The Megyn Kelly Show - Moms Fighting Back Over Masking Kids and CRT, with Maud Maron, Natalya Murakhver, and Jenin Younes | Ep. 180

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Maud Maron, a public defender and candidate for NYC City Council, Natalya Murakhver, founder of the "Mask Like A Kid" campaign, and Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, who are three liberals, to talk about moms fighting back all across the country, how the Biden administration is considering using the PATRIOT Act to crack down on parents speaking out, how race is being taught in schools, the decline in parents' rights and students' rights, the elimination of the gifted and talented program in NYC, the science-based effort to unmask our kids in schools, legal avenues to fight mask and vaccine mandates, the value of natural immunity, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, we are taking an in-depth look at the Biden administration's effort to criminalize ticked off parents who are refusing to remain silent over the direction of their children's education. It's crazy what's happening. It's crazy now. I'll get into all of it, but from the endless masking, the forced vaccinations, gender focused curriculum, critical race theory, and trying to teach everything through a prism of race, parents nationwide have had enough. Today, I will be speaking with three

women who are leading movements to fight back against this nonsense. And keep this in mind as you listen to or watch the show today. All of these women describe themselves either now or up until recently as lifelong Democrats. First up, we've got Maude Marin. She's a mom of four and a lifelong liberal who started speaking out after her public school started eliminating merit-based admissions. It ended with her losing her job in a crazy public accusation of racism by lawyers within the Legal Aid Society that she was working for. Maude, so good to have you here. Thank you for being here. Hi, Megan. It's great to be here. So let's just start with the most recent thing and then we'll backtrack into what happened with legal aid, which is insane. As a lawyer myself, what was written about you was so defamatory and awful. But let's not start there. Let's start with your more recent op-ed, speaking out against what has happened with our Department of Justice. And just for those who may not be as up to speed on it as you are, can you explain how Merrick Garland and the DOJ and the FBI got to the point

of seriously now taking a look at cracking down on parents like you, me, and our other guests today as potential domestic terrorists. Right. It sounds crazy because it is crazy, right? It's a really, the language is over the top. And the language comes from a letter written by the National School Board Association, an organization I had never heard of, despite being elected to the school board where I live in New York City in Manhattan, and having served on that board for four years. The National School Board Association wrote this letter to President Biden, but I guess it wound up on Merrick Garland's desk, saying that they were documenting what they saw as criminal activity of parents at school board meetings. And they explicitly asked that the federal government intervene by looking at parents as domestic

terrorists, their language, not mine. And they explicitly asked the FBI to use, among other things, the Patriot Act to deal with what they saw as the problem of parents at school boards. And what they're upset about is is alleged a disturbing spike in alleged harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against board members. But no evidence of that has been provided. And so we went back, we actually pulled the letter. We looked at the 26 individual examples of people allegedly harassing, intimidating or somehow criminally threatening school board members. And the evidence that they provide, Maude, shows nothing of the kind. There's maybe one or two where you're like, oh, that was bad behavior. But for the most part, I read these examples. I'm like, I'm very proud of these parents. I'm inspired by these parents who went out to their school boards and stood up to them. Okay, yes, some obscenities were yelled. That's not illegal. They were carrying let them breathe signs at certain a small disruptive group forced their way inside of the district office. They were politely asked to leave but refused. Oh, the horror.

One school board may now limit public input after some meetings got, quote, disorderly. And one man was cited as as having the nerve to ask if all the board members had their high school diplomas. Okay, I'm waiting to feel the outrage. I'm waiting for it to kick in. Here's another one. Grand Ledge School Board goes into recess due to public disruption. Board meeting had to go into recess twice. Once because someone went over their three-minute time limit. This is their evidence to get the DOJ involved. A second time was after public comment when two board members were speaking to one another and the audience kept interrupting. So annoying. One time, another place they had to kick out a

resident who refused to wear a mask. The horror. They started comparing the mask mandate to Nazis. Oh, sure. That's that's cause for the FBI to now get involved. That's sort of loose talk. I mean, you hear that everywhere. It goes on and on. I'm I can't believe that the DOJ took a look at this and said, we're in. Right. Look, and just to make clear, Megan, like there are, there are behaviors that are inappropriate that people shouldn't do. Inappropriate is not even a bar or the threshold for state law enforcement to get involved, right? We could all agree that we want people to, um, be respectful or not. Like sometimes protest isn't always respectful, but you can just told that during the George Floyd protests. Well, yes. Well, yes, there's that. But what I wanted to say

is if even if any of, um, the behavior alleged was criminal, we have laws, we have law enforcement, we have state courts that are responsible for and do a very good job of enforcing the laws. I've worked in state court as a public defender, representing people accused of crimes for years. So the looping in the federal government is really peculiar because it's not how it works. If someone in New York state disorderly conduct is a violation, it's not a crime. You can go to jail for up to 15 days for disorderly conduct. In other states, it actually is a misdemeanor. But regardless, if someone behaved in a disorderly way such that you thought you should call the cops, call the cops and they can come and make the determination as to whether or not they should make an arrest. That's not

what's happening at our school boards overwhelmingly throughout our country. And if it does happen, call the police. Looping in the federal government is about something else. It's about silencing parents, and it's really, really troubling. There's a reason there's that expression. Well, I'm not going to make a federal case out of it, because that's an elevation. That's an elevation. And normally, the DOJ would absolutely laugh at this kind of a thing. And the fact that they're taking it on makes me wonder how it was orchestrated in the first place. Did the DOJ request a letter like this? Right. Were they just the innocent recipients or did they orchestrate the Biden

administration, the whole thing? I was I was struck by the fact that it took two business days for the highest law enforcement person in our country, Merrick Garland, to respond to the National School Board Association as if he was just sitting around waiting for incoming from the NSBA. I mean, that's a really fast turnaround. So I'm, you know, I'm suspicious about it. I don't, you know, I don't have any evidence that the DOJ was anticipating it or was involved in it. But look, we know that in May, when the CDC told us we could take our masks off, Randy Weingarten, who's the head of the teachers union, didn't much like that. And then that advice got peddled back.

So we know that our government officials can be influenced by pressure from groups that want them to say different things than they're saying. Meanwhile, you and I both know as attorneys, it's not unlawful to even say mildly threatening things. I mean, in order to get to the only kind of speech that really is unlawful, and we went through this with the second Trump impeachment incitement, I-N-C-I-T-E meant, is it has to be immediate. It has to be obvious that it's about to cause immediate harm to somebody. You cannot prosecute somebody, which is what they're asking for and the DOJ is threatening here, for saying, I'll get you if you keep that mask mandate in place. This is bullshit, and I know where you live, even if they pass something that's, you know, whatever, controversial.

That's not unlawful. And I understand it could make some people feel uncomfortable, but the DOJ has no jurisdiction here. 100%. And I'll tell you, I was at a rally yesterday in New York City. They're trying to get rid of the gifted and talented program, or Bill de Blasio has announced that he's getting rid of the gifted and talented program in New York City. And a lot of parents are unhappy about it. And we were on the steps of the Tweed Courthouse, which is where the Department of Education is located in New York City, protesting, yelling, holding up signs, making a case, arguing the facts about why we should have more gifted and talented programs and not be eliminating them.

