The DOJ’s Abortion Civil Rights Violations

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

In May, Paulette Harlow, a 75-year-old grandmother, was sentenced to two years in prison for a civil disobedience protest at a D.C. abortion clinic.

In September, Amber Smith-Stewart was sentenced to 30 days in prison for pro-abortion attacks on a pregnancy center. She and her two co-defendants had been tied to attacks on three pregnancy centers in Florida during which threatening messages such as “If abortions aren’t safe than niether are you” and “YOUR TIME IS UP!!” had been scrawled on them that were linked to the wave of nationwide attacks by the pro-abortion Jane’s Revenge terror group.

Harlow was sentenced for what the Biden-Harris Department of Justice described as “a conspiracy that created a blockade” of the abortion clinic doors. Generally this is known as civil disobedience, but the FACE Act turned abortion clinics into ‘first amendment free zones’ where people can spend years in prison for doing the same things other protesters get away with.

However the FACE Act equally applies to the pregnancy centers attacked by Jane’s Revenge in the aftermath of the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade as unconstitutional.

Despite the FBI’s nationwide armed raids on the homes of pro-life protesters, there have been virtually no arrests in the dozens of attacks on pregnancy centers by pro-abortion activists.

The arrests of Smith-Stewart and her three co-defendants were the sole exception and ended in sentences of a month in prison for the two women, and a year in prison for Caleb Freestone: the male defendant. That’s in sharp contrast to the years in prison typically dispensed to Harlow and the average pro-life protester prosecuted under the FACE Act. Lauren Handy, one of the female protesters at the D.C. abortion clinic, was sentenced to nearly 5 years in prison.

While the Department of Justice aggressively employs the Freedom of Access or FACE Act against pro-life protesters, it selectively fails to enforce it against pro-abortion activists. And on the rare occasion when it does, the two-tier political system of enforcement quickly kicks in.

Rather than respecting the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which ended the fictitious legal claim of a constitutional abortion right, Attorney General Merrick Garland and top Biden-Harris DOJ officials responded by announcing the creation of the Reproductive Rights Task Force. Rather than enforcing the FACE Act without any political considerations, the task force was specifically geared to empower abortion.

“Dobbs dealt a devastating blow to reproductive freedom,” Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer, who established the RRTF task force, argued. “We established the Reproductive Rights Task Force to bring a whole-of-department approach to protecting access to reproductive health care following Dobbs.”

The explicit linkage of the Dobbs decision to the task force was an admission that the DOJ’s mission was to specifically protect abortion and not anything else in violation of the FACE Act.

In a summer press release, RRTF bragged that “since January 2021, the Department has brought 25 cases involving a total of 57 defendants accused of criminal FACE Act-related violations.” During this same period there were over 20 attacks on pregnancy centers. These attacks ranged from firebombings to death threats to vandalism. They included attacks on churches which are also illegal under the FACE Act and liable to federal prosecution.

Despite that, the FBI did not make a single arrest until it was faced with congressional hearings by the new GOP majority. It did however have the time and resources to send two dozen armed agents to arrest a pro-life protester accused in a shoving incident at an abortion clinic.

FBI Director Wray testified that “probably in the neighborhood of 70% of our abortion-related violence cases or threats cases are cases of violence or threats against… pro-life organizations. And we’re going after that through our joint terrorism task forces, through our criminal authorities, FACE Act and things like that.”

And yet out of 57 defendants only 4 were pro-abortion while 53 were pro-life which means that while 70% of cases involve attacks on pro-life groups but 92% of defendants are pro-life.

Only 7% of the DOJ’s FACE Act defendants are related to 70% of the cases while 92% are related to 30% of the cases. This is a completely illegal bias displayed in hard numbers.

It gets even worse because while the average pro-life defendant received a multi-year prison sentence, all the pro-abortion defendants got far lighter sentences.

After the sentencing of Lauren Handy to nearly 5 years in prison for civil disobedience, an FBI official falsely claimed that “the FBI and our judicial system will not tolerate the obstruction of civil rights.” In fact the FBI is dedicated to the violation of civil rights with a two-tier system.

After two years and at least twenty incidents of pro-abortion violence by a national network, the FBI and the Department of Justice did virtually nothing to arrest and indict the majority of the perpetrators. And while bias can be hard to prove, press releases by the DOJ task force and statements by top DOJ officials make it clear that its mission is pro-abortion, not pro-justice.

The language of DOJ officials including Attorney General Merrick Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta shows that rather than enforcing the FACE Act as it’s written, they have invented a new pro-abortion FACE Act and are enforcing that instead.

Garland and Gupta have defined the mission of the task force as protecting “reproductive freedom”, but the FACE Act protects “freedom of access” to clinics, whether pro-abortion or pro-life as well as to churches and synagogues. Replacing freedom of access with reproductive freedom has allowed the DOJ to enforce a law that they invented rather than one that exists.

The DOJ task force’s mission is not to enforce the FACE Act but to protect abortion. By turning over FACE Act enforcement to a pro-abortion task force, the Biden-Harris administration and its DOJ ensured the civil rights violations proceeding from systemically unequal enforcement.

What is at stake in the civil rights abuses of the Biden-Harris administration and the Department of Justice goes beyond personal opinions on abortion. A politicized justice system is the first and foremost threat to civil rights. The politically selective interpretation of laws leads to a two-tier justice system in which the political agendas of those in power become the only law.

The FACE Act was already inherently unconstitutional because the intent behind it was to criminalize protests by one particular political movement against another. While civil disobedience is illegal and may deserve some punishment, a system under which members of one political movement engaging in civil disobedience receive 5 years in prison while members of another usually get an easily dismissed misdemeanor is traditional form of political repression and not any fundamentally different than the legal systems of Russia, China or Cuba.

The only thing that kept the FACE Act from being the modern equivalent of WWI’s Sedition Act and other legislation that liberals used to abhor before they gained power and embraced their use was that the bias was in the agenda behind it rather than in the text. The DOJ’s selective enforcement of the FACE Act however has made it a full blown unconstitutional abomination.

The DOJ and the FBI had the opportunity after the Dobbs decision and the attacks by Jane’s Revenge to show that they could be trusted to fairly enforce the law despite their personal politics and the only thing that they demonstrated was that their politics are the law.

And if you doubt that, ask the pro-life activists being sentenced to years in prison or, better yet, ask the pro-abortion activists getting off with a slap on the wrist. You’ll only have to wait 30 days.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading. 

Whatever happened to... (Part 2)

More painful observations

Michael D. Shaw Mar 28, 2024 @ Mike's Point Of View

Whatever happened to…Civil Rights—The notion of “Civil Rights” must be contrasted with basic human rights, that are presumed to exist as part of the Natural Law. In essence, Civil Rights must be guaranteed by the government, while human rights are part of the inherent dignity of mankind. Indeed, our Bill of Rights is mostly about preventing the government from limiting our human rights.

