Reflections on the Supreme Court oral arguments in the OSHA vaccine mandate case
Everything the Democratic appointees know about the pandemic comes from the TV and it's entirely wrong
I listened to the oral arguments this morning in connection with the OSHA vaccine mandate case. I found the whole experience depressing to the point where it is difficult to even write about it without losing my mind. Even if we win and this totalitarian government overreach is struck down, I fear for the future of our country.
Some reflections:
Scott Keller, the attorney for the first plaintiff, the National Federation of Independent Business, was weak. He has a distinguished background — he’s the former Solicitor General for the state of Texas. But I kept wanting to buy him a cup of coffee to make his brain work faster. His slight Texas drawl made him sound like an outsider amidst the northeast blue bloods who serve on the Supreme Court.
The gist of his argument was that the OSHA vaccine mandate would be burdensome to businesses. Okay that’s fine. But that’s like saying Soviet totalitarianism would increase paperwork requirements. It’s partially true, but it misses the enormity of the problem we are facing.
To be clear, the problem here is that government wants to mandate a product that does not work, that actually has negative efficacy against the virus, and comes with catastrophic side effects. Government wants the right to dictate that it can put whatever it wants in your body at any time for any reason.
But what was astonishing about the oral arguments is that there was almost no scientific discussion at all about the virus nor the vaccine — other than completely hysterical and wrong information from the Democratic appointees that went almost entirely unchallenged.
Which brings me to the three Democratic appointees on the court — Kagan, Breyer, and Sotomayor. This is a source of great disappointment for me. I was elated when each of them was appointed to the court. Yet all three of them are completely and catastrophically wrong on this question. Not just wrong but cartoonish, like they have been locked in a padded cell for two years watching nothing but Rachel Maddow and developed full-blown cases of Stockholm Syndrome as a result.
Elena Kagan was perhaps the worst (though she had stiff competition). She combined the unhinged panic of Rochelle Walensky with the verbatim Pharma narrative straight from MSNBC. I do not know how to stress this enough — THESE ARE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES! They have access to any scientific expert they want in the entire world. They have a staff made up of the finest law school graduates in the country who can look up any fact for them whenever they want. And yet apparently they prefer to consume the pablum offered up by the mainstream media that is completely captured by Pharma.
Kagan is certain that this is a Pandemic of the Unvaccinated(TM) and that the vaccine reduces infection, transmission, hospitalization, and death from SARS-CoV-2. Of course, none of that is even remotely true. The data show that the vaccines INCREASE one’s risk of contracting coronavirus (what is known as negative efficacy) and this is now a pandemic of the fully vaccinated. Kagan believes the lies from the pharmaceutical industry because they fit her pre-existing biases (that technocratic elites have the right to rule over us). Kagan’s barrage of Pharma misinformation went completely unchallenged.
Only two members of the Supreme Court have ever voted against any facet of the vaccine program— the now-deceased Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor in their dissents to the disastrous Bruesewitz v. Wyeth decision. But the two-year Pharma propaganda campaign appears to have worked on Sotomayor and now she is thunderous in her embrace of the Pharma narrative and can see nothing wrong with Democratically-led democide of the population via OSHA.
Sotomayor declared that,
We have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators. We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, many on ventilators.
Apparently no one informed her that ventilators are the wrong protocol and kill about 90% of people put on them (far more lethal than Covid itself). I guess she watched too many press conferences from Andrew Cuomo (who obsessed about needing more ventilators even as they killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers).
Furthermore, the current national pediatric Covid hospitalization census per the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is 3,342. Many/most incidental [with Covid not from Covid]. Why bother even having a Supreme Court if all they are going to do is watch TV all day and repeat whatever nonsense they are told by the paid Pharma spokespeople?
Stephen Breyer is clearly unfit to serve on the court at this point and he should retire immediately. He’s 83, but not a young 83, more like the grandparent who you are secretly hoping will have their driver’s license revoked by the DMV so you don’t have to tell him.
Breyer kept repeating that there were 750,000 Covid cases in the U.S. yesterday even though everyone now acknowledges that we should stop focusing on case counts because Omicron is far less dangerous than previous variants. Then at one point Breyer got all hepped up and confused and claimed that there were 750 MILLION Covid cases in the U.S. yesterday (in a population of 330 million people). I guess every American now has 2.2 cases of Covid — which certainly fits the Democratic panic narrative. Once again this clearly incorrect statement went unchallenged.
The second plaintiffs’ attorney, Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers, was very good. His brain works quickly, he understood the material, and he was the smartest jurist in the room. The conservative justices warmed to him immediately and the back and forth was productive. But even here, I wanted Flowers to more forcefully challenge the junk science that underlies the government’s claim that this is necessary and appropriate. He only reluctantly acknowledged at the end that he was triple vaccinated and still got Covid — which is why he was testifying remotely instead of in person. Well that destroys the entire government claim that the vaccine works but he refused to underscore that point.
I get that the plaintiffs’ attorneys could not be seen as challenging the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines, nor point out that there are safer and more effective alternatives (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, niacin, fluvoxamine, etc.) without appearing like damn dirty anti-vaxxers and potentially losing the case. The window of permissible arguments is very very narrow right now. But at the same time it breaks my heart because if we cannot speak about the actual evidence in a Supreme Court hearing then when exactly can we ever speak about it? Never, that’s when, and that’s the problem (and why the public discourse is so cartoonish and wrong).