That's part of being a good parent. It's part of being a good advocate. It's part of, you know, it's a basic American right to get out there and yell and protest and make demands on your public officials. And honestly, with all but a couple of exceptions, that's all that's alleged in this document. It's not in no way is it the stuff we saw the media defending during George Floyd destruction of property and burning buildings and even shootings. It's like, no, I won't put my mask on. Okay. The contrast is very illustrative, right? We saw the local law enforcement choose to not even prosecute looting

and clear illegality in our streets last summer. And now we have the federal government coming in because parents are pissed off about what's happening in their schools and talking about it at school board meetings. The contrast is pretty overwhelming. The other thing is in this letter complaining to the DOJ, which the DOJ now accepts, they claim on the subject of critical race theory, disingenuously, quote, this propaganda being pushed by parents who need Merrick Garland to police their speech. This propaganda continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains

a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K through 12 class. This is so infuriating. I feel like guys like Chris Ruffo came up with a term, critical race theory. I mean, it had existed, but they sort of co-opted it to just be the bucket into which all of the crazy race peddling that's going on in our schools would get thrown because there's not a good short form way of referring to it or there wasn't before that. So it doesn't necessarily have to be the capital C, capital R, capital T race theory taught in law schools in order for it to be the problematic racist messaging that we parents are complaining about.

This is such a dodge, right? It's like this is such a dishonest way to raise the argument. They know very well what they're teaching in K through 12. And it's all race. Race is the prism through which virtually everything gets taught now. Well, the people who know what's being taught in school are the parents. We've had it in our homes through Zoom and we see it in what our kids are reading and we see what's going on. You know, look, critical race theory is a theory. It's not math. Right. And it's a theory that says you look at our society, at our institutions, at our laws

through the lens of race. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a legitimate analysis that you can come up with. But what happens is that everybody who is a proponent of this theory winds up coming up with the conclusion that America is irredeemably racist. I look at some of the same facts they look up and come up with a different conclusion. Having that conversation about whether or not we teach those conclusions to our kids, it's a legitimate conversation. And somewhat incredibly, Megan, I think,

and this is why you see with this response to the Merrick Garland letter, is the fact that parents on the right and the left, Democrats and Republicans, parents all over are in agreement that they should be able to go to their school board and talk about these issues. People who agree and disagree with me have been showing up at school boards to talk about these issues. So wherever you, you know, you may be a proponent of CRT, but you should still be able to come to a school board and talk about it as should the people who, you know, I would be inclined to agree with who think that it's deeply problematic and should not be in our schools. I feel like I want to say to these folks, okay, I don't know what you're calling it, but why was the diversity group at my old school demanding mandated reading for

faculty that said in every classroom where white children learn, there is a future killer cop. I don't give a damn what you call that. I don't know. I don't know. You don't have to put it under critical. Stop teaching that. Stop saying that.

Stop filling the heads of the teachers who have access to my children with that racist nonsense. So they can pick whatever label they want. What they want to do instead is say that nothing controversial is being taught and that anybody who wants to go protest at their school board meeting otherwise is a criminal, is a terrorist. We watched a woman on this program last week, I think it was, or when Carol Margo was on, railing in Virginia about about i mean it was truly disgusting stuff about pedophilia in a school book in the library and um yeah and it was very graphic this is not like oh my virgin ears i mean it's

deeply disturbing stuff celebrating child abuse i mean child sexual rape and um she got up there she was mad she the mom was mad. She had every right to be. Yes. And this is a woman who could be treated as a domestic terrorist under this new approach because she was mad. She was yelling. She wouldn't stop when they tried to cut her mic. And that's by design. They want people like her to be quiet. Right. I mean, I think that's what's happening is that we see an impulse to silence parents. Right. And the letter is very effective in that way. If someone who had wanted to go to their school board and speak up says, wait a second, they're calling parents domestic terrorists. There are plenty of parents who are going to think twice before they sign up to go and speak. And that's a deep problem. It's the chilling of speech. And we are Americans who have a First Amendment that we value or many of us value. I used to think most of us or all of us value, but there's been a strange, a strange question mark put on our First Amendment values by some folks who are prioritizing their, their sort of love of some of these theories over the free speech rights of people who disagree with them. Right. Let's just spend a minute on the scared parents, because I think a lot of folks outside of these very blue cities might be like, what do you mean? Why are you afraid? This is nonsense. You got to go in and fight against that stuff. It's racist. If it were racist against Black people,

you'd have no problem going in there and fighting it. And just racist against white people is equally bad. Go in there and fight. But the truth is, it's really scary because especially in the blue cities, you're talking about, I don't I don't want to lose my job if I if I'm on the nightly news in a clip saying, quote, the wrong thing. I don't want my spouse to lose their job. I don't want my kid to have it held against him or her. It's complicated. And I feel like they know it. That's why they're doing this. I know something about losing a job because you said words that weren't approved by ideologues, right? I had that happen to me. And, and it came out of literally my advocacy on a school board, I ran for my school board. I got elected, I wound up running for the president of the school board. And I, I became the president of my school board. And some people like what I have to say. And some people didn't, that's to be expected. That's normal. But the people who didn't like what I had to say, didn't agree with me, really waged a campaign against me. And that wound up also going to my workplace where the people in my workplace put out

public letters and got my bosses basically to sign on to these public letters saying that because of what I believed and because of what I wrote and because I'm white, I couldn't do my job. It's insane. I mean, what happened to you is so deeply disturbing. And I do think you were used as a, as a canary in the coal mine, you know, in a way like this is, this is what can happen. Proceed at your own risk. And it's it's working right. As some parents have found the nerve, even in a city like New York, to stand up and protest. But I know some of the bravest and best behind the scenes who are fighting these battles

who still don't want to go public because they do have real, you know, real skin in the game. They really could lose jobs and career opportunities and so on. More with Maude after this. You will not believe the story of how she actually lost that job. Plus, we'll talk about the parent now who was so viral in that one video is getting arrested. This one dad at this school board meeting and they painted him as a villain. Now the story comes out about why he was actually there and the school board trying to cover up allegedly what happened to his daughter. So I just want to start with this because it made so

much news and it's a great case of, you know, be careful what the media tells you when it comes to these issues and be careful what this group writing to Merrick Garland tells you, too. Loudoun County, Virginia, is this sort of Tony suburb outside of in Virginia and not far from Alexandria. And this father went viral in a video. His name is Scott Smith. He's 48 years old. He's a plumber from Virginia. And he was arrested on June 22nd in this video. For our listeners, you can watch it later on youtube.com forward slash Megyn Kelly. But you can see the police really pulling this. He's balder and a little balding, I should say. And they're pulling him down to the ground. You almost certainly have seen it because the media

played it everywhere, condemning sort of the chaos at the school board meetings, suggesting this is indicative of what's happening nationwide and how we need to tamp down on these out of control parents. Well, now, Maude, it comes out that thanks to the Daily Wire breaking the story, this guy was upset. This parent was upset because he says there was a boy who wore a skirt. He says he doesn't doesn't believe the boy is actually transgender. He says he believes that the boy was bisexual. His word that he went into the girl's bathroom and that he used the skirt to get in there and that he he raped this man's daughter, teenage daughter. The boy was arrested and is facing felony charges now, charges of forced sodomy. And the father found out he went down to the school, was irate, read them the riot act. They called the police on him, on him, on the dad for making a scene. So he shows up at the

school board meeting, which is debating this very issue of who should be allowed to use the other sex bathroom. And he got mad because the superintendent of the school, Scott Ziegler, said the school, this school has never had any form of incident inside of a bathroom involving a transgender child. Quote, to my knowledge, we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms. This had just happened. I mean, this it wasn't ancient history. And so Mr. Smith was more to the story. And by the way, that boy, according to Mr. Smith and Daily Wire, was transferred to another school where he then committed another felony on another child. The school just moved him and didn't alert the parent body that this kid was in the school. Very disturbing, all of it. The point here is that parents' rights come last.

