In 2012, after oral arguments in Sebelius v. NFIB, the Supreme Court met in a secret conference to determine the constitutionality of Obamacare and its “individual mandate.” Following three days of oral arguments, hundreds of pages in briefing, and hours in chambers with clerks and fellow Justices, Roberts provided the critical fifth vote to create a majority holding that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional.

But the arguments did not cease when the Court adjourned, and the Chief soon dithered under public scrutiny.

Three days after oral arguments, President Obama spoke from the Rose Garden to pressure the Court to uphold his signature legislation. Senator Patrick Leahy, then Chair of the Judiciary Committee, addressed Roberts on the Senate floor weeks later. “I trust [Roberts] will be a Chief Justice for all of us and that he has a strong sense of the proper role of the Judicial Branch.” Newspapers and cable news anchors warned Roberts that if he voted with the majority “his ambition of transcending politics on the Supreme Court will have to be judged a failure.”

The Wall Street Journal took note of this in its column “Targeting John Roberts: the left tries to intimidate the High Court on Obamacare” arguing “We doubt the High Court will be intimidated by any of this, and…no Justice would be worthy to sit on the Court if he is…The Court’s reputation will be tarnished if it bows to the political distemper of the moment, not if it follows the Constitution.” But the editorial staff was wrong.

Chief Justice Roberts flipped his vote in response to the public pressure. CBS reported that “Roberts switched views to uphold health care laws,” writing “Roberts pays attention to media coverage. As Chief Justice, he is keenly aware of his leadership role on the court, and he also is sensitive to how the court is perceived by the public.”

Supporters and critics agreed that Roberts’ decision was a political calculation rather than a legal determination. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat authored “John Roberts’s Political Decision,” writing that Obamacare was “saved by political considerations.” At National Review, Jonah Goldberg noted, “No one is confident, never mind certain, that Roberts actually believes his own position.”

Now, the Court faces another Democratic president’s unprecedented expansion of federal power in Murthy v. Missouri (formerly known as Missouri v. Biden). Like the Obamacare case, decided in 2012, the decision comes in an election year and features the heavy-handed influence of the medical industry’s lobbying and public pressure campaigns.

On Monday, the Court will hear oral arguments in the case, and the Justices will confront the most pervasive forces in American society: the private-public censorship industry, the influence of the Intelligence Community, and the Biden Administration’s repeated attacks on free expression.

The argument comes just two weeks after President Biden’s targeting of the Court in his State of the Union address and amidst the regime’s demonstrated antipathy for the separation of powers.

May 2020: The Chief Invents a Pandemic Exception to the Constitution

Just two months into the Covid response, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to rebut the government’s tarnishment of the Bill of Rights. The Justices could affirm that our Constitution has no pandemic exception, and cloaks of benevolent phrasing cannot warrant the usurpation of our liberties.

Instead, Chief Justice Roberts suspended the Constitution in deference to “experts,” thus ushering in three years of emergency orders from charlatans and petty tyrants. It proved a turning point in the Covid response, acting as a green light for prolonged church closings, First Amendment violations, and turnkey totalitarianism.

In May 2020, a California church petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn Governor Gavin Newsom’s restrictions on church attendance. The “fog of war” is no excuse for “violating fundamental constitutional rights,” they argued.

Newsom’s order limited attendance at religious ceremonies to 25% capacity with a maximum of 100 attendees, no matter the size of the venue. The State offered no “justification for this arbitrary cap,” the church explained. Retail stores were permitted to hold 50% capacity at the time, and offices, food packaging, museums, and and “every other sector [had] no percentage cap.”

Four members of the Court were able to see through the state’s flimsy pretext of “public health.” Justice Kavanaugh asked, “Assuming all of the same precautions are taken, why can someone safely walk down a grocery store aisle but not a pew? And why can someone safely interact with a brave deliverywoman but not with a stoic minister?” Justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas joined Kavanaugh in voting to grant the church’s motion.

The liberal wing of the court – Justices Kagan, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer – voted to deny the motion without offering any opinion to support their vote.

The critical fifth vote thus came to the Chief Justice. Roberts sided with Governor Newsom, arguing that the Court should defer to “experts” because the “unelected judiciary lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”

Of course, every tyrant has claimed “competence” to control the lives of his subjects. Our Constitution, however, is designed to restrain all men, regardless of self-proclaimed insight, genius, or title, from abridging the rights of citizens.

The Chief’s fifth vote ignored constitutional text in favor of an imaginary pandemic exception to the Bill of Rights. As the head of the judicial branch, his deciding vote suspended judicial review as lockdowns obliterated Americans’ liberty.

