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https://brownstone.org/articles/a-digital-coup-detat/

A Digital Coup d’Etat

There was a time. What seemed to be unfolding was a huge intellectual error for the history books. A new virus had come along and everyone was freaking out and smashing all normal social functioning. 

The excuse turns out just to be the cover story. Still, it bears examination. 

Even though plenty of outside commentators said the pathogen should be handled in the normal way – with known treatment and calm while those most susceptible stayed cautious until endemicity – some people on the inside fell prey to a great fallacy. They had come to believe computer models over known realities. They thought that you could separate everyone, drive down infections, and then the virus would die out. 

This was never a plausible scenario, as anyone who knew something about the history of pandemics would report. All known experience stood against this cockmamie scheme. The science was very clear and widely available: lockdowns do not work. Physical interventions in general achieve nothing. 

But, hey, they said it was an experiment born of new thinking. They would give it a whirl. 

When it became clear that the lockdowners had gained sway over policy, many of us thought, truly, how long can this really last? A week, maybe two. Then we would be done. But then something strange happened. The money began to flow. And flow. The states thought that was awesome so they kept it up. The money printers got to work. And general chaos broke out: social, cultural, educational, economic, and political.

It all happened so fast. The months rolled on with no break in the narrative. It became crazy after a time. There were so few critics. We didn’t know it but they were being silenced by a new machinery that had already been constructed for this purpose. 

Among that which was censored was criticism of the inoculation potion that was being rolled out and which would eventually be forced on populations all over the world. They said it was 95 percent effective, but it wasn’t clear what that could mean. No coronavirus had ever been controlled by any vaccination. How could this be true? It wasn’t true. Nor did the shot stop the spread. 

Many people said this at the time. But we couldn’t hear them. Their voices were muffled or silenced. The social media companies had already been taken over by government-connected interests working on behalf of intelligence agencies. We had believed that these tools were designed to increase our connections with others and enable free speech. Now they were being used to broadcast a preset regime narrative. 

Strange industrial shifts took place. Gas cars were deprecated in favor of a new experiment in electric vehicles, thanks to intense consumer demand caused by shortages owing to supply chain breakages. Digital learning platforms got a huge boost because physical classrooms were closed. Online ordering and doorstep delivery became the rage because people were told not to leave their homes and small businesses were forcibly closed. 

The pharma companies were riding high of course, gradually acculturating the population to a subscription model. There were attempts to convert whole countries to a health passport system. New York City tried this, along with actual physical segregation of the entire city, with the vaccinated considered clean while the unvaccinated were not allowed into restaurants, libraries, or theaters. The digital app didn’t work however, so that plan fell apart quickly. 

All of this happened in less than one year. What began as an intellectual error in public health ended up looking like a digital coup d’etat. 

Coups of the past featured rebel armies from the hills storming the cities and joined by the military as they invaded the palace and the leader and his family fled in a carriage or helicopter depending on the epoch. 

This was different. It was organized and planned by intelligence agencies within the structure of the global state, a great reset to reject the forms of the past and replace them all with a new dystopia. 

Initially, the people who said this was a great reset were derided as crazed conspiracy theorists. But then it turned out that the head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, had written a book by the very title that you could buy from Amazon. It turns out to be HG Wells’s The Open Conspiracy updated for the 21st-century technology. 

There turns out to be much more than that. There was an angle to all of this that impacts the mechanisms we use for democratic control of societies. Buried in the flurry of bills shoved through in March 2020 was a liberalization of balloting and voting that would never have been tolerated before. In the name of social distancing, mail-in ballots would become the norm, along with the known irregularities they introduce. 

Implausibly, this too was part of the plan. 

Researching and realizing all of this in real time has been a bit much. It has shattered the old ideological paradigms. The old theories no longer explain the world as it is unfolding. It causes all of us to revisit our priors, at least those with minds adaptable enough to pay attention. For vast swaths of the intellectual class, this is not possible. 

Looking back, we should have known something was up at the outset. There were too many anomalies. Were the people in charge really so stupid as to believe that you can make a virus go away by making everyone stay home? It’s absurd. You cannot control the microbial kingdom this way, and surely everyone with a modicum of intelligence knows this. 