Students' rights come absolute dead last. And then the desire to bend over backwards to take care of anybody who's in one of these prized protective classes, not girls. We're in a protected class. Women are in a protected class. But a person of color, although it has to be a particular color, Asians don't count. People of Indian heritage don color, although it has to be a particular color, you know, Asians don't count. People of Indian heritage don't count. It has to be black Americans. Right. Maybe Hispanic, as long as they're not voting for Trump. You got to figure out where the lines are. They're the ones who are prized and are untouchable. Right. Here's the thing. I read that that article. It's horrifying. Your child's safety is absolutely the most important thing.

If you don't have that, there's really not much left to talk about, about what's going on inside your kids' schools if they can't be safe. But to put it in context, Megan, that is about the rarest of rare event. Usually we don't have parents coming to school boards to talk about physical assaults on their kids. Although I will say in New York City, there's a robust conversation right now about whether or not we should have school safety agents in our schools. And I've had a lot of parents come to school boards and say, why are the politicians who work in offices where you have to pass through magnetometers and pass through security checks, saying that our schools should not have those same safeguards, right? So there's a real legitimate conversation to have about that. I happen to think we should keep our school safety agents in our

schools. But that story, which is truly horrifying, and of course, that father should have been given enormous leeway to explain his position and the reasons behind his positions. But instead, he was arrested. That father, you know, should have been treated very, very differently. But I think that the vast majority of what parents are showing up to speak about at school boards is so much different. They're talking about the kinds of classes that kids are being taught. There is a conversation about critical race theory and about access to bathrooms, but there are so many more mundane topics that parents want to talk about. And the whole range of topics from,

should we have organic food and lunch? Or to how do we keep our girls safe in a bathroom? That whole range of topic has to be on the table and people have to be able to discuss it. And bizarrely, I think the vast majority of Americans, of parents and school boards come out in the same place in a lot of these important issues. I agree with you. We're in this, we're living in this incredibly polarized time where, you know, we're being pushed to the sides and creating these battles, but there are, I think, and I know you referenced my, um, my situation at work. Um, Barry Weiss, uh, wrote a piece on her sub stack, which I would recommend to anybody to follow, um, and interviewed me on her podcast about what happened to me, um, at work. And in response to that, I got an incredible number of emails from parents,

and they said things like, I don't think we agree on this. Or some of them said, I'm far to the left of you. And some of them said, I'm far to the right of you. But they were almost too apparent. I got the nasty emails too. But to the reasonable people who were trying to engage in a conversation, they said, we may not agree on everything, but what happened to you shouldn't happen. You should be able to write an op-ed about your kid's school and show up at work the next day and work alongside your colleagues, some of whom agreed with your op-ed and some of whom didn't, because that's what freedom of speech means. And so the Merrick Garland letter horrifies me so much. And I wrote about it also on Barry Weiss's Substack. It horrifies me so much because I know there are parents

who will be quiet, who will not speak up and who will not come to their school board because of that letter. And that's wrong and it shouldn't happen. And the administration should take steps to fix it. I couldn't agree more. And frankly, I couldn't relate more. I mean, I understand what it's like to say, well, this is how I see it. And then the next thing you know, the next morning, your whole go to work for legal aid, I'm a lawyer. I went to work for Jones Day. The bleeding hearts went to work for legal aid. The people who wanted to save the world, they knew they weren't going to make any money at all. You want to help poor disadvantaged folks fight the system that's stacked against them. You can always make more money as a lawyer than legal aid. That's the least money you could possibly make. So you went there for altruistic reasons, right? So that this wasn't about you. So good on you. We need a million more just like you. Boy, did they turn on you. And the group, the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus, what they wrote about you, Maude, was so defamatory and disgusting. I couldn't believe it. So you write this op-ed, just set it up first before we get like, what was your original op-ed? Your original sin in the eyes of this group was what in the op-ed? I wrote an op-ed, which was

published in the New York Post talking about an anti-bias training that I went to as the school board chair of my school district. And there were things that happened in it that I didn't like. You weren't allowed to speak the rules of speaking where you had to give your race and the race of your children before you could speak. I think your opinion should be welcome in a setting, regardless of your race, and compelling people to engage in your idea. This is where you see critical race theory that the NSBA says is not being taught. This is where you see it in action in our schools and in our systems, because people who buy into critical race theory are going to say that this is a legitimate thing. I had a

different opinion. I offered it. We should be able to listen to parents regardless of their skin color, and we shouldn't force people to only be heard as a representative of their race. I wrote about it. I said what I believed then and I still believe it now. And some people at my job, the people who feel like they can speak up, disagreed with me and wrote insane accusations against me. And you're right, it was a caucus of my union. But then the all the higher ups of legal aid, you know, they understand the assassination that took place. Just for you expressing what is a mainstream position, you know, held by Republicans and Democrats alike when it comes to this sort of indoctrination and race obsession. The Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus blasted your racist views after the op ed claiming you had no business working as a public

defender. I'm just going to give a couple of highlights or lowlights. We now feel compelled to publicly respond to Maud and to denounce her as the racist that she is. Oh, my God. She characterizes the idea of anti-racism as a benign sounding but chilling doctrine, quoting you. That Maud finds this to be chilling tells true racial advocates all they need to know. She's racist and wants the school system, which holds the honors of being the most segregated in America, to remain unequal. That's that's your secret purpose, according to them. And then they move on and say Maude is a classic example. Listen to this. This is exactly how the game has been redefined. Classic example of what 21st century racism looks like.

She does not parade around in the city in white sheets. She does not use racial slurs and discourse, at least not publicly. Times have changed. Overt racism is no longer publicly acceptable. The new racism of today is to pretend that racism is largely non-existent, confined to a few bad apples that utter statements clearly offensive to even the most ignorant among us. It is obvious to anyone with any sense of racial justice that Maud is racist and openly so. She attacks efforts to end racism by claiming there is no racism. A lie. It's all lies. It's all misrepresentation. It's all lies. Every single word of that is a lie alive and then they end it with this what makes this all the more

sickening sickening is that maude is a public defender tasked with representing a constituency she clearly has no regard for she's one of many charlatans who took this job not out of a desire to make a difference but for purposes of self-imaging this is This is what's sickening, Maude. This letter is a sickening, unfair character assassination. And I can only imagine how you felt when your employer, Legal Aid, then retweeted the letter. The letter is horrifying. And it was so horrifying when I read it. And I was honestly shocked when my employers signed onto it by retweeting it. But I'll tell you something, if you take the time to read, it's a four page letter, it just goes on and on and on. But if you take the time to read it, the one thing after the initial

shock of it that was really clear to me is they never engage with the arguments I made. They never want to have an honest discussion about what I was talking about. I joined my school board, not to make sure that any group of people of a skin color didn't have access to education. I joined my school board to improve education for all kids in our school system, because in New York city, it needs improving. There's a lot of problems with the New York city public school system.