The Chief Justice continued his deference to “experts” for over a year despite their demonstrable failures. Two months after the California decision, he again provided the fifth vote to uphold Nevada’s limit of religious gatherings to 50 people, despite the order permitting casinos to hold up to 500 gamblers at a time. Justice Gorsuch explained in dissent: “the First Amendment prohibits such obvious discrimination against the exercise of religion. The world we inhabit today, with a pandemic upon us, poses unusual challenges. But there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.”

The death of Justice Ginsburg and the confirmation of Justice Barrett to the Court flipped the 5-4 split, but Chief Justice Roberts continued his pandemic-exception jurisprudence into 2021. In February 2021, he upheld California’s banning on singing in church, explaining that “federal courts owe significant deference to politically accountable officials with the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health.”

In April 2021, he voted to deny Californians’ petition to challenge Governor Newsom’s edict limiting in-home religious gatherings to three households. Justice Barrett, however, overrode his dissent, and the Court restored the petitioners’ First Amendment freedoms.

Unclouding the Fog of War

The Chief Justice has a penchant to capitulate to political pressure. Murthy v. Missouri features perhaps the most powerful and united hegemon that the Court has ever encountered.

Let us hope that the Chief no longer allows the fog of war or fear of political blowback to excuse the deliberate and repeated violations of fundamental constitutional rights.

Alexander Hamilton noted in Federalist, No. 78, “whenever a particular statute contravenes the Constitution, it will be the duty of the judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter and disregard the former.”

It is not just the Court’s power to remedy usurpations of our liberty, but it is its duty. The Chief has been derelict in the past, deferring to the capricious whims of political opportunists, but Murthy v. Missouri offers the Chief an opportunity to reaffirm his Court’s commitment to the Constitution.

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(Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute)

The dirty secret is this: Masks don’t work by controlling the virus. Masks work by controlling the people.

If we’re talking about stopping the spread of the virus, masks simply don’t work.

But if we’re talking about stoking fear, instilling blind obedience to state authorities, sowing discord between citizens, and publicly “outing” skeptics and dissidents – in other words, creating an authoritarian, even totalitarian system of public health – then masks work very well indeed.

MASKS DON’T WORK AT CONTROLLING THE VIRUS

By this late date, it has been established beyond honest scientific doubt that masking is ineffective at stopping the contraction and spread of COVID-19. This is true both at the microscopic level and at the population level.

The early mask mandates regarding COVID-19 were largely “justified” on the assertion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not prone to airborne spread. However, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has since been proven to be an airborne virus (like influenza), meaning it can remain circulating in room air for extended periods of time, and spreads in this manner. SARS-CoV-2 viruses have also been proven to be much smaller in size than the holes in cloth and surgical masks.

Therefore, at a microscopic level, Harvey Risch is correct: trying to block the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a surgical mask is quite literally like trying to keep mosquitos out of your yard by erecting a chain-link fence.

At a population level, the latest Cochrane meta-analysis of the available randomized, controlled trials surrounding masking and respiratory viruses concluded that “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks.”

(It should be noted that as the mask debate has been resurrected, Cochrane has been under intense pressure by pro-mask entities to addend and modify their comments about this study, to which the organization has capitulated.)

Furthermore, this study is only one in addition to the hundreds of other studies that clearly outline the epidemiologic ineffectiveness and real harms of masks, many of which have been known since at least 2021.

To summarize: at the microscopic level, masks do not stop the exit or entry of the virus into human bodies, and at the population level, mask use has not been shown to provide any benefit, and has been shown to have numerous harms.

MASKS DO WORK AT CONTROLLING PEOPLE

The entire Public Health^TM enterprise in the West has a strong political and authoritarian impulse built into it from its very conception. While a detailed review of this is beyond the scope of this article, it harkens back at least to the figure of Rudolf Virchow, the preeminent 19^th century German physician, opponent of Semmelweis and Darwin, and founder of so-called “social medicine,” who famously wrote that “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.”

The attitude that Public Health^TM should possess the power to dictate national and local political policy for the “public good” (as they, the “experts,” unilaterally determine it to be) has increased over the past century, especially in the United States. Around it there have grown vast, lucrative industries, from which (since at least the Bayh-Dole Act), Public Health^TM officials often profit handsomely. The vaccine industry is only the most obvious of these.

During the COVID era, the authoritarianism of Public Health^TM morphed into totalitarian mode, with the unprecedented lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions, vaccine mandates, etc. that we all endured. The most visible and most easily enforceable symbol of this power grab were masks.