The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was concerned with ending discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin. The Act enabled the Feds to prevent racial discrimination in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities. Never mind that virtually all this discrimination was originally imposed by the Government at some level.

Barry Goldwater is remembered for opposing the Act, even though he was quite a leader in the Civil Rights movement in his home state of Arizona. Goldwater’s opposition was based on his correct perception that this was an immense power grab by the Feds, since there was almost no limit to what could be deemed a “civil right.” Goldwater was to soften up as he got older, and said that he regretted his decision.

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment states that:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

It would seem that this provision was routinely violated for 96 years, and I guess no one ever noticed, until it became politically expedient. Mostly because of the liberal bent of the mainstream media, the Democrats—well-known at least in the South as the party of segregation—became identified with the Act. Still, it never would have passed without significant Republican support.

Affirmative Action, whereby government contractors are to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin" dates back to a 1961 Executive Order. It gained momentum following the passage of the Act, and would soon turn into full-blown quota systems.

Alas, the quota systems would morph into outright in-your-face discrimination with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. Thus, we come full circle with both the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act being violated—all with the full faith and credit of the Feds. Do you think the younger Barry Goldwater was onto something?

Given the ingenuity of plaintiff’s lawyers, pressure groups, and the insatiable appetite of the Feds for more power, within a few short years after the passage of the Act, countless victim groups would come forward, in the name of “civil rights.” To be sure, many of these were worthy causes, but what have we wrought?

Do I really need to count up the ways in which society has been fragmented, secularized, and polarized, or how human rights have taken a distant second place to civil rights?

Thanks for reading Mike's Point Of View! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Artur Pawlowski Found Guilty of Inciting Mischief and Eco-terrorism: A Threat to Canadian Freedom of Expression and Religion

By Cindy Chafian July 19, 2023

 Calgary Alberta, July 18, 2023 - In a recent ruling, Artur Pawlowski has been found guilty by a judge of inciting mischief and eco-terrorism, leaving Canadians concerned about the erosion of their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion. The sentencing for this case is scheduled for August 9, 2023, unless further legal actions are taken to challenge the verdict.

The implications of this ruling are far-reaching, as it poses a significant threat to the cherished principles that have defined Canadian society for generations. If not struck down, it could set a dangerous precedent whereby any individual, including politicians, journalists, and private citizens, who dare to oppose the ruling party, expose corruption, or voice dissent against tyranny, may face up to 10 years of imprisonment....To Read More......

I've been following this from the beginning, and here's my Pawlowski file:

• Canadian Pastor Gets “Total” Win In Court – “Jail Time…Censorship…Fines Against Him Were Illegal”
• Justin Trudeau’s ‘Sting of Spite’ Against Political Prisoner Pastor Artur Pawlowski
• Canada Doubles Down on Arresting Christians
• Calgary police finally got their revenge against Pastor Pawlowski

 

Politics and the End of Private Lives

By Daniel Greenfield July 06, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Cancel culture, like most of our contemporary cultural revolution, began in China.

In the aughts, rural Chinese migrated to massive mega-cities whose impossible population densities were matched by the growing interconnection of the internet. While three quarters of China’s population is now on the internet, in 2006 it grew by a quarter to encompass only 10%.

In these cramped quarters, physical and social, there was no room for the individual.

The Chinese internet, unlike its American counterpart, was always centered around social media which is one reason why TikTok is eating Facebook, Twitter and YouTube’s lunches. It was also always mobile. Chinese commuters on public transportation tapped in their grievances against neighbors, friends, family and random strangers. And mobs formed to take sides.

What we call cancel culture, the Chinese called “internet hunting” by “morality mobs” who were enforcing a street-level Confucianism in Maoist fashion by destroying the lives of the offenders.

It took Americans another decade to catch up to China. Cancel culture is more overtly ideological than internet hunting, but they are the common phenomenon of leftist mass societies where people inhabit anonymous collectives, displaced by technology and the collapse of definable communities, they form ad hoc groups to enforce social codes and burn witches.

Communist societies pursue collectivization to eliminate personal spaces. The Soviet Union pushed its peasants into collective farms and its urban residents into communal apartments to root out the very idea of the personal. Early Soviet apartments had no kitchens and the planners initially intended to have everyone eat in public kitchens and use their homes for sleeping.

The social web is much more stifling than any Soviet communal apartment. A family might have been stuck with one bedroom, but at least they had a door that they could close. The internet has taken down all the doors. Making the private public is a core leftist program. The old hackers claimed that “information wants to be free”. Information is less free than it ever was, but people’s lives have become public property. The ‘free’ public services of Google, Facebook and others offer convenience in exchange for information. Family life and political participation leave a trail. Disputes spill out into their ugliness into social media. From the media to social media, everyone is invited to judge the private lives that have become public commodities.

It took Americans longer to collectivize the personal than it did the Chinese. And we did it in a typically individualistic fashion. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, when collectivism came to America, it did so by flying emojis offering character creators, personalized algorithm suggestions and relevant ads. Americans became the same under the guise of expressing their differences. That sameness refracted through the illusion of collectivist mass cultural expression is not at all coincidentally at the heart of identity politics setups like the LGBTQ movement.

Cancel culture politicized the personal. But for it to work, we had to give up our private lives.

In a collectivist society, everyone is either a model citizen or a problem. Individualism is an offense against the system. That is what the Chinese, whose version of the ‘Ugly Duckling’ has the swan dying because of his differences, innately understood. It was what China’s morality mobs and internet hunters foreshadowed to Americans eagerly signing up for Facebook.

When people make their personal lives public, they hand them over to the Left

Defeating cancel culture requires restoring private lives. Soviet citizens in the grip of Communist terror understood that they could survive, not only physically but morally, by creating spaces where the state and its enforcers could not reach. At the end of the film ‘Brazil’, the protagonist, being tortured by the state, escapes into his imagination. Such is the power of inner lives.

Engaging with cancel culture on its own terms feeds the beast. Like every totalitarian system, cancel culture is nourished by consuming the lives of others. And those lives must be accessible. The more we live our lives in public view, the more of us it consumes and the more we normalize the idea that life is a collectivist enterprise to be pored over by others for their entertainment. What began with reality television has culminated in professional influencers whose existence is a facsimile of reality and whose gravitational pull warps our sense of reality.

Private lives are not just a stylistic choice. The American Revolution was fought over, among other matters, because the colonists refused to be feudal peasants who were expected to open their doors and quarter British soldiers in their homes at the demand of a king. Contemporary Americans assume that they are obligated to let officers of the state, not only the police but a long list of inspectors and authority figures into their homes, and have made their homes and lives into just another node on the internet for everyone to pass through when they please.