And I like every other parent who sticks your head up and says i'll speak up i'll help wanted to do good i wanted to make our schools better um and i think i can sit with people who don't agree with me on the how how we make them better um and talk about the fact that we need to make them better we need to make improvements and if you can't do that without the character assassination, without labeling people and without the constant accusation of racism, then you're not willing to come to the table in good faith. What happened in your personal life after this became public and you were under attack like this? Well, you know, I'll say I was running, I was and still am running for city council. So people tell you, um, uh, to be quiet,

to not lean into it, to not talk about it. And I understand that, that playbook. Um, and I followed it to some extent in the beginning, but at the end of the day, remaining quiet is not my style. And I don't think it's good for people who are, who have to fight back from this accusation. The other advice that people in my situation get a lot is to apologize. That was a non-starter for me. When I've done nothing wrong, I'm not apologizing. And I wish more people would do that because you see people being, it feels like they're almost tricked into apologizing. Like if they apologize, it will go away. But it never goes away. It makes it worse. So I tried to stay really quiet. I tried to just focus on the issues that were in my city council race. But really, that took an entire year of me trying to focus on the race. And when, you know,

I didn't win my primary as a Democrat, I ran as a Democrat because I'm a lifelong Democrat. And now I am running in the general election as an independent. And I decided during this independent run that I was just going to speak my truth and that I was going to say what I believed and say it clearly and, you know, have a conversation with anyone who wants to have a respectful conversation with me. you can agree with me or disagree with me and I can talk to you. And that's when Barry Weiss interviewed me and that's when my piece came out. And honestly, Megan, it's so much better not to remain quiet. It's so much better to speak up, to say your truth, and you will find people, right? My community of people. Abigail Schreier said to me when I spoke with her that the great surprise for her of this year, of this past year in her life is the community of the canceled.

And it spoke to me so deeply because I thought, yes, I tried being quiet for a year. I tried doing the, you know, don't lean into their accusations, just talk about the issues. But they kept coming, they kept showing up, and they kept attacking me, and they kept accusing me. And so now I think I'm going to say what I actually believe. I'm going to say that parents should, if you think critical race theory, or if you think gender ideology doesn't belong in your kid's school, show up, say why, and be prepared to talk about it in a thoughtful way. I am. And I'll have that conversation with anybody. Now, how are you paying the bills now? I realize you weren't getting paid a lot of legal aid, but a salary is a salary. My plan was, and I thought it was a great

plan, is I would run for city council. And if I won, great. And if I lost, I would go back to a job that I love and a job that I'm good at. So that's now off the table. The election is three weeks away. So I'll have to figure that out three weeks from now. How do you feel about your chances? How's it looking? Do you know? Do they poll these races? You know, they do not. We are not big enough and fancy enough to get polling in local city council races. I talked to so many people that agree with me, which is not a poll, and it's not statistically significant, but I hear from people all the time who care about the things I care about. So I'm hopeful.

Can you just expand before we wrap it up on de Blasio getting rid of the gifted and talented programs? I mean, what I read is that he did that because he doesn't think that there's enough, quote, diversity in those schools. There's something like eight or six percent black, let's say like eight percent Hispanic, six percent black or the reverse. And I what I read is that he thinks there's too many Asians. It's almost 50 percent Asian, the rest white. And he he doesn't like that. And so they got to go. So he's getting rid of them. The reality is it's mostly we got here on the gifted and talented in particular through mismanagement, but only about 2,500 seats were available to kids who tested into the gifted and talented program in New York every year. But the ideological through line of this decision

has been consistent throughout, which is to get rid of programs that show you that there's a racial disparity in the outcomes of how kids are doing instead of focusing on how we lift up all kids. There are gifted kids and talented kids or kids who could benefit from that kind of program in every district in the city. And the thing that should have been happening in the last eight years is opening up programs in districts that have been deprived of those programs, implementing things like universal screening so that we can find the kids who belong in those programs and raise the level, the academic bar in New York City, so that our kids can learn, can reach their highest potential because our kids are going to go out in the world and compete with kids from other countries

and other states who aren't getting rid of the best programs and the most accelerated advanced programs in their schools. So why are we cheating New York City public schools out of those opportunities? You tell me, because I lived in New York for a very long time.

There are some unbelievable charter schools that are predominantly, if not all black, that are amazing where these kids are just killing it. They're so excited to learn and they're getting great grades. They're getting great SAT scores. He doesn't like that either. It's like he he's so disingenuous. If you if you really want to help black kids get ahead in a program that's challenging, it's going to take them next level. You don't need to cancel the gifted and talented program. Allow for more school choice. Right. At this point, I happen to agree that's something that I probably would have thought about differently a few years ago. But at this point, I'm so deeply frustrated with what they're doing in the schools at school choice,

not just for black families. Families of any color want to have a choice to send their kids to a school where academics are focused on. I certainly want that for my kids. And I think there are parents of every color, every socioeconomic group who want a school that is going to focus on academic excellence. Wow. Well, what's the date of the race? November 2nd. November 2nd. All right. We're going to be watching it, Mada, and we are definitely going to be rooting for you. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much, Megan. It was a pleasure to speak with you.

Likewise. Up next, the fearless mother leading a group dedicated to unmasking our children. You're going to love this. Joining me now is Natalia Marakver, a concerned New York City parent who previously sued the New York City school system over their reopening after COVID, wanting them to reopen after COVID, and has now launched a new campaign called, quote, Mask Like a Kid, a group of parents dedicated to unmasking our children in the name of sanity and science. Natalia, thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Megan. So what led you to get active on this? How many kids do you have and what did you start seeing? I have two kids, a seven-year-old and an 11-year-old. And quite honestly, I think all of us were willing to trade, you know, masking for open schools last fall, as in fall of 2020. And we're willing to put up with it pretty much the entire year because we so desperately wanted schools to be open and to be safe. And we weren't sure what, you know,

what the risks and trade-offs were. But as it became clearer and clearer that masking was really just a performative action for neurotic adults to feel more comfortable, it started to feel onerous. And the kids, quite honestly, are really fatigued of it too. So over the summer, I had been talking to many parents across the country and it seemed that we had all arrived at the same place at the same time. And really, we're looking for off ramps, which thus far we have not been able to get from our government or our local officials.

This is one of the maddening things. There's no off ramp. There's no limitation. There are no criteria for when the masks are going to come off. As you know, I was in New York City. Now I'm in Connecticut. The governor here just extended the mask mandate for children without saying when or why it's going to come off until February. But even February, you know, that's going to get extended. And so there's no goal line there. We have no idea what we're shooting for. Hospitalization ratio to population. What is it? No one will tell us. Yeah, that's really frustrating.

I mean, I had no idea that he had extended it to February. It seemed like Connecticut was trying to be more conservative and science-based, but it seems that that's not happening. And, you know, I heard your conversation with Scott Gottlieb a little while ago, and you were right. Why are we allowing local, you know, municipalities to make restrictions on our kids, you know, freedoms based on, you know, feelings and not science? Isn't that what we have scientific regulatory agencies for and a federal government for? I mean, it just doesn't feel like a cohesive country anymore. We actually have a bit of that from my interview of the former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb last week. It's on YouTube if you want to check it out. But here's a snippet of he and I on masks. But the masks are not effective and there aren't studies proving that they are. The CDC's own study deal with that.

Ninety thousand students in the Atlanta school district prove that they do not have any effect. Why isn't that valid? Why isn't the CDC relying on its own study to allow us to unmask our children? My policy prescription would be that in the setting of a very contagious variant that we we don't know how hard or easy it's going to be to control in a school setting where the imperative is to keep kids in the classroom and also keep them safe. We should go into the school year adopting all the reasonable measures that we can take and peel them away as we see how successful we are. Masking has negative effects. Masking has negative effects on children. That's been proven as well. This is not a harmless measure and it's not helping. So why wouldn't we be honest about the CDC's own

information? Well, that's what we're going to agree to disagree. Florida took that approach. They didn't have any mitigation in place in a lot of those school districts. And we saw the virus become epidemic in the schools. Now, of course, it's way through. What schools did it become epidemic in? Amongst children in school spread? That's not true. And it wasn't true. We went back and checked after the show. It's not true. So, I mean, you've got even people like Gottlieb, who I would say of the officials who are sort of talking heads on TV, he's a little bit more reasonable, but he's pro-vax mandate, pro-mask mandate, although he will criticize the CDC and the government bodies for not handling this right.

