Legal Victories Won’t Save Us, Only Cultural Ones Will
“Politics is downstream of culture” -Andrew Breitbart
George Grosz - The Eclipse of the Sun (1926)
Earlier this month the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments on OSHA’s vaccine or perpetual test mandate for companies with over one-hundred employees. The hearing was the off-key crescendo of the Biden administration’s efforts to enforce compliance with an iron fist and portray competence and control to its Containment base. Biden, whose presidency was only possible within the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and a manufactured hysteria, often said on the campaign trail and in the early months of his presidency that “[he] would shut down the virus, not the economy.” This talking point which he often repeated verbatim did not end up panning out in the real world. This past Summer’s seasonal infection lull was hailed as a victory for vaccines, but when the seasonal increase in infections hit in the early Fall many on the Left cried for more vaccination. It was during this time that Biden announced his direction for the Department of Labor to concoct an emergency standard for large employers to require vaccination. The Supreme Court’s reversal of the OSHA’s order was a final blow to Biden’s toolkit to increase vaccinations as efficacy wanes and vaccination and booster demand dwindles.
The two hours of oral arguments centered around whether or not the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has the authority to enact such a standard, and if it does not then where that authority would properly reside. And additionally, if the economic and political ramifications of such a broad requirement rose to the level of allowing it to be adjudicated within the Major Rules Doctrine — meaning Congress would have to give clear statutory authorization for the agency to have authority over this matter. It is worth noting that these two central points of contention are only concerned with whether or not this rule was implemented through the proper channel or was an over-reach of executive power. The issue of vaccine efficacy and safety as well as forced medical (experimental) procedures was sidestepped completely. While it is the case that from a legal prospective you would want to take a narrow legal argument targeting the dubious authority of an agency under the executive branch to enact such a rule, the subject matter’s near complete absence from the discussion is revealing. It bodes of a bleak future where our cultural logic can be rigged from on high.
The three liberal Justices are an example par excellence of the warped and completely out of touch with reality logic that is pervasive in left wing circles. In the context of liberals obsession with fact-checking it is a pleasant and unnerving irony that they were speaking so much misinformation in the highest Court in the United States. Of course the most notable false or misleading statement was made by Justice Sotomayor. She claimed that over one-hundred-thousand children were in hospitals and ICUs, and that many were on ventilators. I am not sure how this information came to her, whether from her law clerks or MSNBC. In reality, less than one-hundred-thousand children have been hospitalized in during the whole pandemic. And we know that many hospitalizations counted as Covid-10 hospitalizations are mere ‘with Covid hospitalizations’ — even Dr. Fauci has now admitted this on mainstream news outlets. All three liberal Justices had a exaggerated sense of the risk from Covid-19. Justice Breyer misspoke and claimed 750 million people were tested positive just yesterday — he meant to say nearly 750 thousand — more than double the population of America testing positive in America in a single day, what a feat. An obvious mistake, however it speaks to how they perceive the situation. Everyone has it! We all may die any second! Justice Kagan is firmly within this cultural-moral sphere of Covid panic as well, stating near the beginning of the hearings, “It is by far the greatest public health danger that this country has faced in the last century. More and more people are dying every day. More and more people are getting sick every day. I don't mean to be dramatic here. I'm just sort of stating facts.”
The liberal Justices outsized view of the risk is the product of a mindset thoroughly stuck within the confines of this past year’s propaganda and talking points. It is clear that they have in no way kept up with newest information available. They are trapped by the conviction that only vaccines and masks are effective in anyway against the disease — as Justice Kagan says, “We all know what the best policy is. I mean, by this point, two years later, we know that the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated and to prevent dangerous illness and death is for people to get vaccinated. That is by far the best. The second best is to wear masks.” No one has told her yet that vaccines, in fact, don’t stop spread — before and now more than ever with Omicron. The current strain is not last Summer’s Covid and no amount of masking or vaccinating or boosting will stop its spread. I agree with Toby Rogers, it is disheartening that the people with the most control over our lives, as judicial power grows from less legislation and more executive action and judicial activism, are not able to use their legions of law clerks and vast reservoirs of potential advisors to more effectively understand the situation. They are captured by the same propaganda campaigns that captured the average Joe. This is a extremely scary prospect.