Inhabiting public lives has not made us any happier. Statistics show a sharp increase in depression and suicide rates for teens beginning with the popularization of the smartphone. Critics and experts point to the devastating impact of phones on public happiness, yet fail to boil it down succinctly to what adults understand, but teens never had a chance to experience.

Like the child stars and teen musicians of another era, a generation has come of age and another is coming of age without any sense of what living a private life is even like. The personal is naturally public. Life feels only lived if someone else is watching. Without audiences, life appears unreal, and yet with the eternal audience of social media, it is truly unreal. To be public is to give up the self. Teenagers, who have the greatest need for privacy and the least ability to maintain its boundaries, are the greatest victims of the violation of private lives.

Cancel culture is only the most visible manifestation of that, along with elevated depression and suicide rates, and a general anhedonia, an inability to be happy, because happiness on any level other than the animalistic is impossible without a private self. Teenage girls are the most dependent on social networks for their sense of worth and are the most likely to lose their sense of who they are to them. Transgender mutilation is a massive phenomenon among teenage girls for the same reason that body dysmorphic disorders tend to hit them harder. When you lose your mental sense of self, hurting your body becomes a desperate effort to exercise control.

Politics did not cause us to dive so far down a technological rabbit hole that we left western civilization behind and found feudalism waiting on the other side of the singularity, but the destruction of individuality opened the Overton window for totalitarian movements. By trading the private for the public, we erased the lines between the personal and the political. A revived leftist movement under the flag of wokeness made politicizing the personal into its mission statement. Giving up our wealth, our homes and our children to it was nothing. The true sacrifice was to give up our morality, our reasoning and our souls to the madness of the trending topic.

We ceased to think and we became receptacles for mass messaging in a way that no people, not even during the worst days of the twentieth century, had ever become. We no longer thought, we echoed, and we stopped acting and reacted, and let the postmodern dancing sickness that had once infected medieval millenarians take us on a crazy jig down the street.

The best defenses against public madness are private lives, against mass culture, the pursuit of individual creativity, and against mindlessness, thinking for ourselves. We are on the cusp of a world in which culture will be mass produced by AI, tailored by algorithms and primed to persuade us of anything as long as it has enough information about us to form a profile.

In the face of that inconceivable collectivism, we can become ourselves or lose ourselves.

Private lives, and their vital tools, thoughtfulness, modesty, integrity, religiosity, reason, humility and common sense, are the anti-virus software against a virus of a scale we can neither imagine nor survive intact as reasoning civilized beings. They are the barriers, the doors we can close on a system that needs us to give up everything we have in order to rule over us.

This is not monasticism: it’s individualism. We do not need to retreat from fighting or making a difference. But what we must do is fight without losing the selves that we are fighting for.

What, in the final analysis, are we fighting for? More than a single election, we are fighting for a world in which we are the kings and queens of our homes, where our children are safe from the predators who have become emboldened in the age of identity politics, where we do not have to account for choices to the oversight of the state and where we are free to think and believe.

We are fighting not just for a nation, but for the right to our private lives once again.

In a totalitarian state, the private is public because the people are the property of the state whereas in a free society, the public is private because the state belongs to the people.

America was founded as a free society and has become a totalitarian state. Its monolithic institutions, state, corporate, academic, nonprofit, claim the right to control everything about their subjects from birth to death, a thousand forms and agenda items put the personal at the disposition of the public. A new revolution will make the personal, private once again. It is a revolution that can begin with us when we do not answer a question, fill in a form, turn over data or share our lives or scrutinize the lives of others who are not our family or our friends.

The act of living private lives carries with it a moral power that can transform a culture..

Even in the most totalitarian societies, people can draw lines between the public and the private. Acts of quiet defiance serve to restore norms and limit the power of the state. There are many walls worth building. One of them is the wall between the private and the public, the personal and the political, between our homes and the system, and between ourselves and the state.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.

Blasts From the Past: Latest Academic Hoax Is A Doozy

By Rich Kozlovich 

I had these old articles sitting forgotten in my draft file, but while some of these are a couple of years old, all of it is up to date because these posts shows there's an unending effort to arrogantly corrupt and pervert science, and academia as a whole, with nationally destructive leftist narratives by leftist academics in each and every field they have input.  Academia is a sweltering swamp of leftist corruption, academic fraud, and academic welfare.  And that includes those universities based on religious orders.  They're all guilty of: "profligate spending, administrative bloat, exorbitant tuition costs, massive student loan debt, mission drift, student radicalism" and worse.

 

 

It's very real, it's pandemic, and it's long past time we stop funding universities.  While screaming about academic freedom they're the worst offenders of civil rights in the nation, and they're the worst because they're corrupting young and impressionable minds who are captured in these classrooms, and it starts in Kindergarten.

 

Both Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and Eric Blair, AKA, George Orwell, would have been impressed.  

 

Latest Academic Hoax Is A Doozy  - November 29, 2021 by Steven Hayward - Ever since Alan Sokal hoaxed Social Text more than 20 years ago, and Peter Boghossian and his two compatriots punked several postmodern journals with total gibberish just a couple years back, you’d think academic journal editors and reviewers would be on guard against similar hoaxes. But apparently not Higher Education Quarterly (a Wiley publication) which is just out with a howler entitled “Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy.”  The study purports to demonstrate that “right wing” money is having a significant effect in pushing colleges to the right.

The first sign this is a hoax is that the article says the two authors, Sage Owens and Kal Avers-Lynde III, are on the economics faculty at UCLA, but I can find no record of their existence at UCLA or anywhere else, and no record of other publications by either author. I believe they do not exist. My suspicion is that the “authors” may be conservatives, or at least anti-leftists, who decided to see whether an article that flatters the deep biases of academia could get past peer review and into print...........To Read More...

American institutions outsource graduation speeches to foreign elites, By Olivia Murray  May 28, 2022 - Springtime in these United States means universities across the country gather for ceremonies and speeches. Two of the most academically (dis)reputable establishments, Stanford and Harvard, played host to foreign elites pushing a leftist global agenda. Zelenskyy made an emotional appeal to encourage further bankrupting American citizens to support his war with a global superpower, while New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern arrogantly detailed her country’s ‘progressive’ legislative model.    From her speech:..........

 University Accused of Weaponizing Public Records Law to Harass, Intimidate Faculty - January 3, 2022 - Indiana University paid a law firm to file a public records request against itself to search the emails of a law professor who was investigating its presidential search process, the professor claims, citing an invoice for the firm's services. Steve..

‘BIPOC’ Debate Tournament Banned White Students from Competing - January 3, 2022 Admin - Student-run debate organizations at Northeastern University and Boston College co-hosted the American Parliamentary Debate Association’s (APDA) “inaugural BIPOC tournament” and explicitly prohibited white students from competing.  The BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color,) only tournament included teams from multiple universities including the University of Chicago.  As The Chicago Thinker reported this past semester, The University of Chicago informed students the BIPOC debate was only open to anyone who “does not identify as white.”..........Topics for the debate tournament include “issues relating to race and social justice.”

Academic Ideologues Are Corrupting STEM. The Silent Liberal Majority Must Fight Back (quillette.com) Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman 18 Dec 2021 - Earlier this year, I (Anna) did something that my friends feared I would come to regret: I publicly spoke out against the intrusion of illiberal thought into science and education, with a letter entitled, The Peril of Politicizing Science, published on June 10th in The Journal of Physical Chemistry. In that letter, I drew on my own early life in the USSR, where communist ideology permeated all aspects of life, and survival required strict adherence to the party line and enthusiastic displays of ideologically proper behavior.  I noted that certain names and ideas are now forbidden within academia for ideological reasons, just as had been the case in my youth. My own home town of Yuzovka, I noted, was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), then renamed Stalino after Trotsky was purged, then Donetsk when Stalin was posthumously canceled by Khrushchev. ............

Jesuit-Led Loyola Academics Urge Continued Teaching of CRT in K-12 Schools - Dr. Susan Berry - Faculty members of the School of Education at Loyola University Maryland argued recently that while there are many topics that should be kept at the collegiate level because they are too advanced or inappropriate for children, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is not among them...........

• Black Lives Matter Activists Tell Students ‘Crime Is Made up’ - Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists gave a talk to over 150 people in the spring of 2020, telling students that “crime is made up” and black people are “enslaved” when they are sent to jail, among other things.

A law school forces Maoist re-education on a professor who ran afoul of Black students - December 27, 2021 The details of both his non-sin and the insane fire the law school is raining down on his head should be a reminder to all of us that American academia is toxic. .....

And the Golden Turkey Award Goes To… November 24, 2021 — John Hinderaker -Twice a year, Center of the American Experiment presents its Golden Turkey Award to highlight wasteful government spending in the State of Minnesota. Each contest features four nominees, and thousands of Minnesotans vote to select the winner. This time around, the nominees included a $261,000 grant to the University of Minnesota to teach eagles not to fly into wind turbines.........

Struggle sessions come to UC Berkeley - By Jared Peterson November 23, 2021 - Read the email reproduced below from Dania Matos, U.C. Berkeley's new vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion.  And weep.  Or laugh.  The language alone — an inadvertent parody of academic incomprehensibility — is enough to provoke uncontrollable laughter or tears, depending on one's state of mind.  Here it is in all its Orwellian glory:...........Let's be clear about what we have here:  This is a summons from U.C., Berkeley's new vice chancellor for "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion," a lawyer and 2003 political science graduate of Brown, presumably sent to all faculty members (and to many others — postdocs, grad students, who knows?), informing them that their presence is "requested" at the "political orthodoxy training seminar cum hate whitey and excoriate excellence festival" (my title) announced by the good comrade vice chancellor.......

Time for a New University? -  Allen Mendenhall November 19, 2021 -  “The foreseeable ranting and naysaying among journalists and scribblers isn’t an impediment to UATX. The chief challenge for UATX, in fact, will be recruiting students.”   Higher education in the United States is in dire condition. Priced Out, a report by Neetu Arnold of the National Association of Scholars released earlier this year, describes several problems afflicting colleges and universities: profligate spending, administrative bloat, exorbitant tuition costs, massive student loan debt, mission drift, student radicalism—the list goes on.  What can be done to fix these challenges? Is it time to build parallel schools to rival too-far-gone institutions? Is there room for new colleges and universities predicated on the serious, unbridled pursuit of truth and open inquiry, free from the rigid orthodoxies, anti-intellectualism, and close-mindedness of wokeism and identity politics?..........

It is clearer every day which party is radical, extreme, dangerous, and flat out crazy

March 23, 2023 By Jack Hellner

It is sad that only 74% of registered voters believe that parents have more rights to choose major, life-changing medical surgery than school officials. Here is the poll:

Poll: Majority of Voters Believe Schools Should Inform Parents of Students’ Gender Transitions - The poll released by parental rights organization Parents Defending Education found that 74 percent of registered voters believe that schools should not help students change their gender identity without parental consent. In the poll, 71 percent of registered voters oppose letting schools withhold information about a child’s gender identity from their parents. This includes 76 percent of black voters, 71 percent of white voters, 66 percent of Hispanic voters, and 59 percent of Asian voters and 85 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of Independent voters, and 59 percent of Democrats.

Who are the 26% of voters who believe the parents have no right to know?

Probably the same sliver of people who believe that biological males should compete with girls in sports and that people with penises should be able to invade girls' privacy in public restrooms and expose themselves in their locker rooms.............Parents are required to sign permission slips in order for children to go on field trips.

1. They are required to sign waivers to allow children to play sports. 
2. School officials need permission to give students an aspirin. 
3. The age of consent in most states for sex is sixteen
4. People need to be 21 to smoke, and 18 to vote.
5. People can't sign contracts or get married in most states until they are 18. 
6. They can't drive until they are 16.

It appears that the only time that children can make a major medical decision without the parents' permission is when a young girl wants an abortion or when children as young as grade school decide, with egging guidance from school employees, that they want to be castrated, have their breasts cut off and to take dangerous puberty blockers to completely alter their bodily development.............To Read More....

The Resistance Continues

By Rich Kozlovich

It's being said by conservative writers the reasonable thing for the truckers to do now is to go home, and then just refuse to drive, in effect, go on strike, that way they can avoid fines, license restrictions and potentially jail, and that will work to end the tyranny.  

Well, that may be the reasonable thing to do but it isn't the rational thing to do.  Name one insurmountable obstacle that's ever been overcome by being reasonable. 

This trucker activity isn't an organization, it's a movement, there is no command and control structure, if they go home they lose! There will be no solidarity after they've broken up.  This is their time, this is the place.  To carry the day this has to be a win or lose mentality, and if they take whatever punishment comes, they'll win.  One of the conditions for going home is all punishments and fine are to be revoked, and any cost imposed on these protestors must be compensated.

Here's the reality of Canada. They have a parliamentarian form of government, and Trudeau's Liberal Party won the election, but failed to attain a majority, as a result he's leading a minority government, and the "conservatives" in Canada are worse than RINO's in America.  So this could easily collapse his government and create a demand for a new election, and a whole new conservative party, which is what these protestors should be demanding from their politicos, and then make restitution a matter of law.   

 

But no matter what happens, this will haunt Canada for decades because it shows just how contemptuously their leadership view their citizens and their rights.....which really is the law....which Trudeau and his myrmidons are warping and ignoring. 

The Truckers’ Occupation of Ottawa Has Revealed the Fecklessness of the Regime.

By Giles Hoffmann 2/12/22

I joined the Canadian Freedom Convoy once the trucks were already firmly set in Ottawa. My time in the Canadian capital was spent gathering information, specifically to document the successful, as well as the failed, tactics and strategies of the demonstration. My reticence over details is necessary because, whether through fate or my own persistence, I am now helping the central organization with some of their strategy, and anything that I disclose publicly could be used against them. But I can give a brief overview of what is happening here...........The Regime is failing against the Freedom Convoy..............

As the elites panic, they escalate their efforts and resort to desperate tricks, including calling the demonstrators nazis, booking every hotel room in Ottawa, interfering with donations, disrupting internet service, having officers posture for five minutes in front of the press media, threatening arrests, and even threatening military involvement because of the specter of “foreign interference.” It seems like Canada is going to war. 

But the injunctions, and the municipal and provincial states of emergency have only been powerful in name, not in practice. So far, their illusions have been all hat and no rabbit. Every obstacle in the truckers’ path is circumvented, and every day that the convoy remains, the government’s incompetence is revealed, and it is humiliated on the world stage..........To Read More....

The Canadian Dilemma in a Nutshell - By David Solway - From the perspective of freedom-loving citizens in this country, the trucker convoys and blockades protesting mask and vaccine mandates are a stirring spectacle of patriotism, civic responsibility, and true grit. They represent the offset to heavy-handed and arrogant government that is using everything in its power to suppress their efforts: threats, fines, police coercion, theft of property, and the manifestly illegal sequestering of funds donated to the truckers by private individuals. A conflict of this nature is often framed as the state versus the nation, the authorities versus the people. Whether it applies to the current situation, as we will see, is problematic.  The issue is the preservation, or restitution, of the government-violated Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms meant to guarantee common life in a democratic country—or, at any rate, a country now under the sway of an avowedly communist leader and several autocratic provincial premiers, a country that would appear well on the road to despotic control............

 

Free speech becomes roadkill in the crackdown on Canadian truckers - By Jonathan Turley, opinion contributor — 02/12/22  3,960 Comments - Canada appears to be facing its greatest threat since Benedict Arnold came close to seizing Ottawa in 1775. The source of this "insurrection" and "attack on democracy," however, is not a foreign government but Canadians who have descended on their own capital to protest continuing COVID-19 mandates. The protest has been peaceful — and highly successful in cutting off key highways. But the most alarming development has not come from the convoy but from the commentary about it, including calls for mass arrests and even vigilantism. The Ottawa Police Services Board chairman has called it a "nationwide insurrection," adding, "Our city is under siege." CNN analyst and Harvard professor Juliette Kayyem was apoplectic at the thought of truckers shutting down roads and interfering with trade. She tweeted out a call to "slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks." CNN correspondent Paula Newton said this act of civil disobedience was nothing less than a "threat to democracy. An insurrection, sedition.".....................

Canadian Police Begin Mass Arrests of ‘Freedom Convoy’ Protesters — But Now They Have a Whole New Problem by  Kyle Becker Feb. 14, 2022 - Kiss your freedom goodbye, Canada.  Plus, this suggests that even if you're an American (or from any other nation), Canada will now classify you as a terrorist if you merely donate to some cause that they don't like, no matter how non-violent and reasonable. The second internet donation site that was set up after GoFundMe froze donation funds to the truckers got hacked, and all the names of tens of thousands of people who donated to the truckers was released online by the hackers (I think it was either 60,000 or 80,000 people's information was published by the hackers).  Is Canada now going to prosecute or classify all of those people as terrorists?..........

BREAKING: Trudeau Has Declared Martial Law Against Freedom Convoy Protest - by  Kyle Becker - Justin Trudeau is making a declaration of “emergency” to suspend civil rights and impose a state of martial law due to the Freedom Convoy protests. Trudeau is invoking an executive order that was formerly called the War Measures Act. The Emergencies Act is the rebrand used during two world wars and in 1970 when militant Quebec separatists kidnapped a British diplomat.  The military is poised to intervene against the truckers, according to Canadian media reports. Trudeau’s arbitrary invocation of the Emergencies Act, rather than recognize the fundamental human rights of Canadian citizens, thus effectively suspends the Constitution, the Charter and even the International Covenant on Civil Rights...........

• Update: Justin Trudeau Invokes Never-Before-Used Emergency Powers Act to Quash Freedom Convoy Protests
• Canadian Civil Liberties Association Speaks Out Against Justin Trudeau’s Declaration of Emergency Act to Crack Down on Freedom Convoy Protesters By Jim Hoft February 14, 2022 400 Comments
• Stasi Tactics: Canadian Police Show Up to Woman’s Home and Harass Her Over Pro-Convoy Facebook Posts – Admit They are “Monitoring” Citizens’ Online Activity – (VIDEO) - Canada is quickly becoming a police state in the wake of the pandemic and trucker convoy.Thanks to the brave men and women that are standing for freedom, Trudeau’s mask has been ripped off, which has sent the elites spiraling into full panic mode. As they continue ramping up the crackdown on protesters themselves, Canada’s tyrants have even started to send law enforcement officers to people’s homes to harass and intimidate them over simply supporting the protests. ........... 
• *BREAKING* WINDSOR POLICE MOVE IN – Begin Removing Protesters Blocking Ambassador Bridge to US — Snipers on the Roof – City Buses Arrive for Arrests — Media Warned to Move Back
•  Not Giving Them a Choice is a Crime and Genocide’ – Canadian Army Major Sends an Urgent Message to Canadians and Calls on Military and Police Comrades to Stand Up Against Government Forced Medical Tyranny (VIDEO)February 12, 2022, by Jim Hoft

WOW! Trudeau Regime Announces Terrorist Financing Will Now Include Crowdfunding Donations for Anything They Don’t Like (VIDEO) - By Jim Hoft February 14, 2022 571 Comments - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on Monday afternoon to quash the Freedom Convoy 2022 truckers who have been protesting his tyrannical rule for three weeks now. This is the first time in Canadian history that the Emergencies Act has been invoked by a prime minister. Trudeau is doing this to crack down on truckers protesting overbearing COVID regulations...........

You're all probably already aware that the 'Freedom Convoys" have spread all over the place - even to New Zealand, Belgium, The Netherlands, etc., etc., etc.  People everywhere are utterly fed up with unresponsive, unaccountable, irrational, tyrannical government.  For the videos in the tweets:

 

Watch: Police Break Car Windows as Freedom Convoy Bursts into Paris (breitbart.com) - French police have squared off with thousands of protesters attempting to establish a Canadian-style convoy in Paris in response to the draconian coronavirus measures that Emmanuel Macron’s government has imposed upon the country. A little over a month after President Macron infamously announced that he wanted to “piss off” the unvaccinated people in France by introducing full-on vaccine passports in the country, over 3,000 vehicles have attempted to enter Paris to demand an end to the Covid regime. It is not clear at the time of writing how many vehicles of them actually made it into the city, as police were sending many cars away throughout the day...........

 

  That governments of supposedly 'free' nations are willing to go to these lengths is horrifying.

• Freelance Journalist Did the One Thing the Liberal Media Has Failed to Do Regarding Canada's Freedom Truckers
•  Canada’s Response to Truckers Emerges as a Disgraceful Failure of Leadership 
• Bigger Than Truckers: Canada’s Leaders Wage War on Working-Class 
• Trudeau Panicking: Another Canadian Military Leader Breaks Rank, Government Rattled (Video) 
• Video: Emmanuel Macron Unleashes Tear Gas on Peaceful Protesters, Random Families in Paris 
• BREAKING: Ontario Freezes Millions of Dollars Bound for Truckers
• Trudeau is getting dangerous, but the truckers still have options February 12, 2022 Of course, they would have had a great sense of power in all this if Canadians hadn't done something really stupid in 2020. More
• We Are All Truckers Now Sally Zelikovsky There’s something happening here. What it is, is exactly clear. More 
• Mayor Accuses Truckers of ‘Economic Terrorism’ as Another Canadian Blockade Formed 
• New Zealand’s Covid Cops Fail to Disperse Freedom Convoy with 80s Music 
• Report: Biden Administration Urges Justin Trudeau to Use Federal Powers Against Trucker Blockade 
• Trudeau to Canadian Trucker Protesters: ‘You Are Breaking Laws’ 
• Ex-Obama Official Backpedals Call for Canadian Truckers to Have Tires Slashed 
• Mayor Accuses Truckers of ‘Economic Terrorism’ as Another Canadian Blockade Formed 
• Tucker: Threats Against Freedom Convoy Show Canadian Officials ‘Impotent’

Rashida Tlaib: Big Mouth Liar Who Failed History

 By Mychal Massie January 17, 2022  @ Daily Rant

It’s one thing to be singularly stupid, but it is another thing to be a pernicious liar who uses historical ignorance to spread deception and acrimony.  The necessity to spread discord amongst the poorly educated whose self-esteem and self-worth is based exclusively upon being a crayon color doesn’t take an abundance of skill.

It requires only that a person be an unconscionable liar willing to reduce themselves to a standard of dishonesty and commonality that surpasses the greatest liars in history. That said, none are more skilled for the task than the Democrat Socialist Rashida Tlaib from Detroit.  Tlaib is also known for pursing her mouth and lips in a way that gives the appearance she is preparing to plant a big wet kiss on the business end of a pig’s behind.

In her latest contest to surpass her own lies, she Tweeted: 

It’s no surprise that she is given complete immunity to lie, on Twitter.  Twitter like Facebook is best known for giving shade to liars and skanky trollops who celebrate themselves as boorish commonalities.

Tlaib being a passionate liar found it much easier to claim Republicans are keeping blacks from voting.  Apparently her history and government classes ignored the following truths:  

Following his reelection, Eisenhower continued his civil rights efforts. In 1957, he proposed a bold civil rights bill to increase black voting rights and protections – proposals promptly blocked by Democratic Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In fact, Eastland is credited with killing every civil rights bill that came before his committee in the 1950s, and his committee was literally known as the burial ground for civil rights legislation in the U. S. Senate. When Senate Republicans sought to keep Eisenhower’s civil rights bill from going to Eastland’s burial ground, only 10 Senate Democrats joined in that effort. Nevertheless, those few Democrats, combined with the strong Republican numbers, was sufficient; they were able to prevent Eisenhower’s bill from going to Eastland’s committee. (See: Democrats and Republicans In Their Own Words)

With Eastland unable to kill the bill in committee, other Senate Democrats responded with a filibuster against the crat at that time, set the record in the U. S. Senate for the longest individual filibuster speech ever given in Senate history – over twenty-four hours of continual speaking in his attempts to block Eisenhower’s 1957 civil rights bill. The stiff Democratic opposition in the Senate resulted in a watered-down version of Eisenhower’s original bill.

And do we need revisit the revered Ku Klux Klan leader, the late Robert Byrd, WVA? Clearly ignoring that Byrd also led one of the longest filibuster’s in history to stop the Civil Rights Act.

But when the lapdog mainstream media is willing to ignore and/or support the lie she is telling that grants Tlaib little if any accountability.  Thus she and the pathetic cabal of calumniators are free to make claims that go unchallenged.

It’s too bad she’s nothing more loudmouth, blowhard.  I would love to debate her one on one regarding her lies on Civil Rights and Voting Rights.  There are few things I derive more pleasure from than handing out verbal thrashings to whorish Democrat Socialists who aren’t prepared for the depth of contempt I have for them, that accompanies my command of facts and language.

Tlaib, like the rest of her kind are nothing more than loudmouths who bully weak sissified, little girlie-boys.  They’re not prepared to go toe-to-toe with a man who holds them in the lowest of esteem intellectually and morally.

The pathetic excuses for women who applaud her would do well to remember that I challenged Al Sharpton, Walter Fauntroy (co-founder of Congressional Black Caucus), and Marc Morial (National Urban League President) to debate me three-on-one at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, at my expense..

The three of them were willing to be humiliated as the accounts of their cowardice took national attention when I held an empty-chair debate without them; rather than have me embarrass them on CSPAN.

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About the Author

Mychal Massie

Mychal S. Massie is an ordained minister who spent 13 years in full-time Christian Ministry. Today he serves as founder and Chairman of the Racial Policy Center (RPC), a think tank he officially founded in September 2015. RPC advocates for a colorblind society. He was founder and president of the non-profit “In His Name Ministries.” He is the former National Chairman of a conservative Capitol Hill think tank; and a former member of the think tank National Center for Public Policy Research. Read entire bio here

Biden Admin Praises Taliban’s 'Openness' to Women’s Rights

Daniel Greenfield January 03, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In 2001, the Taliban blew up the giant Buddha statues. Now they’re charging tourists five bucks each to go see the statues that aren’t there. Considering the Islamic knack for destroying statues, tombs, historic buildings, and anything that isn’t a mosque, tourism can be tough.

Fortunately the Taliban have the opium business to fall back on.

While officially the Taliban deplore drugs, their takeover was partly backed by the country’s drug lords who were eager for an end to America’s war on drugs. Planting season has arrived and everyone is expecting a lot of drug money to start flowing into the Taliban’s terrorist coffers.

The Taliban response to international complaints has been the familiar drug shakedown.

“If the international community recognizes our government and we receive aid and development assistance, then poppies will definitely disappear,” a Taliban governor told the media.

Former U.S. administrations had offered aid in exchange for suspending the drug business. And while Afghanistan’s only real cash crop didn’t go away, the Jihadist bosses of the opium OPEC were willing to occasionally reduce production in exchange for cash from Uncle Sam.

The Biden administration is directing over a hundred million in aid to Afghanistan, but what the Taliban really want is the $9 billion in money from the former government they had overthrown.

That includes the $1.3 billion in gold sitting in Manhattan vaults near Ground Zero.

The Taliban would like that gold, but so would the families of the victims killed by the Taliban’s Al Qaeda allies on September 11.

The 9/11 families had sued the Taliban and won $7 billion in damages. But back then the Taliban didn't have money just sitting around in downtown Manhattan.

That's no longer the case.

Biden's problem is the familiar one facing the Obama administration over judgements won by terror victims against Iran and the PLO. How do you funnel money to the terrorists without letting their victims get hold of it? The answer is that you pay secret ransoms or send “humanitarian aid”. Withholding money from terror victims to pay terror bosses looks tacky, so just turn the money into ransom for American hostages or medicine for crying local children.

And so despite the fact that the Taliban negotiate with all faiths other than their own in bad faith, the Biden administration is still negotiating with the terrorists who broke every previous deal.

A week after Thanksgiving, some of Biden's boys from the State Department, USAID, the Treasury Department, and assorted spooks, flew off to talk turkey with the Taliban in Qatar.

The assortment of departments and agencies in the delegation to the terrorists was an interesting one. The State Department's diplomats love to appease terrorists, USAID is there to dole out "humanitarian aid", the spooks are there to ask the terrorists for info on the other terrorists, and the Treasury Department is there to discuss economic sanctions.

And how to bypass them.

All it takes is certifying that the Taliban are nice folks now and it’s time to work with them on feeding and clothing the Afghan people, not to mention educating the girls of Afghanistan.

A week after the Taliban banned women from television, Biden's State Department spokesman Ned Price released a statement praising the Taliban's "openness to engaging with the international community on full access to education".

Price further claimed that the Islamic terrorist group which closed most schools to girls had actually "welcomed efforts to verify and monitor progress to enroll women and girls in school at all levels."

The Taliban, apparently, also "asked for support in the education sector."

Preferably in the form of cash, heroin, or Black Hawk helicopter parts.

According to the Taliban, 75% of girls are back in school. And if you believe that, you probably work for the State Department.

The Taliban’s newfound feminism is as suspect as that of Andrew Cuomo, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Joe Biden, but they want money and Joe Biden wants to give it to them.

The levers for extracting that cash are a combination of blackmail and victimhood.

The Taliban will cash in on opium while the people starve. And then ask for money in exchange for shutting down the drug trade and then getting the people something to eat. The remaining Americans and Afghan visa recipients are also hostages who can be traded for more dollars.

That’s another reason why so very few of the visa recipients ever made it to the airport. And why the majority of those who did had no visas and no vetting, but probably did pay off the Taliban.

The Taliban can only make so much money from charging tourists to see the missing Buddhas.

The last year should have been a comprehensive education in why the Taliban can’t be trusted. After agreeing not to conquer Afghanistan, they went ahead and did it anyway. While they were doing that, the Biden administration, which is almost as trustworthy as the Taliban, assured the media, which is almost as trustworthy as the Biden administration, that everything was fine.

Now everything is fine again.

When the Taliban aren’t beheading members of female sports teams, they’re showing a great deal of “openness” to “engaging with the international community” on their feminism.

They’ll even field a fully progressive approved all-female sports team of men in burkas.

The Biden administration promised to leave Afghanistan, but the United States never leaves anywhere. Aside from taking in tens of thousands of Afghans into our country, we’re still on the hook for feeding, clothing, and educating the Afghans in Talibanland, not to mention Pakistan.

Even once the Taliban get their billions and their UN seat, we’ll still be sending them aid.

In December 2000, the State Department boasted that it had sent $113 million in "humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people". It further bragged that the "United States is the largest single donor of assistance to Afghans, and has a long record of providing such assistance."

All the while it acknowledged that the Taliban were mischievously harboring Osama bin Laden.

That money stolen from American taxpayers covered "food, housing, health and education programs" for the Afghans. And the State Department shamefully bragged that "of every ten dollars" in aid, "nine dollars is a United States contribution."

Next year the Taliban contributed four airplanes directed at killing thousands of Americans.

Having learned nothing in twenty years, the Biden administration and its career diplomats expect Americans to continue funding a Taliban welfare state.

This time the Taliban really believe in feminism, they insist. This time they’re really committed to fighting terrorism. And this time they surely won’t host another terrorist attack on America.

As long as we pay them enough.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Tags: Afghanistan, feminism, Islam, recent, Taliban

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

 

A Racial Reckoning for the Democrats

August 12, 2021  By Deborah Bucknam

Vermont Democrat Party chair Bruce Olsson published a commentary recently proclaiming yet again that Republicans are "racist." This is particularly rich since the Democrat party is the oldest and most enduring racist political party in history, and its racism continues to this day.  Here are the facts:

The Democrat Party was founded in 1828. Its first national party platform, ratified during the 1840 Presidential election, stated: “ that all efforts by abolitionists or others, made to induce congress to interfere with questions of slavery… are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people… and ought not to be countenanced by any friend to our political institutions.”.............

Throughout most of the 20^th century, Democrats condoned  or excused policies of apartheid and disenfranchisement of Black Americans.  Senate Democrats successfully filibustered a Republican led anti-lynching bill in 1934, and a Republican-led effort to ban the poll tax in 1940.  At the time, the poll tax was so effective in the American South that  only 3% of Black Americans were registered to vote there. Elected Democrats fought tooth and nail against anti-racist legislation, filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and engaging in so-called “massive resistance” against school integration into the early 1970s. A century and half of racist policies vigorously supported  by Democrat party leaders -- no other political party in history comes close. ...........To Read More.....