But even he, you know, is out there sort of, yes, no, but mask mandates, you have to do everything reasonable, everything possible. No, you're the CDC's own study said this one doesn't work and it's hurting the children and they won't listen. They won't listen. They don't care. You keep hearing how resilient kids are. And every time I hear that, I think about the kids in the Romanian orphanage, the orphanages in the 90s, and how they were deprived of human contact and human affection. have a much bigger sample size now in this country uniquely. My husband's from England. They have never masked young children. Even my high school niece and nephew went to school without masks all of last year, with the exception of six weeks when Delta was surging. And, you know, Scott Gottlieb is lying because actually he can just look across the pond and see, you know, Denmark. Tracy Hogue, who's done all the research on distancing and circulation and CDC has relied on her research, has said that this is not how the virus spread.

The kids are largely immune. The kids should be allowed to resume normalcy. But Scott Golib knows, you know, Randy Weingarten had a panel a couple of weeks ago with two scientists who literally had no evidence to support their feelings that masks worked in the presence of scientists who showed research and said, look, there is no evidence that they work and they come at a great cost. The feelings seem to be, you know, it's like a, it's like a mania. It's like captivated this country. And I get it. Masks have a feeling, they're sensorial. Like our intuition says that if we have something on our face, it must be doing something. But actually what it's doing is socially isolating the people, the kids who need the interconnectedness more than anyone.

And I've also been reading a lot of research about just the amount of bacteria growing on the inside and the outside of masks, and also like some eye disorders that can be exacerbated and other issues. But we seem to have just this one like singular focus, like put the masks on, masks up, or you're a bad person or you're a bad kid, you're a bad student, you're going to get punished. He tried to tell me that there have been many studies supporting the effectiveness of masks in school. And I got in his face and said, absolutely not. No, not one.

If you look at the David Zweig article in New York Magazine, which I referred him to, he took a hard look at it. He talked to me, came on this show a couple of weeks ago and said he went to the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics who are behind the student issued mask mandate and said, give me your evidence or the underlying data upon which you've based your recommendation. The American Academy of Pediatrics did not respond to multiple requests by him. I mean, this isn't some like, you know, Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson calling up and asking. This is David Zweig of New York Magazine. They totally blew him off. CDC press office said, oh, well, we recommend schools do universal masking since kids can't vaccinate under 12. And then they sent links to unrelated materials. So he went on his own, David Zwe Zweig and tried to find every single study out there.

And what he found was that the underlying data in the studies did not support the conclusions that in any study that found masks might be effective. There was increased ventilation. There was social distancing. There was nothing to prove it was the masks that did anything. And there was never a comparison group that didn't require student masking. So this is the error that was made by Duke University, which is the study everybody cites. They won't acknowledge it, Natalia. It's infuriating. And they do it now, not just with respect to the masks, but with respect to the vaccines, too. It drives me nuts. You and I are sitting here having a conversation. Your kids and mine are sitting in school all day for eight, nine, ten hours with their faces muzzled.

And so are the kids of everybody listening to this program, unless you're in places like Florida or Texas. All right, we're going to pick it up right there. We've got more with Natalia after this. And up next, a 16-year-old Wyoming high school student forces her school into lockdown. She didn't force them. They decided to put the school in the lockdown and they arrested her because she refused to wear a mask. That's the insanity we're up against. Stay with us much, much more. Natalia, it's just a word on the harms of masks. There's no question that, you know, kids process information, people process information by looking at another person's face.

And they say that until about age 14, children are still developing their facial recognition skills. Moreover, you point out the thing about the bacteria. There was something on MedPage today talking about how there is a risk of bacteria spreading to your eyes from the inside and outside of your mask. They did a study that found that face masks became seeded almost instantaneously with oral and nasopharyngeal bacteria. It can be dispersed upward toward the eye unless you tape your mask flat to your face. They found bacterial growth on the inside

of 97% of the masks they looked at and 90% of the outside, 97 inside, 90 outside. Now to mention the mental health issues, none of which counts for anything with these people. You can't get through. I mean, so you're in, I know you're in this group, you're in another group with a pal of mine who I absolutely love, who's fighting for sanity too. How, like, what's the plan, right? Like I'm out here talking about it. Parents are showing up at the school board meetings. Now they're being threatened with being treated as domestic terrorists. So what are the plans being kicked around? Um, I think this is really a good time. Uh, I think that the, there is a groundswell at this point where parents really are starting to

question what the mitigations that have been implemented in especially schools are and what is absolutely essential because now it's become a long haul and they're seeing kids who really are suffering and there's no end in sight. So we have realized as a group of parents across the country that our biggest disability has been that we're fragmented. We don't have a union. There's no one place where we can go and really just connect and try to implement best practices for kids that really don't vary from California to New York. Kids are kids. They need to be able to breathe. They need to be able to move. They need to be able to be largely unrestricted and feel like school is a place they want to go to rather than a place where they're confined in. So we've started just talking.

We talk with parents in California, in Oregon, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, you know, all over the country, and really try to implement an awareness campaign. Obviously, we don't have the power to unmask our children. And that's so frustrating to so many of us. But we can challenge adults to mask like children. And I think that that's harder than most adults imagine. These children have to put on those masks often at 7.30, 8 o'clock in the morning. Many of them in New York City, especially, they don't get breaks. It's explicitly written into the DOE guidelines. No mask breaks, don't take it off outside, no recess, no gym break. So you're kicking a ball around, sweating in a mask, suffocating. But nobody can really see that. And nobody cares.

I mean, that's an incredible message to send to our kids, too. But we're trying to raise awareness that this is how kids actually mask. And we're going to have a mask like a kid day, which is going to challenge politicians. Our governor, Ho-Chul, who always appears on camera unmasked and, you know, communicating with, you know, the masses unmasked because she obviously knows how much easier it is to communicate and establish connections unmasked. I'd like to see her mask. I'd like to see reporters mask. I'd like to see, you know, people who are just walking around on the street mask like kids. So 8am to, you know, three o'clock in the afternoon, a 20 minute break for lunch, but a mask the rest of the day. And by the way,

you can't just access water anytime you want to just because your mouth is dry. For instance, in New York City, in some schools, I know that kids are forced to leave the classroom, stand three feet apart at designated times just to get a sip of water. That's what masking like a kid means. And I don't think any adult is experiencing that and that kind of loss of agency. It's a great point. My eight-year-old just told me yesterday that if he wants to get a drink of water at school, they make him, you can pull down the mask to take the sip. And then before you've even swallowed, you have to have the mask back over your nose. They're putting into these kids, they're treating these kids like they're, like they've got some hideous communicable disease

that any breath caught out into the open could be lethal for one of their it's not true. And I resent them scaring my eight year old when my husband and I have done such a good job of not doing that. Right. Like it's like we're fighting against the schools on this, not with them on the on the subject of sort of civil disobedience. Sixteen year old girl, Wyoming, decides not to wear the mask to school. She gets suspended for two days. She does it twice more. She's trying to make a point. I don't want to wear the mask. So that's six days. If she gets to 10 days, she's expelled. She goes into the school, I guess, on the third time or after the third time. She wasn't supposed to be on school property. She goes into the

administration office, I gather, and they throw the school into lockdown. She didn't have a gun. She wasn't making threats. She didn't, you know, there wasn't some domestic terror threat and she got arrested. Here's some video of it. Please let me into class. I can't unless you're going to wear a mask at all. So you're taking away my right to go to school?