Even within their own framework of vaccines saving lives and stopping the spread of Covid-19 — as Justice Kagan said, “we know that the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated” — the policy becomes a farce. Who is the policy meant to protect if the vaccines stop contagion and serious illness? It is a policy aimed at forcing those who have decided not to take a vaccination to take that vaccination in order to make them less vulnerable, no one else. This issue came up when Justice Alito questioned the Solicitor General of the United States, Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the DOJ. Prolgar admitted that the grave danger categorization only applied to unvaccinated workers in OSHA’s findings and that the concern was unvaccinated to unvaccinated spread — saying “One of the risks that OSHA was guarding against here was the risk that unvaccinated workers posed to other [unvaccinated] workers because they are so much more likely to transmit this disease to them. ... The grave danger finding is limited to unvaccinated worker who are far more likely to contract it from their coworkers as well.” This cannot be sustained on such a basis as Alito pointed out. Its a farce even from within their own logic.
On the side of opposition, the attorney to the first plaintiff — Mr. Keller — was not very impressive. He focused on the issue of authority and the likely catastrophic economic impact if the mandate was to go into effect — the prospect of losing millions of workers, likely to not be replaced easily, during an economic downturn and massive supply chain crisis. However, he did not touch on safety and efficacy of these vaccines at all — which is more pertinent than ever in the new arena of Omicron. He continually said that he did not deny the severity of Covid-19 or that it posed a grave danger to the American public. When asked by Justice Barrett, “[If he was] disputing what Justice Kagan said, that this is a grave danger and that in some circumstances this rule might be necessary, but just the scope of it makes it different?” — he agreed. That is, this could be done, just not like this. It could be done to people if they fell within a limited scope of activity or work that was deemed more hazardous in terms of spread. Or if it was done by state governments or governors — like New York City — that’s just fine. Even if this was in order to achieve the best result, it seems wrong and shortsighted.
The only people to raise the questions of the efficacy of the vaccines against spread or their potential risk were Justices Alito and Thomas and the second attorney, Mr. Flowers, representing Ohio’s claim against the mandate. Justice Thomas in dialogue with Mr. Flowers spoke of the increasingly robust evidence within the data — and if you live in any city, increasingly evident from anecdote — that the vaccines do not stop transmission. And Justice Alito brought up that risks and benefits are inherent to all allopathic medicine. These points are important, but unfortunately did not tarry in the court for very long. In an ideal world there would be no rushed vaccines that did not have proper trials, however since we do live in this world, it would at least be good if there was some discussion of risk and reward in one of the most important debates over the governments ability to force this medical product on people.
This is an important victory, but it does not leave me hopeful. While the larger mandate for large companies was reversed, the smaller CMS mandate was affirmed in order to portray the Court as reasonable — forcing health care workers to be vaccinated. In the United States only healthcare professionals are not able to make healthcare decisions for themselves. Largely the discussion by all Justices and the counsels were squarely within the paradigm of safe and effective. The liberal Justices were not at all immune to the corporate-media propaganda campaign or interested in the on the ground facts of Covid. Their reductionistic mindset of disease and the human organism were best displayed by Justice Sotomayor when she said, “Why is the human being not like a machine if it's spewing a virus.” They do not have a nuanced view of the biology or virology and are driven by fear. Our Supreme Court Justices, like everyone else, are also susceptible to the mass formation psychosis. We cannot win these battles through litigation alone. Culture flows downstream to these battles. You have to dam the rivers of disinformation flowing to the Court. Culture has to be battled over first and won, by satire, grassroots media and messaging campaigns, organizing, et cetera. We have to find a way to de-program the culture programming of the past two years. I am not sure if that is possible or what such a process would look like, but it is our only hope.