Masks, even the comically useless ones made of old handkerchiefs, or the filthy, week-old paper surgical ones seen on countless chins, signaled compliance and submission. For the very real Public Health^TM purpose of unquestioning obedience, masks work very well indeed.

Masks are effective at instilling fear in people. Fearful people more readily submit to authority, particularly when that authority promises a solution to the cause of their fear.

Masks are effective as virtue signals of compliance, bolstering the submissive person’s ego. Masks also impose a very strong peer-pressure effect, which pushes uncertain persons toward following the crowd.

Masks are effective at humiliating people. They are uncomfortable, ugly, dirty, and unnatural. They truly are “face diapers.” In a word, masks are degrading. If the ways of the old Eastern bloc taught us anything, it is that the systematic degradation of individuals, especially for patently stupid reasons, is highly effective at promoting totalitarian ends.

Masks are also extremely effective in exposing dissidents. Who dares to stand up against the state? There’s one, right over there. Shame on them. Shun them. Arrest them.

That’s how masks really “work”, and that’s why the Public Health^TM types love them.

That’s why they’re trying to bring them back.

Sound off about this article on the End Medical Tyranny Substack.

About the Author

C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

This was just a confirmation of what we already knew. Still, when Dutch MEP Rob Roos asked a yes/no question to Pfizer’s representative Janine Small, it was nonetheless a historic moment.

Had the vaccine been tested before it was launched to see whether it protected against the spread of Covid-19?

The answer was ”No,” followed by an awkward laugh and a word salad: ”We had to really move with the speed of science to understand what is taking place in the market…”

Let that sink in. Pfizer has known all along that these injections have no greater proven effect on the spread of infection than an ice lolly.

Once again, this is nothing new. Peter Doshi, one of the editors of the British Medical Journal informed us already two years ago that the vaccine manufacturers’ clinical trials were not designed to answer the most relevant questions.

However, the announcement in the European Parliament still set off a powerful tidal wave, which should sweep along some of those who have spread and fueled this lie. I am talking about heads of state and top bureaucrats, epidemiologists and experts, editors-in-chief and celebrities. Just to mention a few.

When Johan Carlsson, the director general of the Swedish public health agency (Folkhälsomyndigheten) in office at the time, declared in a well-attended press conference in June 2021 that they now recommend young people aged sixteen and above to take the Pfizer vaccine, he cited three main reasons for this:

“The first and most important: Vaccines protect the individual against illness…

The second reason is that vaccination reduces the risk of the infection spreading among young people…

The third reason is that the spread of infection to other age groups also decreases somewhat when the age limit for the vaccination offer is lowered.”

Was Carlsson himself misled by the vaccine manufacturers? Or did he deliberately mislead the press corps present and the Swedish people?

When a public narrative starts to fall apart, it can have unforeseen consequences. After all, if a public official lie is exposed and people are forced to realize they have been profoundly fooled, a follow-up question may well present itself: If they can lie about something this significant, what else have they been lying about?

To prevent a domino effect to that consequence, they now try to minimize the damage, such as what Reuters’ ”fact-checker” did with the following tweet:

”Posts online are saying Pfizer “admitted” that the company did not test whether their COVID-19 vaccine reduced risk of the infection spreading prior to rolling it out – something they were not required to do, nor claimed to have done.”

The truth is, they have, albeit nicely wrapped up at times. In January 2021, shortly after the launch, Pfizer wrote on Twitter that their vaccines “have been emergency approved to prevent individuals from the age of 16 from getting covid-19.”

In May of this year, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla participated in a live discussion at the World Economic Forum. When asked why anyone should get vaccinated if there is now a treatment for Covid-19, Bourla replied: ”The primary thing is not to get the disease to begin with, and therefore you should get vaccinated. In this way, you also protect those you love.”

CJ Hopkins writes in Off-Guardian that ”fact-checkers” should be called ”gaslighters,” since what they really do is engage in psychological manipulation. Gaslighting means that you systematically feed your victim false information and make them question what they know to be true. Eventually, they end up doubting their own perception, their memories and even their sanity. In other words, a form of crazy making.

The ”masses” Hopkins writes, “having forced themselves to believe whatever you needed them to believe during the Shock-and-Awe phase, have to force themselves to believe they never believed whatever you needed them to believe then, and believe whatever you need them to believe now.”

The type of historical revisionism that Reuters’ ”fact-checker” engages in; we have seen a great deal of that since the EU Parliament debacle. Suddenly parts of the mainstream media pretend as if they never heard about any promises about protection against the spread of infection.