Well, I need you to wear a mask because that's what we gotta do right now. You've been suspended, they've asked you to leave. Sounds like you're refusing to. All right, so as law enforcement, I have no respect for requesting that you leave the premises because you've been suspended. Are you willing to do that? No. are you willing to do that no too ought to be ashamed all for a face mask it's despicable they put her in handcuffs she was in handcuffs i mean i don't even know what to do it's like she tried civil disobedience she's trying to

make a point i i realized she wasn realized she wasn't doing what she was ordered to do by law enforcement. And this is what we're up against because you don't want your kid to disobey authority, right? They're taking advantage of our kids' respect for authority. Well, and the other dangerous part here is that, guess what? Kids are smart. They figured this out. I've heard of lots of conversations amongst middle schoolers and even elementary schoolers who are like, wait a second, we're in school here obeying these artificial distancing guidelines and wearing masks. But then after school, we hang out normally, no mask, hanging out at each other's houses, because that's what humans do. And nothing's happening. We're still alive. We're not sick. Like, what are these rules? Like,

why are we required to follow one set of rules inside a school building? They don't make sense. We were taught to question. We know about science. This doesn't seem to be right. But then, you know, nothing's happening. And I'm hearing more and more anecdotally conversations that are happening amongst, you know, young people about this. And I don't think this girl will be the only one because kids really have a sense of justice and injustice and they want to live. They need to live in a just world, but that's not what we are setting up for them. But let's make a point of saying in this country, not this is not happening

in Europe. Okay. In Europe, they have been saying, you know, Alec, Alec MacArthur, Alec McGillis, sorry. It's just written an article, a really brilliant article in the New York Times, talking about nuance and how important it is, you know, if you're going to apply a mitigation, like masking, that it's done with science, and it's not a blunt instrument, it's done with precision. And in Germany, where he has been, you know, people use masks discreetly on the, you know, in crowded subways or buses or trains, and they take them off when they go outside, because there is almost no risk to people, to kids, adults or any age outside. So if you apply it like a blunt instrument, this is the result you're going to get. If you use it with discretion and with sense and with

science and evidence behind you, people might actually comply, including kids like we did last year. It's been 18 months now. It's long enough. They can't keep going like this. And back to the original point, there is no end date. There's no metric. They just keep moving the goalposts. And while people like you, people like me may be trying to talk sense to our kids at home, we're up against teachers like this guy in Oregon who are pushing masks, pushing vaccinations on kids. And the kids know very well they're going to lose real things in their lives that are important to them if they don't go along with their teacher's authority. Here's a soundbite from the teacher high school in Oregon on vaccines. The only thing that's going to get us out of this mess is for us to get to that third immunity level, which is between 80 and 85% of the population vaccinated. Last time I checked, it was about 66%

of people vaccinated. So we're pretty far from her immunity. So if you want to be able to go to concerts and not have to wear a mask, be able to come to school and not have to wear a mask, be able to go to the emergency room and be able to actually be seen

at a reasonable time, you've got to get vaccinated. It is an option for you because you are healthy and able to. Please get vaccinated and please tell the people around you to get vaccinated. We are literally going to keep

sending you this big fat message until we get to that 85% 85% Who is she to tell the children what they need to do when it comes to their medical choices? Yeah, I mean, it's parents, you know, are being completely eliminated from this equation. And, you know, I mean, what an awful position to put kids into. And also much of what she says is not true. So, I mean, this is like the boy who cried wolf, like what happens when we actually do have a Spanish flu where kids are affected or something that really disproportionately targets the youth? Like what will they do when they've realized that the regulatory agencies actually never told them the truth and that the, you know,

federal and local officials lied to them? You know, how will we get them to comply when we're actually telling them the truth? I think that's really a scary scenario. The media is so derelict in its duty on this whole story. So I can't watch the mainstream media doing interviews of officials like Fauci because it's just it's it's a farce. I mean, it's it's a joke. They don't ask the tough questions. That's why it was so exciting to have Scott Gottlieb here, who I did press. And one of the things we got into it over was the vaccines and in particular, the vaccine mandate out in L.A., the L.A. school district for some 600000 children.

And he was trying to say earlier, like, oh, there should be flexibility. Parents should be allowed to do one dose of the vaccine with their kids or a lower dose. And I was like, oh, I love your utopia. But the reality is those kids can't do that. That's not what the vaccine mandate there or in my school says. Parents don't have that delightful choice of like scaling it or waiting in between the two doses or any of that stuff. Here's part of that exchange for those who missed it. You said you could potentially wait for the lower dose vaccine to be available. No, they can't. They've got to do it. You said if your child has already had covid, one dose may be sufficient.

That's not true. So there's different approaches that you can take in consultation with your pediatrician to try to address whatever. I look, I appreciate you. It is, too, because the parents in L.A. do not have that choice. They've got a stick of vaccine. You're talking about their 70 pound 12 year old. That's the same as they put in their 200 pound husband. Right. You're talking about one city in one part of the country. By the time that this one is actually incorporated into the vaccine schedule, it's going to be a long way off. You know, California moved quickly here. I wouldn't expect many other parts of the country to mandate vaccination. It's happening right now. I'm telling you right now it's happening in private schools and across the country. It's happening in my own private school right now. And by the way,

you mentioned the flu. They don't mandate the flu vaccine. And that did kill more kids last year than COVID. Oh, a lot of school districts do mandate the flu vaccine, actually. It's not a nationwide thing. And it's not a school district wide thing. And the flu vaccine has been around for a lot longer. So what's your point? He knew very well what my point was. It's not true. There's not some pressure to to get a mandate to have flu vaccine mandates. That's a lie. It's spreading. And not only is it spreading, but there's this great there's a woman on Twitter who I follow, who I love. I think it's New York City Angry Mom. She's well worth your follow. And she was pointing out in response to that segment, you know what? You try to bring your kid into a museum in New York City right now without a vaccine if he's 12 or older. Good luck.

Try to bring him into a restaurant. Right? We all know that there's a restaurant vaccine passport in New York. Good luck. Try to bring him in any public facility. Try to take my friend taking her kid to basketball practice. He was told by the coach, you can't play unless you've been vaccinated because he's 13. And you have to wear a mask while you play the basketball. I mean, the the this same friend was at a party recently was told by the host that when she went inside the apartment to use the bathroom, she had to put her mask on by herself, by herself to go into. People have lost their bloody minds. And our kids are either going to have to revolt like the girl we saw at that school and get arrested and put in handcuffs or deal with it. That's why I mean, you and obviously New York City angry mom feel so angry.