Another clue: there never was an exit plan. What exactly was fourteen days of frozen activity going to achieve? What was the benchmark of success? We were never told. Instead, the elites in media and government simply encouraged fear. And then met that fear with ridiculous protocols like dousing ourselves with sanitizer, masking while walking, and presuming every other person is a disease vector. 

This was psychological warfare. To what end and how ambitious are these hidden plans for us?

Only four years later, we are grasping the fullness of what was going down. 

For those of us schooled in the persistent incompetence of government to get anything right, much less deploy a plan with anything like precision, elaborate conspiracy theories of plots and schemes always seem implausible. We just don’t believe them. 

This is why it took us so long to see the fullness of what was deployed in March 2020, a scheme that combined a plethora of seemingly disparate governmental/industrial ambitions including: 

1) rollout of subscription/platform model of Pharma distribution, 

2) mass censorship, 

3) election management/rigging, 

4) universal basic income,

5) industrial subsidies to digital platforms,

6) mass population surveillance, 

7) cartelization of industry, 

8) shift in income distribution and entrenchment of administrative state power, 

9) crushing of ‘populist’ movements worldwide, and 

10) the centralization of power generally speaking. 

To top it off, all these efforts were global in scope. This whole model truly stretches the bounds of plausibility. And yet all the evidence points to exactly the above. It just goes to show that even if you don’t believe in conspiracies, conspiracies believe in you. It was a digital-age coup d’etat unlike anything humanity has ever experienced. 

How long will it take us to process this reality? We seem to be only at the early stages of understanding, much less resisting. 

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https://brownstone.org/articles/governments-must-reject-new-amendments-to-international-health-regulations/

Governments Must Reject New Amendments to International Health Regulations

Remember when we were subjected to a surreal barrage of orders from our governments to stay home, not entertain more than X guests for dinner, not open bars and restaurants to unvaccinated customers, stay away from places of worship, wear pieces of cloth on our faces while walking to our seats in bars, etc etc., purportedly with a view to crushing a respiratory virus that made a relatively marginal impact on average life expectancy?

And then we all took a big sigh of relief when governments finally lifted the restrictions? Well, don’t get too comfortable, because the WHO, most likely with the complicity of your government, is pushing through a set of amendments to international pandemic laws that will put your livelihood and liberties at the mercy of a WHO-appointed “expert committee” whose advice during a pandemic or other “public health emergency” will supersede that of your own government.

The proposed amendments to International Health Regulations do not require any new treaty, even though the WHO is attempting to get a separate pandemic accord ratified in addition to the IHR amendments. These amendments alone will revolutionise the international legal framework that governs responses to public health emergencies. The amendments are still being negotiated and the WHO aims to see them finalised in May 2024. They will be considered fully ratified ten months later unless heads of State explicitly reject them in the meantime.

It is critical that heads of State explicitly reject these amendments before they come into effect, because they cede a dangerous amount of power to the WHO during international public health emergencies, and the WHO can activate this emergency power by unilaterally declaring a public health emergency “of international concern.”

Here are nine reasons why governments must stop the IHR amendments in their tracks:

1. Proposed amendments to International Health Regulations (IHR) subordinate State authorities to the WHO as “the guidance and coordinating authority” during an international public health emergency. But the WHO is the very last organisation we should be ceding power to over international health emergencies. This is an organisation that has already shown its regressive, inhumane, and anti-scientific colours during and after the Covid pandemic, including failing to warn citizens about the incompleteness of safety data for mRNA vaccines, obstinately recommending community masking with very limited scientific evidence, warmly praising China’s cruel and draconian lockdowns, and enthusiastically supporting a global bio-surveillance regime modelled on the European Union’s digital Covid certificate.
2. In the proposed amendments, an important clause requiring that the implementation of the regulations be “with full respect for the dignity, human rights & fundamental freedoms of persons,” is to be replaced by a commitment to “equity” and inclusivity.” This is simply perverse. It is inconceivable that a responsible person would seek to remove the language of dignity, human rights, and fundamental freedoms from an international treaty.
3. Under these amendments, the Director-General of the WHO may designate an event as “having the potential to develop into a public health emergency of international concern.” The WHO has the ability to unilaterally set in motion its own emergency powers. Obviously, the WHO has a material interest in declaring a public health emergency that activates its power and influence over the international community, so we are heavily tilting the scales in favour of the activation of international emergency protocols.
4. The introduction of the concept of a “potential” public health emergency, along with the idea of “all risks with a potential to impact public health,” gives the WHO much wider leeway to set in motion emergency protocols and directives.
5. Under the proposed amendments, travellers may be required to produce “documents containing information…on a laboratory test for a pathogen and/or information on vaccination against a disease.” This legally enshrines a global bio-surveillance regime, similar to the discriminatory and coercive biosurveillance regime we saw in Europe.
6. The WHO would play a pivotal role in developing global “allocation plans for health products.” So an organisation financed by private donors with vested interests in Pharma products, like Bill Gates, will supervise the distribution of Pharma products. Go figure…
7. Both the WHO and States bound by IHR “shall collaborate” in “countering the dissemination of false & unreliable information about public health events, preventive and anti-epidemic measures and activities in the media…” This would effectively enshrine a global censorship regime in international law. We’ve already lived under an international WHO-led censorship regime: views different from the WHO’s “official” take on lab origins, vaccine risks, masks, etc. were taken down from google searches, YouTube, Twitter etc. We can expect even more of this under the revised IHR. This is the very antithesis of open and transparent scientific inquiry.
8. The revised International Health Regulations would make international public health responses slavishly dependent on WHO directives, discouraging dissenting responses such as that of Sweden during the Covid pandemic. Policy diversification/experimentation, essential to a robust healthcare system, would be crushed by a highly centralised response to health emergencies.
9. The WHO is already riddled with internal conflicts of interest, as it depends on private donors like the Gates Foundation with financial stakes in the success of specific Pharma products, including vaccines. These conflicts of interest disqualify the WHO as an eligible organisation for impartially coordinating an international pandemic response. The more power we give to the WHO, the more we will exacerbate these conflicts of interest.

It is often pointed out that the amendments to the International Health Regulations would not technically remove the sovereignty of national governments. But that completely misses the main point of the IHR, which is to legally bind States to follow the advice of the World Health Organisation during an international public health emergency as determined by the WHO, and to integrate national pandemic responses into an international health bureaucracy.

Though national States could, theoretically, renege on their legal undertakings under the IHR, taking a different path to that recommended by the WHO, this would be rather strange, given that they themselves would have both agreed to and financed the new IHR regime.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-administrative-state-is-destroying-our-country/

The Administrative State is Destroying our Country

It is clear to me that we are increasingly being governed by an “Administrative State” instead of by our chosen representatives. Indeed, we are more and more becoming a “Regulation Nation” which is a true threat to our Constitutional Republic.

What do I mean by that? I mean that we are being governed by regulations and rules issued by administrative agencies, instead of being governed by laws duly passed by our elected officials. 

Why does that matter? Because agencies are run by unelected, government bureaucrats who are beholden to nobody but the person who appointed them. They don’t care what the voters think or want or don’t want. They don’t need to care. They don’t need your vote to stay in power. They only have to appease the politician(s) who appointed them. If they just follow the yellow brick road, they will land on the other side of the rainbow.

Shockingly, some legislators are okay with this, because it allows them to escape any sort of responsibility or blame for an unpopular (or illegal) rule that is implemented by the bureaucrats sitting in the agencies (you know, the ones with no accountability to us voters). But, legislators should not only care, they should actively work to stop the Administrative State, because not only do many of these “regulations” usurp a legislator’s law-making power, but they are wholly unconstitutional!

You will remember from grade school Social Studies class that our government is comprised of three, co-equal branches: the Legislative branch (senators and assemblymembers who make our laws), the Executive branch (governors and the president who are supposed to enforce our laws), and the Judicial branch (judges and courts which adjudicate our laws). Each branch has its own powers and authorities, as bestowed upon them by our Constitution. Any power that is not delineated in our Constitution is reserved for the people. Remember my long-uttered phrase that, the Constitution was written to keep the government in check, not to keep we the people in check!

There is no fourth branch of government. There is no branch called the Administrative State. There is no authority in the Constitution to have agencies that make rules/regulations that employ the force of law. And yet, we see at the federal level as well as at the state level, Executive branches that are chock full of bloated, power-hungry agencies that have given themselves an astonishing amount of never-authorized-by-the-people power. In many cases, those powers are unconstitutional, meaning the agency did not have the authority to make the rule or do the thing they are doing (or trying to do).

Let me give you a few real-life scenarios so it’s easier to digest.

For starters, my quarantine camp lawsuit is a perfect example. For those not familiar with this case, what happened there is that the NYS Department of Health (DOH) issued an “Isolation & Quarantine Procedures” regulation. The head of the DOH is a commissioner who is appointed by the Governor. Everyone that works for the DOH is unelected. They do not need to listen to voters wants and needs. Quite presumably, if the Commissioner or any of the government workers below him don’t do the bidding of their “boss,” then their days at the DOH would surely be limited. 

So, what happened in my quarantine case is that the DOH created a wholly unconstitutional regulation (Rule 2.13) that allowed them to pick and choose which New Yorkers they could lock up or lock down.  That could have been forced isolation in your home, or they could have removed you from your home and put you into a quarantine facility of their choosing. For however long they wanted. With no notice. With no right to an attorney until after you were locked up. With no procedure for you to regain your freedom once you were incarcerated. 

There was no age restriction, so they could have taken you, your child, your grandchild… And they didn’t even have to prove that you were sick, or that you had even been exposed to a communicable disease! Guilty until proven innocent.

The DOH gave themselves this phenomenal power. If that is unclear what I mean there, I will explain. The DOH wanted this unbridled power to be able to control 19 million New Yorkers with the stroke of a pen, but the NYS Legislature wouldn’t give it to them in the form of failed Assembly bill A416 (because the legislators knew it would be political suicide). So, the DOH simply made Rule 2.13 and gave themselves the power they wanted, anyway. No legislative consent given. No voter input had. Zilch. A clear breach of Separation of Powers. A clear affront on our Constitution. A perfect example of the “Regulation Nation” as run by an Administrative State.

This was the most unconstitutional regulation I had ever read in my 25 years of practicing law. It was an attack on the very basis of our freedom, and a dangerous chipping away at the bedrock of our free society…a government by the people, and for the people. Without question, I knew I had to stop it.

So, I sued Hochul and her DOH on behalf of a group of NYS legislators (Senator George Borrello, Assemblyman Chris Tague, Congressman Mike Lawler) together with a citizens’ group called Uniting NYS. Our argument was clear: the DOH does not possess the power to make a law, and this was surely a law, despite the fact that they called it a regulation or rule. It conflicted with the Constitution. It conflicted with NYS law. As Assemblyman Tague said at a press conference we held when we first filed our lawsuit in 2022:

This policy’s aim to forcibly isolate law-abiding citizens is reminiscent of actions taken by some of the ugliest tyrannical regimes history has ever known. It has no place standing as law here in New York, let alone anywhere in the United States. Policies as dangerous as this should be debated and scrutinized in a public setting by elected representatives, not quietly slinked through regulatory approvals.

In July 2022, the Judge ruled in our favor and struck down this stunning display of tyranny. You can read that decision here. Of course Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James appealled the court’s decision so they could try to get back that heinous power. In November of 2023, the appellate court dismissed our case for lack of standing (a true dodging of the merits of a lawsuit if I ever saw one). So, now I am appealing that calamitous decision to the Court of Appeals (our State’s highest court).

I have done numerous interviews about my quarantine lawsuit and this “Regulation Nation” phenomenon, and you can access some of those on my website, www.CoxLawyers.com. One such interview was with Steve Gruber on America’s Voice Live, and can be accessed HERE.