I phoned Swedish radio and get connected to the news desk for the daily news show Ekot. I ask how long they have been aware of the discovery during the questioning of the Pfizer representative. The woman I was passed on to dismissesed my question by saying that no authorities have claimed that the vaccine would protect against the spread of infection, but that they only have maintained that it protects against serious illness and death.

I objected by saying that the mantra of the Swedish public health agency, Folkhälsomyndigheten: ”It protects against serious illness and death,” is something that they switched to at the end of 2021. Before that, the mantra also included that the vaccine protected against the spread of infection. This is easy to check via older versions of the Swedish public health agency’s own website, for example from the autumn of 2021, when they wrote:

”Vaccination effectively protects against becoming seriously ill or dying from covid-19. It also protects against getting infected and infecting others.”

But the woman at the news desk insists that the agency never claims that the vaccine would protect against the spread of infection. The conversation feels surreal. I remind her of the well-attended press conference where the then director general of the public health agency claims exactly that, but she hangs up on me. – I have been following this issue throughout the pandemic, so I know what I am talking about!

I am not convinced that the woman at the news desk was lying deliberately. It may also be a question of serious denial that comes into play when reality gets too much to bear. Mark Twain said that it’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled. The author Upton Sinclair added that it is impossible to make a man understand something if his livelihood depends on not understanding it.

For anyone prepared to remove the blinders, the announcement from Pfizer should prompt a sobering period.

I wonder what they are saying today, all those principals and teachers who pressured their students to take the shots.

What will the reactions be from employers who have laid off unvaccinated or denied them employment?

What do all artists and celebrities who urged us in costly campaigns to “roll up our sleeves” and ”take one for the team,” so that we could hug again, say now?

What will be the excuse from editorial writers and columnists, from right to left, who all competed to condemn the unvaccinated?

What does Peter Kadhammar say today? In a chronicle in Aftonbladet last autumn he spoke in favour of the unvaccinated paying for their own healthcare, since “they sabotage society’s attempts to combat a lethal pandemic.”

All you well-paid bullies; what are your comments to the vaccine not having been tested for its ability to stop the spread of infection?

And what about the friendships that were ruined and the relations that were terminated because of the hard feelings that vaccine passports and malicious media reporting brought along?

In her report ”Livet i vaccinpassens skugga” (Eng: ”Life in the shadow of the vaccine passport,” my translation), Diana Blom interviews some of those who were harassed and socially excluded in their workplaces. We also get to meet students who lost their internships, and a faithful church goer who was refused to attend Christmas Day service.

Apart from nonsensical tragedies, we have also witnessed absurd farces, such as when the unvaccinated top ranking tennis champion Novak Djokovic was banned from defending his title at the Australian Open on the grounds that he was a risk of infection.

Even if many things seem comical, they stop being amusing when you think of all those hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have taken their jabs because they were obliged to do so. How many have suffered side effects? How many have died or are dealing with chronic consequences?

Only in Sweden, 104.000 individuals have reported suspected side effects, while it is well known from scientific studies that only 1-2 % of all side effects are being reported.

In my interviews with the physician Sven Román, he informs me that myocarditis and pericarditis is a very common side effect with men aged 13 to 18 after receiving their second dose of the mRNA vaccines, that an increased number of menstrual disorders have been observed, that fertility may be affected as the number of births per fertile woman in Sweden has decreased drastically since the vaccination began, and that many pathologists all over the world report an increased incidence of fast-growing cancers in relatively young people.

As an increasing number of irregularities are becoming known, I believe we will become used to seeing more historical revisionism of the kind we are already familiar with from other sensitive fields.

In 2017, the Swedish public service television, SVT, broadcast the exclusive and praised American documentary The Vietnam War, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The title itself is deceptive, both from a moral and a geographical point of view. The Vietnam War should, according to activist Noam Chomsky, be called The Crucifixion of Southeast Asia, to capture the monstrous destruction that was the result of history’s most powerful military-industrial empire which, for over a decade, used its full force against a poor peasant society as well as the neighbouring countries of Laos and Cambodia.

While the documentary does present strong eyewitness accounts and for that reason alone is worth seeing, it describes this crime against humanity throughout using euphemisms such as “tragic mistake,” “best of intentions,” and “good faith.” Washington had the best of intentions too, but unfortunately some mistakes were made. Shit happens.

This is how I believe the historical revisionists will portray the criminality – the deliberate lies and the baseless discrimination – that has caused millions of people, who would otherwise never have taken these injections, to now suffer serious health problems.

Portraying the crimes of states and authorities as accidents at work is welcome because it resonates with how most people would wish the world to be. We do not want to believe that authoritative bodies purposefully commit psychopathic deeds. The thought that our decision-makers would have introduced vaccine passes despite knowing that the injections did not protect against the spread of infection is horrible.