Well, also, um, an important point to make, you know, Scott Gottlieb is completely either pretending he doesn't realize or is ignorant of this, but, um, public school athletics is essentially shut down this year, um, because any contact sports that, uh, kids play. And by the way, this is how inner city kids get scholarships. Coaches come and scout them, and then they get scholarships to fantastic universities, girls with track and field. But any kids who are playing in the public school athletics and are not vaccinated can't play contact sports. Also, no spectators on the field, no parents at games, no coaches. This is only public schools, by the way. If you're at a Catholic school, it's totally fine. So those kids can get scouted. Private schools have different rules. So we have

like all these different little fiefdoms and no real cohesive approach. Like this is not about health. It's clearly about politics. And it's not about equity or giving kids an opportunity to, you know, to rise up because really the people who are being most affected are the people without means for whom like sports and athletics and, you know, the library that was shut for, you know, for over a year, even though it was perfectly safe to be back. I mean, these are the people who are being hurt the most and that's why we can't stay silent and we don't advocate just for our own children. I always say, you know, even if I lived in an ivory tower and my kids went to the most, you know, gilded private schools in the country, eventually they'd have to walk the street and encounter their village. If you don't preserve your village and if you don't heal the world around you, what are you doing? Where are you living and who are your people? And you heard that teacher talking about how we need to get the vaccination rates up community wide. There's no mandate for the seniors, right? The seniors can do what they want,

right? Like the grownups can do whatever the hell they want. But my 12-year-old and soon my eight-year-old, they're going to be forced to take this experimental medicine because the school's got them, because the school mandates that they get an education. The school mandates that they stick this needle in their arm. And when the science comes back saying, well, there are some risks, maybe it should be between me and my doctor. You just get teachers like that who are ideologues saying, I don't care. We need to get the numbers up. And again, this is this country.

Again, in Europe, they are not rushing to vaccinate children because Europe does something. It practices an approach called the precautionary principle. You test something rigorously before you unleash it on the population. You don't use your population as your guinea pigs and then say, oh, sorry, that actually did hurt them. Oops, made a mistake. The precautionary principle is important. And it's something that this country just completely doesn't, you know, it doesn't follow, but, um, our kids are the ones who are going to pay the price. So, and they're paying it right now. I don't, I give them credit. I don't think I could do it. I don't think I could wear the mask as often as my kids do. I, I don't know what the solution is. I'm so upset about it.

I, I feel so powerless and I know people say homeschool them to pull them. I can't. And I don't want that. I want reason in the school system. I want them to be with their, it's like you substitute in new bads for the old ones. If I pull my kids, now I have to find some teacher. What if I don't like the teacher? What if, you know, all three children at home, but how many teachers do I have to hire? I want them to have the socialization. Being at home via Zoom isn't good either. It's just what we want is life to go back to normal. The virus, the number of cases, they are going down. And even when they were high, it wasn't the children, thank God, that were the problem. Natalia, thank you for doing everything possible to fight back against this nonsense and rock on. Thank you so much for being so brave and asking really tough questions that other people should be asking, too. I appreciate it. It's my pleasure. Up next, we're going to be joined by an attorney to talk about how the legal fight is going against these mask and vaccine mandates. They were losing these cases.

And now there was just a very good decision saying you you can't force everybody to get the vaccines. And I'll tell you why right after this break. Joining me now is Janine Yunus. Janine serves as litigation counsel for the new Civil Liberties Alliance and is a contributor at the American Institute for Economic Research. She too is a lifelong Democrat fighting back now against mask and vaccine mandates, in particular in the courts. Welcome, Janine. Thank you so much for having me, Megan. It's like all my friends in New York. They're all Democrats who are now like, because you're still stuck in true democratic principles, which is small L liberalism and liberal values. And much of the party has moved on to some weird place I don't understand or am familiar with.

Yeah, I agree. They've moved into some sort of strange authoritarian fascist territory. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's really manifested over the covid policies over the last 18 months. So tell me about this group that you're working with to file these lawsuits. Is this like a new ACLU or what is this? Yeah, they're sort of a new ACLU. They're nonpartisan, nonpolitical. So there are people from sort of all walks of life here. Their main purpose is to fight against the administrative state abuses of administrative

power, which often takes sort of the legislative process, you know, administrative agencies have become very powerful and have taken over what should be a lot of legislative authority. So we're trying to make sure that every American has all their rights to due process, et cetera, not infringed upon by the administrative state. So you filed how many lawsuits so far? Two? I filed two lawsuits against vaccine mandates specifically. So one against GMU on behalf of a professor there and another one against MSU on behalf of an employee.

George Mason University and what was the other one? Michigan State University. Sorry. So these are both state universities. And so they're therefore subject to constitutional structures. The arguments that we made wouldn't necessarily work against private universities. And we filed these on behalf of employees with natural immunity because we think that's the sort of strongest argument. It's so hard to show that there's any compelling government interest in forcing these people to get the vaccine. Unfortunately, we just lost a preliminary injunction last week in the

Michigan case. I saw that. Can you just speak to this 1905 Supreme Court precedent, though, because this is what everybody looks at. And even I just cursorily looking at it early on in this said, well, Supreme Court has said that you can force vaccinations in the school setting or not necessarily school setting, but they've said it's OK to force a vaccination. But there are real reasons to distinguish that case from what we're seeing right now. Absolutely. So Jacobson was a 1905 case and that involved smallpox. A couple of differences. That was the town that was mandating the smallpox vaccine. But the penalty for not getting the vaccine was a five5 fine, which is about $140 today. That's very different here where we're talking about losing your job. In New York City, if you don't get the vaccine, you can't go anywhere because of their passport

program. So those are a couple of differences. Smallpox is also a disease that kills around 30% of people infected, whereas COVID, we know that the death rate is much lower. And especially when it comes to mandating it for younger people, I think it's much more ethically questionable because this disease doesn't actually kill them at very high rates at all. Another difference is that in Jacobson, that was the product of a legislative process, whereas what we're seeing now is a lot of mandates that are coming from executive or from universities that aren't going through the same process.

You know, they're not these aren't elected officials who are accountable to the public in the same way. And a final difference with Jacobson that we pointed out is that Jacobson didn't involve people with natural immunity. So, in fact, a lot of school vaccine mandates exempt children who've had the disease in question. If you've had measles, you can usually just show a certificate of recovery or antibody test, whereas these mandates don't provide for such exemptions. Right, because they refuse to acknowledge natural immunity as a source of immunity. And this is yet another thing I got into with Scott Gottlieb because his own vaccine, he's on the board of Pfizer now, former FDA commissioner, and there was a study published in The Lancet, this so-called respected journal of medicine.

It was funded by Pfizer, his organization. And it concluded that six months after your second jab of the Pfizer vaccine, you only have 47 percent effectiveness when it comes to fighting off the virus. 47 percent. I'd love to compare somebody six months after the second dose of Pfizer to somebody who two months ago had a bad case of COVID. Right. I mean, we know that natural immunity is long lasting and durable. There is a study from Israel of 700,000 individuals that show, you know, it's last as far as we know, it seems to last as long as we've had COVID. It could last. We could last for years. There's been

a real denigration of the science here and an unwillingness to recognize natural immunity. And everything that I've had the defense say in my cases about natural immunity, you can say about the vaccines. They say, we don't know how long natural immunity lasts. We don't know how long immunity from the vaccines lasts. And in fact, everything that we know about the vaccines was actually based on comparing it to natural immunity. So they look at the antibodies from natural immunity. There's simply no reason to disregard, you know, what is a scientific fact and has been recognized as one for centuries. That Israel study showed natural immunity is 27 times more protective than the vaccinated

immunity. This is what Dr. Fauci was asked about to Sanjay Gupta's credit by Gupta, who's a doctor, about a month ago on CNN. And here is how Fauci answered. Listen. And just real quickly, there was a study that came out of Israel about natural immunity. And basically, the headline was that natural immunity provides a lot of protection, even better than the vaccines alone. What are people to make of that? So as we talk about vaccine mandates, I get calls all the time. People say, I've already had COVID. I'm protected.