Prominent Law Professor Sues His School Over Vaccine Policy

Ethan Yang – August 7, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

Imposing a constitutionally dubious vaccine policy at a public university that not only has some of the top classical liberal law professors in the country but is also intimately connected with a global network of freedom advocates is a recipe for a lawsuit. That’s exactly what George Mason University learned recently when it imposed a school-wide vaccine mandate for students, faculty, and staff. Failure to comply subjects individuals to a list of penalties from social distancing requirements to potential disciplinary action. The plaintiff is Todd Zywicki, the George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, who has as impressive of a resume as anyone can imagine. He has held positions at numerous influential think tanks, executive positions in the federal government, and has taught at numerous respected law schools. His lawsuit is joined by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a non-profit law firm dedicated to advancing constitutional freedoms and founded by the prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger. AIER contributor Jenin Younes is also a member of their litigation team and one of the attorneys on this case.

Zywicki names the president of the school and numerous other officers as the defendants in his suit Zywicki v Washington. He alleges that as a public institution, GMU is obligated to follow the Constitution and its vaccine policy violates the 9th and 14th Amendments as well as the Supremacy Clause. Zywicki contends that his natural immunity from having recovered from a natural Covid-19 infection gives him equal if not superior protection than vaccines. His sentiments are supported by his immunologist, who informed him that receiving a vaccine would be “medically unnecessary”, as well as a joint declaration from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, prominent medical professors at Stanford and Harvard respectively. They write that,

“Multiple extensive, peer-reviewed studies comparing natural and vaccine immunity have now been published. These studies overwhelmingly conclude that natural immunity provides equivalent or greater protection against severe infection than immunity generated by mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna).”

The declaration, found in Exhibit A of the docket, also explains that the evidence to support mitigation measures such as vaccine mandates and passports is lacking. 

Count 1: Violation of the Right to Refuse Unwanted and Medically Unnecessary Healthcare 

The plaintiff asserts that GMU’s vaccine policy, in practice a mandate, and refusal to acknowledge the merits of natural immunity are problematic because they violate his right to refuse unnecessary healthcare. The complaint states,

“The Supreme Court has recognized that the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to privacy. A “forcible injection … into a nonconsenting person’s body represents a substantial interference with that person’s liberty[.]” Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210, 229 (1990).”

The 9th Amendment protects unenumerated rights, which are those that are not explicitly stated in the Constitution. The 14th Amendment protects due process and equal protection under the law. The Covid-19 vaccine is currently deployed under the Emergency Use Authorization and citizens are therefore entitled to be informed of their right to accept or refuse. This fact, combined with the plaintiff’s already robust natural immunity and unlikeliness to infect others with a relatively mild disease, renders such a mandate a violation of privacy. Furthermore, established case law enshrines the right to bodily integrity. The suit asserts,

“Coercing employees to receive an EUA vaccine for a virus that presents a near-zero risk of illness or death to them and which they are exceedingly unlikely to pass on to others, because those employees already possess natural immunity to the virus, violates the liberty and privacy interests that the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments protect.”

If the state wishes to implement a coercive measure, the burden of evidence is on itself to prove that its policy is narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest. The plaintiffs contend,

“Defendants cannot show that they have a compelling interest in coercing Professor Zywicki into taking a COVID-19 vaccine, because GMU has no compelling interest in treating employees with natural immunity any differently from employees who obtained immunity from a vaccine.”

Count 2: Violation of Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine and 14th Amendment’s Right to Due Process

The Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine prohibits the government from imposing coercive incentives against exercising a constitutionally protected right. GMU’s penalties are therefore an impairment of Professor Zywicki’s right to refuse medical care. His complaint states,

“According to that body of law, GMU cannot impair Professor Zywicki’s right to refuse medical care through subtle forms of coercion any more than it could through an explicit mandate.”

Furthermore, the school’s policy is a violation of due process as it is incongruent, disproportional, and inappropriately flips the burden of evidence onto the plaintiff. In light of the robust immunity established by natural infection, the school cannot logically justify its penalties against those in the GMU community with naturally acquired immunity. The existence of such immunity fully serves the interest of the public health measures implemented by GMU. 

The policy also is also deficient of proportionality, as the school indicates no intention to assess the level of antibody level of its targets. If the school believes that the prevalence of antibodies is important in advancing its public health goals, then it ought to recognize that they are acquired by both vaccination and infection. The school not only signals any intention to test for antibodies, but makes the premature conclusion that vaccination is superior, even assuming equality of effectiveness amongst all vaccines. The suit asserts,

“​​In short, allocating burden of proof responsibility to those with natural immunity like Professor Zywicki, coupled with GMU’s stacking the process with presumptions Plaintiff will show are scientifically unwarranted, contravene the Due Process Clause.”

The burden of proof is on the school to show that Zywicki’s naturally acquired immunity is in fact inferior to the vaccines accepted by its policy, and noncompliance poses a threat to public safety. The plaintiff alleged the school has not demonstrated this requirement. 

Count 3: Violation of the Supremacy Clause 

The Supremacy Clause holds that federal law supersedes state law. GMU’s policy is Virginia state law and the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) is federal law. Covid-19 vaccines are authorized by the EUA, which subjects recipients to informed consent. Because GMU’s coercive policies conflict with the letter and spirit of the EUA, it is therefore unconstitutional. According to the complaint,

“That is at odds with the Policy’s forcing Professor Zywicki to sustain significant injury to his career if he does not want to take the vaccine (in light of masking, frequent testing, social distancing, and looming disciplinary action).”

For these reasons and more, Zywicki asked the court to declare the policies unconstitutional and an injunction be issued. 

Key Takeaways

The fight over the official narrative regarding Covid-19 is still alive and well. This lawsuit is only illustrative of the two camps that have developed and how insulated many core decision makers have been from one over the other. Natural immunity for example, although clearly affirmed by the supporting evidence, seems to be unacknowledged writ large. The disproportionate perceptions of the risk of Covid-19 are still rampant.

The significance of this case cannot be overstated with vaccine mandates and passports being considered and implemented across the country. One does not need a background in law to understand that the pandemic has sent the country into another constitutional inflection point. From emergency powers, to lockdowns, to eviction moratoriums, and now vaccine mandates, the precedents we set today will forever affect the ark of our system of constitutional government.

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Ethan Yang

Ethan Yang is an Adjunct Research Fellow at AIER as well as the host of the AIER Authors Corner Podcast.

He holds a BA in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations with minors in legal studies and formal organizations from Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. He is currently pursuing a JD from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.

Ethan also serves as the director of the Mark Twain Center for the Study of Human Freedom at Trinity College and is also involved with Students for Liberty. He has also held research positions at the Cato Institute, the Connecticut State Senate, Cause of Action Institute and other organizations.

Ethan is currently based in Washington D.C and is a recipient of the 13th Annual International Vernon Smith Prize from the European Center of Austrian Economics Foundation. His work has been featured and cited in a variety of outlets from online media to radio broadcast.

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