The tendency for wishful thinking that sometimes turns into denial resembles the dynamics in families with abuse problems. The child who speaks out often faces anger and accusations of lying. The other children want to keep the image of their father as the family’s provider of safety and security.

Psychopaths can also nurture the image of being engaged and responsible individuals. Pfizer’s VD Albert Bourla reminds me of The Mask of Sanity, the first book that in detail explains psychopathy as a phenomenon (published in 1941). As the title indicates, psychopaths learn to behave as if they were normal – otherwise they would not be able to have successful careers. But since everything is theatre, they sometimes reveal themselves and the mask drops.

This is what happened during the above-mentioned discussion at the World Economic Forum in which Pfizer’s CEO participated.

Bourla gripes about “A very fanatical group of anti-vaxxers” wishing to take Pfizer to court. He then starts to rant: ”They will claim that the sun didn’t go up because people were vaccinated.”

”The mask of sanity” falls for a moment.

I wonder what Cindy Darell, the handball player from Göteborg that I recently interviewed, would say about Bourla’s joking ways, so bereft of empathy? She was healthy as a horse before taking the shots. But since taking them, she has not been able to play for an entire year. She has suffered breathing difficulties, pressure in the chest and a tingling sensation on her left side. Her friend who also took a third dose (Cindy stopped at two) suffered cardiac arrest.

I know a woman whose 18-year-old son took the shots to be able to study abroad. He died in his sleep shortly after. The mother is still in shock, but is thinking of suing Pfizer, if possible. What does she think about being dismissed as a superstitious fool?

After Pfizer’s announcement in the EU Parliament last month, I contacted a friend on Facebook who expressed their full support for the vaccine passes, at the time they were in use. I was convinced that he would have second thoughts now that he found out the entire foundation for the vaccine passes – that they were meant to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated – was based on a lie.

But he thought the topic was no longer an issue.

”I have moved on! I don’t care anymore, neither about Covid, nor about the vaccines or the vaccine passes. Enjoy your evening!”

Another vaccine passport advocate I contacted didn’t believe the message from Pfizer was any cause for concern.

”I am sure that many wrong decisions were made during the pandemic, but now people carry on as usual. Maybe it’s time to move on?”

Again, I think of the American documentary on Vietnam. The last part is about the end of the war. President Jimmy Carter didn’t believe the United States owed neither compensation nor apologies since”the destruction was mutual.”

One could, of course, argue that the United States had lost 58,000 soldiers while they had killed around 5 million people, that the Vietnamese troops had never invaded the US, nor sprayed millions of tons of Agent Orange on the fields of California and Ohio, or drowned naked Americans in napalm, etc.

The closing message of the documentary is nevertheless that the ”war” had been devastating for both sides, and that it was time to turn the page and move on. The Beatles’ hit Let It Be is played during the credits.

Imagine if the Holocaust had been depicted similarly. No Nuremberg trial, no Aftermath Agencies, no awareness campaigns, no guided tours to Auschwitz, no Remembrance Day on January 27^th. Just a quiet word of advice to leave the tragedy behind and move on. Let It Be. Let It Be.

Someone else who would like us to turn the page and move on is former Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson. About a year ago, she urged the Swedish people to” pause all hugs” from the unvaccinated. By doing this, she also condoned state-sanctioned bullying.

She is in good company. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett compared the unvaccinated to terrorists walking the streets with machine guns shooting (i.e. infecting) the innocent. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the unvaccinated racists.

The obvious question is if these oppressive heads of state knew at that time that the vaccine had not been tested from a point of view of infection control. If so, should they not be held accountable? And if they themselves had been misled, should not those who misled them be held accountable?

Let It Be. Now they want us to change the subject and move on. Putin brings new horrific headlines, and the ‘Ministry of Truth’ is already busy rewriting history in new gaslighting tweets.

As George Orwell stated in his dystopia 1984: Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

PS

A brief time before publishing this piece, I received an email reply from the public health agency confirming that they knew that Pfizer had not carried out any studies on the vaccine’s ability to protect against the spread of infection at the time of that press conference in June 2021.The public health agency, however, claims that the motive for the decision was not a reduction in the spread of infection, but rather ”was based on the assessment that the benefit of the vaccination was more important when it came to the children at that particular moment during the pandemic when the decision was made.” Thus, not the three reasons that the Director General in office at the time gave during the press conference and that I cite above.

About the Author

Per Shapiro is a long time investigative reporter having worked mostly with the Swedish Public Radio and TV. Since about two years he has had his own podcast “Folkets Radio”.

Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute.