, you know, then We'll defer to the agency's interpretation rather than make our own judgment.
	Now, how much was it a surprise to you that colleagues in the legal community and friends We did not have any skepticism as the lockdowns rolled out.
	To me, this was kind of a mass red pill potential moment as people saw what the state can do, as people could see the consequences of what the state can do, and that when we give the state too much power, we need to re-examine the wisdom and logic of that.
	And in particular, the most vulnerable communities, as you note, that the left historically aligns with and says they want to defend were the ones suffering the most.
	At the response of these policies, we see it with the trucker protests that Viva covered in Canada.
	And we saw large numbers of the left come after truckers, working class truckers in a labor protest.
	How much of it was a surprise seeing friends, colleagues, and others just reflexively just echo whatever the state was claiming rather than contest it, challenge it, independently investigate it, and wonder about its impact on the communities they claim to care about?
	I mean, it was a complete shock.
	I thought, you know, I thought that one could make rational arguments with these people.
	You know, these were my friends and my family.
	And I thought, you know, I could, you know, say, look, this is going to be very bad for Black children if we closed schools, which are, you know, by the way, it's Black children who mostly need to go to public school and you claim to care about people of color, like, and this is going to put them behind.
	It was a huge shock to me that they weren't.
	They weren't amenable to any sort of argument.
	And I attribute it to two things.
	One is more generous and one is less generous, and it depends on the person.
	But one is a sort of inability to question or innate faith in the institutions.
	So the New York Times or the CDC, they can't bring themselves to believe.
	And I think this is maybe a little bit human nature.
	They need to trust.
	It's hard for them to come to terms with the fact that the institutions that they trust aren't being honest with them.
	And well, so if the New York Times says that masks work, which they said unequivocally in whatever, July 2020, the New York Times says that school shutdowns are the best thing for Black kids, then that's obviously true and we don't need to do our own thinking.
	The CDC says that.
	So that's one and that's the more generous interpretation.
	With some people, I think it's actually, they're just complete hypocrites.
	They don't actually care.
	And they were happy to sit at home on Zoom because it made their lives easier.
	And so they pretend to be leftists who care about the poor and the working class, but they actually don't.
	So I think it's one of those two things, or in some cases, a combination.
	You're on mute, Viva.
	You are back, but you're on mute.
	I'm an idiot.
	I've moved rooms to try to get closer to the router because people are saying the internet is disrupting this, and I apologize if that's the case, but done is better than perfect, people.
	So we'll get the knowledge, even if the internet connection is shoddy.
	So Janine, you start reading, you start looking into this yourself, you get this new position, and you jump from, it was defense to now civil rights.
	What's the first case that you took on?
	The first case, so I guess it was Todd Zwicky who was a...
	Professor at GMU.
	He's actually a law professor.
	So he had COVID, did not want to get the vaccine, and we brought a lawsuit on his behalf.
	The university ended up, we sort of reached an out-of-court agreement or settlement, I would say.
	They ended up granting him an exemption.
	So we didn't actually get into the courtroom.
	And that was George Mason University.
	That's correct.
	That's George Mason University in Virginia.
	And then I brought one against MSU, which I just lost last week, unfortunately, a motion to dismiss, but I'm planning to appeal to the Sixth Circuit.
	And the big problem with these cases, you know, is, well, it was in the MSU case, and then I don't know if you guys have heard about Keriotti, the guy in California, UC Irvine, who medical ethics professor is.
	We had almost the same fact pattern.
	We definitely like...
	You know, collaborated with their attorneys.
	So the big problem, in my opinion, is rational basis level review, which the courts have been applying to these claims because it's sort of complicated.
	I don't want to bore non-lawyers, but it's not a fundamental right, which mostly means enumerated rights, so like expressly stated rights in the Constitution.
	If it's not a fundamental right, then the court applies what's known as rational basis review.
	This is a doctrine that was sort of formulated in the 1930s and 40s, and I don't think has any basis in the Constitution and is completely wrong.
	And it basically says the state can do what it wants.
	That's essentially what it is, if it's a non-fundamental right.
	So the way that the courts put it is, you know, the law, the state has to articulate an interest, okay, that's spreading COVID, and then they have to link the measure to that law.
	Okay, so we're going to require everybody to get the vaccine, even if they have natural immunity.
	The law can be unsupported by science based on mere speculation.
	That's what the case law says.
	So that's, I mean, you can't overcome that.
	That's standard as the plaintiff in these cases.
	And so that's a huge problem.
	So I've been arguing and trying very hard to argue that it should actually be intermediate scrutiny applied, which I believe is true based on the case law, even if you're just following the case law.
	I also think this notion of rational basis review is hugely problematic.
	I understand that precedent is precedent, and the court's probably not going to completely repudiate the idea, but I think we need to get away from it.
	It can't be what the framers of the Constitution meant.
	Yeah, I mean, for those at home, what the courts have done is established what they call three tiers of scrutiny over the past 70 years.
	Some of that's been developed.
	Kind of more recently.
	And some of it has a little bit older history, depending on the circumstance.
	And the toughest level of scrutiny of a government action is called strict scrutiny, where the government has to come up with a compelling reason for what they did and claim that what they did was the only remedy, the only option, really, called narrowly tailored remedy to a compelling public interest.
	The intermediate scrutiny is kind of a hybrid in between.
	It's when they don't want to apply strict scrutiny, but they know they just can't get away with applying what's called rational basis.
	And rational basis is just, do you have any reason, can the state give any reason for why they did what they did?
	Now, the courts even there have been completely contradictory.
	That if they don't like politics of what took place...
	They will even say it isn't rational basis.
	But if they do like the politics that took place, then they rush to find rational basis.
	And one legal issue throughout all of the lockdowns and mandate challenges of masks or vaccine has been what level of scrutiny should the court apply?
	For some of us, constitutionally, that should always be strict scrutiny, unless it doesn't involve anything that you could call a right.
	And the idea that you did not...
	The rights were reserved to the people under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
	They weren't reserved to the government.
	And so, to me, it's not, is there a right listed within the Constitution for me to get strict scrutiny?
	It's, was the government explicitly given this power without otherwise?
	Unfortunately, we've abandoned that.
	Our courts have abandoned that entirely and used the police power justification.
	I mean, a lot of this came out of New Deal legislation.
	But in the vaccine context, it comes back in the more horrific.
	And I was going to ask you, how much have judges, other lawyers, other people you deal with, I mean, I was stunned at some level, I guess not entirely, but for the most part, when people rushed on the left to embrace the Jacobson decision of the early 1900s, knowing that that decision was the foundation.
	I mean, first of all, the court that issued that decision said racial segregation was great.
	Right.
	It said that you could force a kid to work however many hours you wanted.
	It was one of the more morally horrific courts in general to start with.
	That's issue one.
	Issue two was the Jacobson decision was the only decision cited in the eugenics case of Bucks v.
	Bell.
	The only basis.
	Saying what they said in Jacobson opened the door to the state being able to forcibly sterilize poor women against their will.
	And those two cases combined were significant in contributing to forced detention camps of the Japanese and the Korematsu decision.
	I call the three decisions the trilogy of infamy.
	But as to these courts that just eagerly embrace a 1905-1906 decision for which they completely ignore what court issued it, completely ignore all the ways the law has changed since then, completely ignore what moral horrors That logic led to has been unsettling.
	How much do you see courts even addressing that?
	How many other legal people that eagerly tweet out, the state's always had this power, look at this, and I always want to tweet back some Nazi example and say, oh yeah, look at this, state had this power too.
	What has been your experience in that aspect?
	100%.
	So the MSU court...
	You know, that was what he said.
	And frankly, that judge, I think, was somewhat more sympathetic to us.
	He basically said he thought not recognizing natural immunity is nonsensical, but he was sort of bound by a rational basis because the CDC says the natural immune people should get vaccinated.
	He felt as though that he couldn't say that that wasn't a rational basis for MSU's policy.
	But I see it and I, you know, I do some debates and they always bring out Jacobson and they're like, Jacobson, I mean.
	Even if Jacobson, like, for the reasons you say, even if Jacobson did use rational basis review, you know, there are very good reasons not to consider a precedent.
	Also, you know, there are very different things about that situation.
	It's not just about, although I totally agree with you, it's not just about the fact that that served as the basis for Buckley Bell, etc., but, like, smallpox kills 30% of people as opposed to COVID, which is, like, way smaller.
	Those vaccines stop transmission.
	These vaccines don't stop transmission.
	So the justification for mandates...
	It's much more tenuous.
	So not only those things, but I actually think there's a pretty decent argument to be made that Jacobson didn't actually use rational basis review.
	So it preceded rational basis review, and people say, oh, it stands for the proposition that it does.
	But they talk about a substantial government interest.
	That's not the language.
	There's a balancing test that goes on, so subsequent cases also interpret Jacobson to say it should be a balancing of the state versus the individual interests.
	There were a few cases involving the Giving prison inmates psychotropic drugs against their will, and they talk about balancing the state versus the individual interest.
	That's not rational basis.
	Rational basis isn't balancing.
	So I think, you know, one, rational basis is not constitutional.
	Unfortunately, it's precedent, so that's an issue.
	Two, Jacobson didn't actually use rational basis.
	And three, Jacobson is hugely problematic because it served as the basis for, you know, decisions in these other cases that we now reject in every way morally.
	Well, and that's the other aspect is the sort of circular logic that's happening here.
	Yeah.
	The state says what they're doing is reasonable by citing another agency of the state that says it's reasonable.
	Right.
	Therefore, the court calls it reasonable.
	And it's like, what?
	I mean, can you explain to people, like, I get a lot of questions like, why isn't natural immunity being argued in courts?
	Why aren't vaccine mandates being challenged on particular grounds?
	And I tell them it is.
	Being challenged.
	And the problem is courts.
	They're not giving evidentiary hearings most of the time.
	They're not allowing discovery.
	They're not allowing jury trials where those would be applicable.
	They're closing the door at the very beginning by saying, this agency says that this other agency's actions are okay.
	And I, as a judge, I just can't challenge that.
	So that's what happened in my MSU case last week.
	The judge granted the motion to dismiss.
	So he basically said we hadn't even...
	You know, articulated a claim, a basis for relief, which is a very low standard.
	So they're, exactly, they're, you know, shutting the door.
	We weren't, we were not allowed to present evidence at the motion to dismiss hearing.
	So, you know, it's...
	It's very difficult, and I understand.
	I talked to a lot of lawyers at the beginning of all of this, and I was wondering why there weren't more lawsuits, and I sort of get it now.
	I mean, you're worried that with this level of review and the hysteria, that you're just going to create a lot of bad precedent.
	I mean, if there's a pandemic in five years, now my MSU case can be used, and maybe if I just hadn't brought that case.
	So I understand the situation that lawyers are in and why many are reluctant to bring these cases in the first place.
	But, yeah.
	I'm going to bring up this chat.
	Mike Bruno, not to encourage you.
	I'm going to respond to this and I'm going to bring up a tweet.
	Vida Frye, ask her what happens when a volcano erupts.
	Can't lock down?
	Can't wear protective gear?
	What do you do then?
	Mike Bruno, here's what happens if a volcano erupts.
	You don't need to get people to lock down because they'll do it themselves.
	You don't need to compel them to wear a mask because they'll do it themselves.
	And not to tout my own logic here, let me just pull up a tweet.
	It was a relatively decent subject matter.
	Bonafide pandemics do not require an advertising budget for people to know.
	Safe and effective vaccines do not require compulsion for people to administer.
	Morally just wars do not require propaganda for people to support.
	And that's the deal.
	I lost my screen.
	Hold on a second.
	I'm panicking.
	If a volcano erupts, you're not going to have to mandate curfews or face masks.
	People will do it on their own.
	And that goes back to trusting the people with their own good judgment, with their own bodies.
	So, Bruno, thank you very much for the comment.
	But, Robert, to your question, and Janine, to what you're saying also, you have the strict scrutiny, intermediary scrutiny, rational basis.
	It's like an opposite curve, right?
	The more the rights get violated, the more...
	It has to go to strict scrutiny.
	And the less the rights get violated, the more you can get a rational basis.
	So like seatbelts infringe on your rights, but very mildly.
	So a rational basis, whereas putting something in your body that you might not want, it's got to have the strictest of scrutiny.
	Other than desecrating those principles, have any of the courts been upholding them or clarifying them in recent times?
	I don't know who's better fit to answer the question.
	Go for it, Robert.
	Well, I mean, it's been a combination.
	And then, of course, you have standing and mootness and rightness and latches and all the excuses they have to keep you out of court.
	Because some people out there think people aren't challenging this, and people are.
	The problem is the bias of the courts.
	Now, my view is courts make decisions for political reasons.
	More often than not, that's what's going on.
	You may have lower courts at times feel bound by what higher courts they think will do, and they don't want to challenge that, and that's what's loosely identified as precedent.
	But even there, the higher courts are making political decisions, in my view, quite typically.
	Because you'll find the same courts that require...
	What's been interesting here is what I told people is, if these mandates were really legitimate, then courts that are for the mandates will have no problem allowing evidence in, and will have no problem applying strict scrutiny.
	Instead, almost every court that has affirmed a mandate so far has refused.
	Strict scrutiny.
	And has refused evidentiary hearings and discovered.
	And it's very revealing.
	It reveals that down deep, even the courts believe these mandates can't hold up to meaningful scrutiny, even just scrutiny of logic.
	Like this judge saying, you know, it kind of doesn't make sense to exclude natural immunity, but the CDC says it does, so I'm going to pretend it does.
	And it's the problem.
	What all of this has revealed is core flaws in the judiciary not exercising independent discretion over executive and legislative action, but particularly executive action, that does not conform to constitutional constraints.
	Go ahead.
	No, no, you go ahead.
	Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
	No, I was just going to add.
	I mean, the other thing is, I think it's important that the right people pursue these suits all the way up the appellate flagpole.
	Because especially as issues calm down, judges are going to be more open to looking at the law rather than the hysteria.
	But also because five years from now, the only chance we have to prevent this from reoccurring is fighting it legally now.
	Yeah, no, that's totally right.
	And I think so.
	A couple of things that I thought of while you were speaking is, I mean, one huge issue is there's been an acknowledgement in my MSU case and then also the OSHA case, actually.
	One of Biden's mandates, basically.
	He implemented through the OSHA, the agency that oversees workplace conditions.
	So the government attorneys have often admitted that the vaccine isn't very good at stopping transmission, but have taken the fallback position that, well, we have the right to, you know, our employers have the right, or the government has the right as your employer to regulate your health, because then you'll be a better employee if you're not sick or whatever.
	Worker absenteeism.
	And this is such a dangerous concept.
	And I mean, I actually debated some left-wing professor who was on this very issue.
	And I'm like, I mean, you claim to be a champion of the American worker.
	And you're basically saying the government or your employer gets to dictate the most personal aspects of your existence.
	I mean, your government could tell you you can't smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, or you have to maintain a certain BMI because then you'll have less absenteeism.
	I mean, this is a crazy position for people who claim to care about, you know.
	Regular people to take, and it's very dangerous.
	But unfortunately, under rational basis, I think this might pass.
	And then this just sort of allows any endless infringement into the individual's life, which I just can't possibly be what the framers of the Constitution meant.
	Well, and speaking of that, there was a person on our locals board that read the recent Fifth Circuit decision on the military Navy SEALs vaccine mandate and found it violated Religious Freedom and Restoration Act issues.
	But she was noting that the logic of what the government was asserting would extend to determining whether and when, say, their women employees could get pregnant.
	Because if you kept applying the logic of, we get to do whatever makes you as an employee more productive.
	And that means controlling at some point your entire life.
	But including medical, well, you know, we really can't allow you to get pregnant between this age and this age because that's your maximum employment productivity or military productivity or whatever it may be.
	I've asked people, what's the limits here?
	Because there's no logical limits in the law.
	Once you establish, you can force someone to take an invasive medical treatment that has lifelong effects, lifelong impacts, as Justice Gorsuch recently noted.
	Then what can you not do?
	I mean, what are the limits at some point?
	No, I think under this new scheme, there are no limits.
	I mean, the court will clearly limit executive power, federal, sorry, federal executive power, not necessarily state, but it seems that under this regime, the state can do whatever it wants.
	So you have to move to a good state.
	You're on mute.
	You're on mute.
	I'll get it.
	Eventually, I'll figure it out because there's kids making noise upstairs.
	Viva, pay attention.
	Who said that?
	Hold on a second.
	If you knew what I was going through here, you would know why I'm distracted.
	Janine, let me ask you the question that has been going through my soul for the last two, three years.
	Two years.
	You've now been in front of the courts.
	People always say to me, Viva, you're a lawyer.
	Go out and sue.
	And I said, I have not lost faith in the court system.
	I just don't have faith in the court system.
	I don't want to go there and plead my guts out, spend weeks working, so that a judge can say, I've heard your submission and I disagree.
	Are you getting disheartened with the judicial system?
	Do you see now the judicial system working as not a cog in the machine, but rather as a piece in the chess game of the government itself?
	Are they independent?
	Are they applying the law or are they politically motivated or politically influenced?
	And is it destroying your faith in the system?
	So that's a really good question.
	I will say I I had sort of a bad I wasn't thrilled with the courts as a criminal defense lawyer.
	Like I had a lot of cases where I believed I won on the law and certainly with like search and seizure.
	So, you know, the government didn't have a warrant, went into someone's home, really shouldn't have searched their stuff.
	You know, but the person was clearly guilty.
	And the courts, they just don't want, you know, someone to not go to prison in those circumstances.
	I didn't have a great impression of the courts upholding our constitutional rights anyway.
	But I guess I did kind of think with, okay, well, in one context, we're dealing with criminals.
	This is a little bit different.
	We're talking about, like, really people's fundamental freedoms.
	I did have some hope.
	And there weren't, you know, when I started here and I started doing these cases, there weren't a lot of, there was not a lot of precedent.
	There weren't a lot of lockdown or mandate cases.
	So I had some hope.
	I thought, you know, we're talking about a vaccine that's, you know, when I started these and, you know.
	Mid-2021.
	This is a one-year-old vaccine.
	Not even a one-year-old vaccine.
	We have no history of mandating vaccines like this.
	All sorts of other differences.
	This isn't a disease that poses a risk to most people.
	Unlike Jacobson, for instance, where the penalty for not getting the vaccine was a $5 fine.
	We're talking about people not losing their jobs.
	When it comes to the city passport programs being basically shut out of society, it's a much harsher penalty.
	So I thought the courts would see that, and I was hopeful.
	And I would say I've been a little bit disillusioned, but the only hope I have is that none of these decisions...
	None of these decisions have actually reached the appellate courts, so I have some hope that perhaps something better will happen there.
	I was going to ask you, your perception of the judiciary between law school and legal experience.
	I had a different political background, so I was a little bit more prepared, but I was still startled at the degree to which...
	We're taught in law school, it's the law that matters.
	What are the facts?
	What are the arguments?
	What are the parallel precedents?
	What are the policies at issue?
	So on and so forth.
	You get into the practice of law and you discover that power is often the most determinative fact.
	That if you're on the powerful side politically in any case, magically the law seems to align with you.
	And if you're on the underdog side, magically it doesn't.
	And you have to fight an uphill battle.
	How much of that, you know, how much were you surprised at how the court system acted when you got into the practice of law?
	And what was that experience like?
	You know, I don't quite remember.
	I think, as I said, I was surprised by a few decisions.
	I really felt like there was not, I was a little surprised the courts upheld the convictions, even though, you know, it's sort of maybe a bad person, but really not enough evidence to sustain this conviction.
	Like, I had one guy who...
	God, I can't recall the details exactly, but he had participated in some plot to rob a drug dealer who ended up getting murdered, but he had done very little.
	He had sort of said something like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he might be at this, yeah, he likes to go to this bar or something.
	He might be there around this time.
	And he was convicted under a conspiracy.
	And they had only been planning to rob the drug dealer and not murder him, so I was arguing he really shouldn't have been convicted of the murder.
	But the court upheld the murder conviction on a felony murder theory.
	That's where you...
	If your accomplice does something, that even if you didn't intend it, you can be convicted of the higher crime.
	So I was surprised by those things.
	But again, criminal is a little different context.
	It's a little easier to understand, okay, the court just really doesn't like this person.
	Whereas here we're talking about forcing a lot of people who don't need a medical treatment to take it against their will.
	And these are hardworking Americans who just want to feed their families, basically.
	I'm not on mute.
	I'm just making sure now.
	Janine and Robert, this question is for both of you, and I don't want to ignore it.
	It's from Greg.
	He says, Janine and Barnes, please discuss IMF, World Bank, UN NGOs requiring African-Asian LATAM to lockdown and vaccinate to receive relief.
	Horrifying, for example, Uganda average age 15.9 years.
	Heavy lockdowns.
	I don't know this to be the case.
	I mean, I don't know of the factual premise of this question.
	Let me see if I can bring it up.
	Robert or Janine, do you know of this?
	Here we go.
	Boom.
	That's a Newfoundlander right there in the avatar.
	Beautiful dog.
	Janine and Barnes, please discuss IMF.
	So I won't read it again.
	Do either of you have any knowledge of this?
	I don't, so I'll pass on that one.
	I assume what they mean is there are various efforts to condition the receipt of international aid from various international aid organizations upon complying with the China response to the pandemic.
	And much of that is tied to Gates.
	Gates had so much influence over so many public health authorities around the world.
	I mean, literally, gave almost as much money as the U.S. government did to the World Health Organization, as an example.
	That Politico in 2017 detailed that there were whistleblowers saying, this one guy is running public health.
	And the combination, and he had a lot of control over some of those funds being released as well.
	And they used all their coercive power to try to force either lockdowns or masks or vaccines on the world population.
	This is why they went so nuts when Sweden refused to go along with it, when Sweden went their own route.
	They didn't want there to be what's called a control group.
	Another population out there that doesn't do these things, that has a whole different set of outcomes.
	And, you know, ultimately they weren't able to complete.
	But I assume that's what the person is talking about.
	But they used every coercive means known to man, including...
	Not specifically, mostly because we're very small, and so we can only take a limited number of cases, and there are only a couple of attorneys doing the vaccine mandate cases.
	We just haven't had the resources at this point.
	What are the current cases that you are working on there?
	So, in addition to the MSU one, which I'm now doing an appeal, I'm challenging a quarantine of children in Virginia.
	They're unvaccinated with natural immunity.
	They have been quarantined a number of times because they're not vaccinated, because they've had close contacts with other children at the school who had COVID.
	So they keep missing school.
	And, you know, in my opinion, it's coercing the parents to get them vaccinated so that they don't have to keep missing school.
	So that's one of my cases.
	I also have a completely unrelated case, a free speech case in Colorado.
	Just to understand the trust the science in Canada is that the government came up with directives and said that the unvaccinated children of vaccinated parents when traveling don't have to quarantine when they come back, but the unvaccinated children of unvaccinated parents do have to quarantine, although to travel internationally you still need to be fully vaccinated.
	So trust the science in whatever.
	But these measures appear to be purely punitive and not scientific at all.
	But have you in...
	You're in New York.
	Have you had any of these issues about...
	DC now, yeah.
	Say that again?
	Oh, DC now, but yeah.
	Oh, DC, I'm sorry.
	In DC.
	Have you had any cases...
	Have there been any issues about kids needing to isolate?
	Not just...
	Forget not going to school if you're not vaccinated, whatever.
	Kids...
	Being compelled into isolation because of exposure.
	Have you had any cases of that nature or any stories like that?
	So stories I've heard.
	Cases I haven't.
	We haven't ended up taking any.
	Not just, you know, happened not to be the right time or whatever.
	But, you know, that would be a very interesting case.
	Although I'm not sure.
	So I don't think that it's sort of up to the parents, right?
	And if the parents are forcing the kids into isolation, it might be hard to interfere with that on a parental rights basis.
	So I'm not really sure.
	It's horrible.
	I've heard and seen crazy stories on Twitter about people putting their kids in the basement.
	I think there was one about putting our kid in the trunk of a car or something.
	I don't know if you saw that one.
	But obviously horrifying.
	Yeah, from the Real Bamboogas question, I have to research that further.
	I haven't seen this.
	I've seen some of the stories that Jimmy Dore did a segment on it and some other stuff.
	And they definitely have a broader agenda.
	I mean, if they could legally establish the precedent, as well as in the court of public opinion and getting people's acceptance in general, that they can do whatever they want in this context.
	I mean, there's a reason why guys like Bill Gates, who's been the most influential private individual connected to this around the world, frankly, you know, has developed technology that can put, you know, chips in you.
	And the theory is that chip will be your, basically, it could ultimately be your social credit score, but it's your access to the financial system, it's your identification, it's your medical records, etc.
	Certain timed chemicals into your body, supposedly for medical purposes.
	But he designed it that it had remote control capability.
	You've got to ask why he's doing that.
	Robert, you've got to explain.
	You're talking birth control now.
	Say it again?
	You're talking birth control.
	I've read that study where there was discussion about remote capability birth control.
	Take it for what it's worth, people, but it's not urban legend anymore.
	Once you develop that...
	Just ask its other applications and other capabilities.
	So there's going to be more stories like, let's have an airborne vax, you know, things like that.
	Unfortunately, it's going to keep going down that path.
	Now, Jeannie, you mentioned, so the Virginia case is about them not allowing kids to go to school just because they're unvaccinated if they've been around anybody that potentially has COVID.
	Yeah, I mean, actually, it's specific to school.
	So the school emails the parents and says, your child has, you know, had a close contact with someone who tested positive, so they have to stay home from school for X number of days.
	They also, by the way, the other very difficult thing about litigating these COVID cases is the policies change all the time.
	That's all of them.
	So you have to constantly amend the complaint.
	And then they claim the case is moot because this, you know, so you have to fend off those.
	Those arguments all the time.
	So, you know, at some point it was 10-day quarantine, then it was five days, and now they're not quarantining the kids at all, but we're still arguing that the case should be adjudicated on the constitutional issues so that we can establish that this was wrong.
	Yeah, and prevent it from happening in the future.
	What is the free speech case in Colorado?
	Oh, that's very different.
	A guy named David Lesh, who very...
	A lot of details there, but he basically, he's sort of a, I don't know what to call him.
	He's a, I don't know.
	Yeah, he sells some things too.
	So he was convicted under this regulation that prohibits sale of...
	Selling your products on federal land.
	But he has a very active Instagram account.
	And it was actually probably a Photoshopped photo.
	So, I mean, there's a free speech issue there.
	And then, like, an evidentiary weight of the evidence or whatever issue.
	So, totally unrelated to COVID.
	So, they're trying to put him in jail just because he sold something on federal land?
	No, actually, I believe the state was...
	So I took it over from a colleague who left the office who was working at the trial level, and now I'm doing the appeal.
	And to be totally honest, it's a little bit of a complicated record.
	I'm not totally familiar at this point.
	So the judge apparently said he could have faced jail time, and I think the state was asking for it.
	He ended up getting probation and community service and a pretty hefty fine.
	But yeah, for like posting Instagram photos with himself with his company name, but they were photoshopped.
	This is not like the silver cure.
	This has nothing to do with COVID.
	It's not like this.
	No, no, nothing to do with COVID.
	Yeah, it's totally a free speech issue.
	We're arguing it that, you know, this violates his right.
	He's posting stuff on social media that was photoshopped.
	I mean, am I understanding correct that they considered it a crime to make an Instagram post?
	Yeah, so it's a regulation.
	So it's a petty federal offense, but he faced jail time.
	But he didn't get jail time.
	He got probation, community service, and a fine.
	But yeah, it was based on an Instagram post.
	Wow.
	They didn't like him.
	They consider him a sort of troublemaker in the area, in Denver.
	So it's politically motivated, but this shows that when you have this many crimes that the federal government and administrative state has, what can happen to people?
	Sorry, go ahead, Viva.
	It's more laws, less justice.
	You can find anything to go after anyone who you want to go after and forgive anyone who you don't.
	But Janine, for people who are aspiring to be lawyers, who don't know what the day-to-day is, you're now...
	So you're involved in this specific field of law.
	It's the most prominent field of law ever.
	How many calls a day do you get?
	Do you get criticism for not taking cases?
	Do you get pooped on for only focusing on the one case you're involved with?
	How many cases are you handling in real time?
	And what's the demand for your services as an attorney now?
	Well, as one of the few lawyers in the country doing vaccine mandate cases, it's off the charts.
	It's settled down a little bit since there are fewer mandates.
	But for a while, I was crazy.
	I mean, I went on Tucker Carlson at some point, and I think I woke up to like 2,000 emails in my inbox or something like that.
	So there's a lot.
	People are actually very nice for the most part and understand that I can't take every case.
	Three cases as doing a trial level work by myself is like pretty, that's pretty much all I can do.
	So I'm like second on a bunch of cases, like the second attorney, so backup basically.
	But I basically have the three active cases at this moment.
	Now, are you living in D.C. or around D.C.?
	No, I live in D.C. In D.C. and I've had quite a...
	What is that experience like?
	Because, I mean, I think they just finally pulled back their vaccine passport.
	Yeah, they finally, the vaccine passport and the mask mandate, which got me in a lot of trouble because I hate masks.
	Like, I hate masks more than anything.
	I don't, it's like some visceral, like, thing I can't deal with.
	And then, you know...
	I hate being told what to do, and I hate it when these petty train conductors or something.
	I was on the Amtrak between New York and D.C. a couple months ago, and I was drinking some wine or something, and the conductor came up and was like, you have to put your mask on.
	And I was like, I'm drinking wine.
	And he was like, you have to put it on your chin so you can pull it up between bites and sips.
	And I was just like...
	I can't deal with it.
	So DC had a pretty strict mask mandate and all this stupid stuff like, you know, you walk into the bar with your mask on and then you take it off and you sit down.
	They finally did away with it.
	But I got in all these fights at the gym because I wouldn't wear my mask.
	I finally quit the gym.
	And then, well, I quit, but then they claimed that I was banned.
	And I was like, no, I quit first.
	So I bought a Peloton.
	That's another story.
	But yeah.
	I think Viva hasn't been skiing lately because of all this.
	I know.
	I will not.
	I stubbornly will not show a vaccine passport to ride in a chairlift to go skiing.
	So I dumped the kids off and I went cross-country skiing.
	It's great.
	I'm healthier and I'm better as a result.
	But Janine, here's a real question because I'm asking this confession through projection because I know what's happened to me.
	How many friends?
	I'm not asking if you've lost friends.
	How many friends, lifelong friends, have you lost because of what you're doing in life right now under this context?
	All of them.
	Well, that's the most depressing thing.
	I'm going to have to skip it out of this.
	All of them.
	Okay.
	Please elaborate.
	I will say, so I don't...
	A lot of people explicitly repudiated me and said that, you know, I was a terrible person.
	They weren't going to be my friend.
	Some people just stopped talking to me.
	And then there were a few who I share equal blame.
	It felt as though, you know, I try to meet up with them and we try to talk about something and they'd be like, oh, I was at this party and everybody was unmasked and I'm so nervous.
	And I was just like...
	We don't have anything to talk about.
	So it's kind of a mutual parting of the ways.
	I will say that one of the silver linings has been I've met so many incredible people through this and free thinkers.
	And actually, I've become friends with a lot of sort of former Democrats who would now call themselves politically homeless like myself.
	And we've created really great friendships.
	And actually, I met most of them through Twitter, funny enough.
	So that's the silver lining.
	And they're people I actually get along with more.
	I know I can say anything, too.
	I know that some of them are watching this and heard some of my more controversial statements and won't judge me for them, even if they don't exactly agree.
	So in the end, I think I've ended up with a better set of friends.
	Were you surprised at all by that?
	I mean, the first time, like, my politics is...
	Publicly, you know, been varied over the years.
	I used to work with Democrats back in the days, back in Tennessee, Democrats were sane.
	And, you know, all of my religious conservative friends who didn't agree with that, I never lost any of them.
	You know, they would tweak me and have fun now and then, that so on and so forth.
	But none of my conservative friends, for any position that I took that was seen as left, ever, you know, unfriended me on Facebook or anything like that.
	Whereas, beginning with Trump, A good number of my lefty friends, a friend of mine who is a corporate lawyer out in South Dakota, who just recently left.
	Now she's doing good work for the first time.
	Especially if you're on the left and you're doing corporate labor law, I don't know if you can preach to anybody.
	I was shocked at...
	Well, I can't say I was shocked.
	I was still surprised, disappointed, I suppose, at how political, because Trump was almost small change compared to the lockdown stuff, that the lockdown stuff sent people totally off the res.
	Were you surprised at some of these people that all of a sudden friendship is judged by whether or not you have the right political belief about a local topic?
	That's a really good and complicated question.
	So I would say it wouldn't surprise me that the left...
	This was a common theme on the left, to stop being friends with someone because of different political views.
	I think some of the earlier stuff I described sort of presaged that, I guess I would say.
	But I was surprised at how quickly this became political.
	That to me was the question of public health and science and civil rights.
	That all of a sudden this was, you know, you're on this side or against it.
	And I was like, well, wait a second.
	Like, we've never done this before.
	We've never talked about locking down an entire, you know, country or state or whatever, city.
	Why is this all of a sudden a political issue?
	And, you know, you bring up Trump and, you know, I talk a lot on Twitter about I think Trump's arrangement syndrome is real.
	Like, I think that...