The government’s defense of the proposed OSHA mandate was argued by U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. Ms. Prelogar’s voice is like nails on a chalkboard and it took all of my strength not to turn off the livestream immediately. A former Miss Idaho, Prelogar is like a cheerleader straight out of Mean Girls — relentlessly ticking boxes on her march to the top without any self-awareness about how completely insufferable she is. It kills me that the new vanguard in Democratic governance (as represented by Prelogar and people like Dr. Sara Oliver at the CDC) are used as the point of the spear to try to poison families on behalf of the cartel.
In spite of being completely wrong on every point, Prelogar was sharp, fast, and in command of her presentation. Her argument was that the pandemic is unprecedented, that surely the 1970 statute that created OSHA must have anticipated a pandemic like this (it didn’t), and that vaccines are the only thing that can save us all from dying (not even close). Even though she sounds like Glinda the Good Witch of the South she knows how to frame a pitch that is outside the strike zone. Several conservative justices (Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch) clearly took issue with her arguments and the unprecedented government overreach that has been proposed. But they respected her and took pains to try to understand and fairly represent her arguments.
Here’s what’s causing me anguish — and it’s the same thing that happened when I watched the FDA’s VRBPAC and CDC’s ACIP meetings this fall. With a few notable exceptions (Gorsuch, Alito, Flowers) these people are not smart. We have this entire “meritocratic” system — the best schools, the best grades, the best recommendations — that is supposedly designed to produce the best outcomes — the best people in the best jobs making the best decisions about what is best (read: most fair) for society. And nothing of the sort is actually happening. Instead we have people in gatekeeping positions who just watch TV, repeat mindless soundbites that are easily disproven, who are making decisions that will potentially lead to the ruin of our country, who lack the necessary acumen to make these decisions.
Which leads me back, once again, to the wisdom of the founding fathers who understood that power corrupts, that government must be constrained and put in competition with itself, and that government is a constant threat to liberty. In setting up the right to trial by jury (the 6th Amendment) the framers of our Constitution understood that ordinary people using common sense make the best decisions. The founding fathers did NOT envision a nation led by technocrats and our experience over and over again as a nation (see The Best and the Brightest) is that the technocrats easily become captured (by their own hubris, information bubbles, and/or corruption) and cause ruin.
If the Supreme Court upholds the OSHA vaccine mandate I do not know what I am going to do because in spite of my three degrees from elite universities I will never be able to work for any branch of government (including schools, colleges, and universities) nor for any private employer of over 100 people ever again. I will be a permanent second class citizen in the U.S. Every Democrat on the U.S. Supreme Court wants to put me on an economic blacklist, for the rest of my life, for having the audacity to actually read original source documents for myself (something that apparently they never do).
I get that in the movement we are setting up a parallel economy, but many of us will starve to death before that is fully underway. And the predatory billionaires and their bougie enablers are not going to leave us alone but instead will do everything in their considerable power to poison our new, better, and healthier system — just as they are trying to get rid of the unvaccinated control group worldwide today.
The problem I have with the plaintiffs’ arguments today is that no one made this broader case — no one pointed out that this is Dred Scott v. Sanford all over again. If the Supreme Court gets this question wrong it will cleave this country in half — the inverse of the Civil War now with free red states in the south and Pharma slave blue states in the northeast and west. A majority decision in favor of the government would make this country unlivable and thus create the conditions that could lead to a political conflagration. On the most important scientific question of our era no one made a scientific argument and no one made a Constitutional argument that I have the right to exist and the right of personal sovereignty over my own body. Instead, everyone politely stayed within the confines of a paradigm that is almost certainly wrong and leading to the ruin of our once-great country and its citizens.
Regardless of the outcome of today’s case it feels like our country is on the wrong track. The case for revolution is even stronger today than it was yesterday. But the revolution we seek is a return to the principles of personal autonomy and individual sovereignty. We must wrest power from the captured technocrats who want to poison and kill us in the name of progress.
You can listen to today’s oral arguments here. In the comments, I am interested to read your thoughts and takeaways from the case.
Update: Naomi Wolf just started a Substack and it’s brilliant! She makes a fundamental point that I missed which is — how on earth did Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer suddenly forget the Constitutional right to privacy that they have defended for almost 50 years??? She writes,
But Justice Kagan seemed suddenly, after decades of this view, not to see a contradiction. Her career-long philosophical foundation that resulted in a consistent view, that citizens had a right to physical privacy in medical decision-making — “My body, my choice” — “It is between a woman and her doctor” — vanished, along with her expensive education and all of her knowledge of the Constitution….
A part of Justice Sotomayor’s brain seems to have simply shut down at the word “vaccines” — though it was the same woman in the same Court, with the same Constitution before her, the Justice could no longer manage the Kantian imperative of consistent reasoning.
Wolf is so flummoxed by the total evaporation of all principles, values, and capacity for logical reasoning on the left when it comes to vaccines that by the end of the article she is searching for supernatural explanations for the levels of evil we are experiencing. I do not have an explanation. I’m just witnessing, with horror, that Dems have thrown away everything they ever believed in so that they can submit, gleefully, to Pharma fascism.
And the notion, put forth by both Democratic and Republicans appointees to the court, that FDA approval means anything, is completely preposterous. All reasonable people should realize that the FDA is captured by Pharma.
Prelogar at one point, in response to a question from one of the justices explained that the vaccine mandate was necessary to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated and I felt like the universe was about to implode from total stupidity. And then the justice tried to help her and she argued that the mandate was actually to protect the unvaccinated from the vaccinated or from themselves and not one of those explanations ever made any sense.