	The left hated Trump so much that things would have played out very differently if he wasn't president, which is not to say that's the left's fault for basically being just totally contrarian on the issue.
	But he set something off.
	And his, I think, reluctance to take the virus seriously, like waffling on masks, just made them go, oh, we must lock down.
	This is very serious.
	Everyone must wear masks all the time.
	And I think that's just...
	Kept going for two years.
	And when I speak to some of my family members who are not on my side with this about the topic, I would say what I get out of them, you know, I'll sort of press them on the vaccine mandate question.
	This doesn't make a lot of sense, like, you know, all the issues with it.
	And what it boils down to is, like, we want to stick it to these bad Trump people.
	We want to punish the bad Trump people.
	It's not about science or logic or public health.
	That all has been a bit surprising to me, I would say.
	How has been the family reactions to your shift politically?
	That's a good question.
	Two of my brothers are actually pretty conservative, which was not how my parents were, but they had been for a while.
	Their friends and colleagues stumble across my stuff and have actually helped some of them a little bit.
	Not everyone I take on as a client, I still can, you know, have some ideas about what to do.
	So actually, they've been very supportive.
	My third brother is very kind.
	Call this confession through projection.
	I'm the youngest of five kids.
	Of five kids, there's diverging politics and there's diverging approval or disapproval of life decisions.
	I don't get into it, but that's the question.
	I will not speak ill of people who do not want to speak publicly.
	Maybe I'm projecting, but I think I feel something.
	Say all of your friends and For what?
	For, you know, talking about stuff that's going on, but you've made new friends.
	Through your practice, have you established a network even within D.C. that is supportive?
	Not that financially or anything, spiritually supportive.
	But you need the spiritual support to know that you're not alone in this world.
	Have you found that even within the swamp cesspool that is D.C.?
	So, yes.
	And I'll say one of the...
	Greatest things about this whole experience is any city I go, I sometimes tweet, you know, I'm in Cleveland, and people are like, oh, come meet us.
	So it's been, it's actually been very, really great in that way.
	And I have a group in DC, I have a group in New York.
	My brother lives in San Francisco, so I went there for a week and met a bunch of people in San Francisco I'm friends with now.
	So we've sort of found each other, I think, in this.
	And a lot of the people have reached out to me as former Democrats and feeling very isolated.
	So we've sort of found each other in this.
	And I think you become really close with people when you feel rejected by everyone around you and you don't fit in anywhere.
	So in a way, I don't...
	I don't regret it.
	And frankly, these are better friends because they're not going to abandon me because we have a different opinion on a public health matter.
	Now, how did you get, like, when you were at, all of us were at the Project Veritas get-together down in Miami.
	How did you get familiar with Project Veritas, their work, and all of that?
	So, I have a friend, Adam Creighton, who's a journalist for The Australian, and he knows James O 'Keefe.
	And we were out one night and he was like, do you want to go to Miami?
	And there's a party.
	And I heard Miami and party.
	And I was like, sure.
	But yeah, that was a lot of fun.
	Someone in the chat had asked, Viva, how do you define a friend?
	And I said, someone you'd go camping with.
	And so I think that struck a chord.
	Camping is a very personal experience where you have to have conversations, not mine being seen naked because that's what happens when you go camping.
	That's a joke.
	But that would be my definition of a friend.
	And Janine, talking about losing lifelong friends.
	I've had friends.
	You lose them because of overt confrontation and then you lose them also just because of passive friction where you sit down and you haven't seen the person in a long time.
	And they talk about...
	You know, I had to go lock down for two weeks to see my mother because she was coming in from wherever.
	And then she didn't come in.
	And then I just wasted a week and a half in isolation.
	And I was like, does any of that make sense to you?
	Like, I don't want to call you an idiot, but does any of that make sense?
	And then it's like, well, yeah, because you have to do it.
	It's like, why do you have to do it?
	And then there's a bridge.
	There's an unbridgeable gap of silence and distance between old friends.
	And it's sad.
	But in all of this travesty of modern times, I've met Robert.
	I've met a bunch of other people.
	I've met you.
	It is weird.
	It's bizarre.
	And the only thing we're after is individual choice, freedom of choice, just freedom of thought.
	But are you losing faith or are you getting more optimistic, Janine?
	I don't know if I can answer that as one thing.
	I've certainly, I mean, I've lost a bit of faith in the courts.
	I don't.
	The political divide in America is disheartening, I think.
	It's just so poisonous.
	And, you know, the hatred both sides have for each other.
	I will say, you know, I get criticized.
	And I think one thing a lot of my former friends from the left would say is that I criticize the left all the time and not the right.
	I don't criticize the right because I don't know them.
	I never hung out with them.
	I don't feel like I'm in a place to.
	And I did criticize the right when I considered myself more on the left.
	But when I see my own side doing something I consider so poisonous and wrong, I feel like it's my duty to speak out against it.
	And so that's why I'm spending all this time on that.
	So this divide is toxic.
	I don't really see how it's going to resolve in any...
	But on the other hand, in a way, the country did come around.
	It took two years.
	And this was something I sort of realized recently.
	But in the end, the fate of the country lies in Americans' hands.
	The fate of civil liberties lies in American hands.
	The courts aren't going to protect us.
	When the politicians knew that they were going to start losing, if they continued with these horrible restrictions, that's when it changed.
	You know, Americans have to stand up and, you know, hopefully next time they're going to realize more quickly and look a little bit more searchingly at what the CDC recommends or Anthony Fauci says.
	Yeah.
	I mean, the way I put it is the courts of law work together with the court of public opinion, but ultimately the court of public opinion has the most power and the most persuasion of getting public officials to do the right thing.
	And without it, it's going to be tough for the court of law to do so by itself.
	But the court of law can reinforce that.
	The cases that are brought, I mean, the case that you brought, George Mason University case, was the first case of that nature at the time.
	And gave people encouragement because George Mason folded rather than risk what would happen at court.
	But they sort of reinforce one another in that context that I think makes a key difference.
	In terms of the everyday practice of law, how much has the shift from criminal defense appeals work to civil rights, civil liberties work across the country, what has that been like?
	Well, it's been intellectually challenging, so it's totally different.
	And it's much faster paced than what I used to do.
	So, well, this is very boring, but deadlines are just constantly up against some deadline.
	I've just been a little surprised.
	I would say I've been a little surprised about, as I said before, that the courts are so willing to just side with the government.
	Seems like the government always wins.
	And yeah, that's a surprise.
	The government is the house, and the house always wins one way or the other.
	They take their cut, they have their guaranteed employment, they exempt themselves from the rules, and they come down with the iron fist on anybody who does not follow their rules.
	There's no other way of putting it.
	Janine, where can people find you?
	Social medias and, I mean, look, you don't need more calls, but you're going to get them anyhow.
	Where can people reach you professionally if they have a case that they think your association might want to handle?
	Your association, it's a not-for-profit or is it a charitable organization?
	That's right.
	It's a 501c3, so it's a non-profit.
	So you don't have to pay for our services, but on the flip side, we take very few cases.
	And we're strategic litigation, so we're trying to change the law in the right direction.
	So we're like...
	Finding the case that sort of fits.
	Okay, well, we'll put the link in the pinned comment without a question.
	Sorry, I actually didn't answer the question.
	It's just my first name, janine.unis at ncla.legal.
	And then my Twitter handle is, as I mentioned at the beginning, leftylockdowns1, which is very stupid, but because I did not understand how Twitter worked when I created it.
	It's good.
	And by the way, just so everybody understands in the chat, I looked for scandals involving Janine.
	Didn't find any.
	I watched a ton of interviews.
	I knew a lot of the answers to the questions that I was about to ask.
	Not all of them.
	Janine, Robert, do you want to have a last word and give us a white tail heading out?
	Sure.
	One of the things I'm always curious about is, I mean, I tell people to pay attention to various thought leaders and other people in the sense of when they're willing to voice a dissonant opinion early on, willing to stick with that independent opinion when everyone was telling them otherwise.
	Some colleagues of mine are experiencing that.
	Some people that are...
	In the Senate, in the House, running for it, etc., experiencing that right now in another context.
	First it was Trump, and then it was the election issues, and then...
	And then it was these lockdown and other issues.
	And now, of course, it's a war overseas where you only can allow to have one opinion.
	If you have any other opinion, then you're evil and terrible and horrible and awful, etc.
	What led you to stick with your beliefs and take continuous action on those beliefs, even when you have the friends and the social media and the public world and the professional world all saying, abandon those beliefs?
	You know, I just knew.
	It didn't make sense.
	You know, this idea you're going to lock down.
	I mean, obviously, again, a lot of people have to work.
	You're putting all these people in apartments.
	A virus is a virus.
	Maybe we delay things a little bit.
	With masks, it was obvious to me.
	We've known forever masks don't work.
	All of a sudden, they work, and we know for certain.
	The New York Times went within seven days, something like that, from masks don't work to masks definitely work.
	The science has settled there.
	Actually, one of the big things for me was Sweden.
	I was paying a lot of attention to Sweden, and I saw how much the left-wing media was desperately trying to declare Sweden a failure.
	There was a New York Times article.
	I'm like, why are you so eager to declare this a failure so early on?
	Like, this is obviously a long view.
	We can't, you know, know for certain what the better strategy is at this point.
	I mean, I thought I knew.
	I was proven right.
	And so I was very tipped off to the fact that the media wasn't being honest or the media that I had been used to consuming, like the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, etc.
	And so I just started to look outside of it and do my own research.
	One of the peculiar features about the lockdown was that I just had a lot of time on my hands.
	I was, you know, not going out, not like doing traveling or doing the things that I usually do.
	So I would just like spend four or six hours at night researching.
	And so I was able to sort of figure things out.
	Next time around, you know, if it doesn't manifest in the same way, I might not have the same opportunity to do my own research.
	It's phenomenal.
	It's fantastic.
	Janine, you might have people following you.
	You might have a saucier Twitter feed tomorrow than you had today, but we'll see.
	I've heard my Twitter feed is saucy.
	There's the old Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility, but also with great exposure comes great Twitter feeds.
	Janine, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Robert, stick around.
	Everyone in the chat.
	First of all, I want to apologize to you, Janine, and everyone else.
	Sorry for the lighting.
	Sorry for the audio.
	But it's the discussion.
	This could be on ham radio.
	This would be worth sharing with the world because it's amazing, Janine, that there are people out there like you doing this despite the turmoil, despite the unpopularity now.
	One day.
	You will be a hero in the history books of mankind, humankind.
	Thank you so much.
	That's so kind of you.
	In Canada, I'm going to get cancelled for what I just said.
	So in the history books of people kind, people, Janine, you're going to be with Robert Barnes right up there.
	And thank you.
	I mean, genuinely thank you.
	This was great.
	One day when you come back on, we're going to delve back into the childhood stuff because the whole...
	You know, we didn't even get into Russia-Ukraine.
	I was hoping you wouldn't ask me.
	I don't have a good opinion.
	There's no such thing as a bad opinion.
	There's only the one that you can't substantiate.
	I have a lack of knowledge on this subject.
	I know the limitations.
	You didn't have to say that now.
	It doesn't matter.
	We'll talk afterwards.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	Snip and share.
	I'll post some clips tomorrow.
	And Janine, it was great to meet you.
	But stick around, we'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	Thank you so much for having me.

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