And now the study says maybe even more protected than the vaccine alone. Should they also get the vaccine? How do you make the case to them? You know, that's a really good point, Sanjay. I don't have a really firm answer for you on that. And he goes on from there. It doesn't contradict his I don't know. I mean, I don't know whether he doesn't know or whether he knows and he just doesn't want

to say. But either way, it doesn't support requiring vaccines of people who have natural immunity. No, it doesn't. It's a very strange phenomenon. I can't understand what's going on. I think there's something having to do with administrative ease. Like, oh, it's just easier to tell everybody to go out and get the vaccine and show their cards. But this is disregarding the fact that actually people with natural immunity have higher risk of adverse effects.

And that especially seems to be the case with young men, actually. A lot of the incidents of myocarditis that we've seen with the Pfizer and Moderna appear to be in young men who've had COVID. So disregarding this is really harming people. And I'm worried about when they start mandating it for kids, you know, now that the EUA approval is coming for the Pfizer for 5 to 11, that more children will be harmed by these mandates. What's the story with your judge who denied your preliminary injunction? Why do you think that happened? You know, I he really relied on Jacobson again, which I think is the wrong standard. I think there is a certain mentality in the country that's just it. It would take a lot of courage to stand up and say to be the first judge to say, you know, strike this down on natural immunity grounds. The lawsuits that are winning in this arena are the ones based on religious exemptions.

So there are actually a lot of victories there, but not with respect to sort of medical type exemption for natural immunity. It seemed to me that he was just deferring over and over again to, you know, sort of the experts, the experts say this, the experts say that it's like, okay, the experts are people like Gottlieb who will not, who will not listen to reason, you know, like, um, uh, I think this is NCLA, uh, filed a class action. Is that you? Yeah, that's you. I'm just trying to get my, my notes straight. Um, okay, hold on a second. He says, uh, let's see. Um, Michigan state trying to find his actual ruling against the Michigan State employee. Paul Maloney, that's your judge, right? Yes.

Yes. That's the judge. And says, okay, she brought the lawsuit, blah, blah, blah, recent antibodies. I can't find it, but basically, oh, he says the MSU mandate is based on guidance from state and federal health agencies. Put plainly, even if there's vigorous ongoing discussion about the effectiveness of natural immunity, it is rational for MSU to rely on present federal and state guidance in creating its vaccine mandate. What about Fauci? What about people who have no idea? We know that that some have these mandates, at least the ones for the kids came because of Randy Weingarten and the teachers union, like, none of that can be considered by these judges who have

massive power over us now. Right. And you know, the CDC guidance, frankly, when you look at their the link that these universities are citing to saying people with natural immunity should get the vaccine, they're not really citing to rigorous scientific studies. And it's interesting because this guidance is not legally binding. So you can't actually go to court and challenge the CDC's guidance and say, you know, this is arbitrary and capricious or not based on anything. But at the same time, all of these universities and institutions are relying on it. So they kind of have us in a catch-22 where we can't bring a legal challenge against it. But at the same time, everybody's relying on it and sort of treating it with the force of law. Yeah. Where's the gold standard study saying that if you've had COVID, you're much more immune and

better off if you still get the vaccine. Where's that? Because I've had a lot of doctors on. I've had doctors try to make the case like it could be this, it could be that. But I have yet to see the gold standard study that proves it. In fact, it appears to have come out the other way. But let's switch gears and talk about the religious exemption, because I do find this very interesting. I will tell you in our school, we have vaccine mandate now for kids who are 16 and up. And for sure, it's coming for the younger kids just as soon as it's no longer an emergency authorization. Once that gets a more permanent approval, it's going to come into the school saying, I don't vaccinate my kids, you know, I'm a Jehovah's Witness, I'm this, I'm that, then forget about trying it now. But I'll tell you, just today, right, there was, I read in the New York Times this case that came out of the federal judge in New York saying New York health officials have to, they must allow employers to grant religious exceptions to the vaccine

mandate in this state. You have no choice but to allow employers to grant religious exemptions because now it comes out, and of course the vaccine companies and the government's like, oh, we knew this all along, but we did not know this all along, that there is a question about the connection of these vaccines to stem cells and the way that they were tested, not what's in the vaccine. Everybody in science seems to agree you're not getting stem cells injected into you in this vaccine, but the vaccines were tested using a clone of stem cells. And for people like me, Catholics, this could definitely be a problem. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and a lot of the religious exemptions are being based on various religions. There was, for instance, a case out of Western Michigan University with the same judge, actually, and he granted their TRO on the same day and denied ours. And their religious exemption was, I believe they didn't even cite a specific religion. They just said their religion was that their body was their temple. So I think what we're seeing is that judges and institutions are being much more sensitive or concerned about religious exemptions or requests than they are about medical concerns, which is an interesting trend. And that's obviously because the First Amendment is implicated. Whereas what they're saying in our cases is there's no constitutional right to refuse a vaccine. That's what we saw. We were trying to argue that you have a constitutional right to bodily autonomy and to decline medical

interventions under the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendment. And the court said, no, you don't have that right. Well, you have the right, sorry, but vaccines don't infringe upon that right. So that's the big difference. They're basically saying your client could just quit or work someplace else. It's not saying somebody can hold you down and force the vaccine into you. It's basically, you don't have to work there. You can go work someplace else. But I think this is actually very interesting because the religious exemption could, you know, could potentially swallow the rule. If this is going to be upheld based on, you know, your right to freely practice your religion. And I didn't realize it was as broad as that, what you just said. My body's my temple.

Then this could be the way forward for people who you don't even have to prove that you've already had COVID. Right. Right. Well, as a lawyer, I don't want to advise people to make things up. But I will say it seems that institutions are taking an expansive view of religion in a lot of these cases. So let's be honest. The government's making its stuff up, too. I mean, like they're they're making up that you absolutely have to have a vaccine if you've had a strong case of covid versus somebody who had the Pfizer vaccine eight months ago. They that is made up. Right. So it's like I can understand how people would say I'm a Wiccan and Wiccans don't believe whatever it is in using vaccines. Another really interesting fact is that a lot of these universities, both George Mason University and Michigan State University, accept vaccines like the Sputnik and the Sinovac vaccine from Russia and China, respectively, which have about 50 percent efficacy rates. So if they're so concerned about immunity, that really doesn't explain a policy that allows these vaccines unless, you know, what they want is the foreign students money.

Right. Well, I was thinking about it with respect to my kids because I don't want them to get expelled. But I if I have to put a vaccine in one of them and I do worry about the myocarditis, given a family history of heart disease in my family. Can I take them over to England and just get them the lower microgram one dose and have them considered vaccinated? The reality is here in America, the answer to that right now is no. But if an exchange student comes over with that vaccine, he can have at it. Great. Welcome to America. Right. That's very strange. Right. So what do you think now? Is there any other way? So like people who are working for employers who have these vaccine mandates right now, what would you advise them to do? Right. If they just they really have strong objections to taking this.

Well, as I said, it seems like the religious exemptions are the ones that are getting granted. So that's probably the approach that's going to succeed the most. Employers don't seem to be and the courts don't seem to be responding to the natural immunity argument, even though I think it's very strong. And I think people, you know, there is a constitutional right to decline a vaccine, especially, you know, for a disease that has a fairly low death rate, especially among certain demographics. I think it's immoral and unethical to be mandating it for people who don't really face a risk from the disease itself. But unfortunately, most the courts and most institutions don't seem to be agreeing with me right now.

So I do have some hope about that. You know, there's the federal mandate. And I think that's it's illegal. It's clearly illegal. And I think there will be challenges to that. And I believe that they will be successful for that reason. Because there was another, there was another case out of the sixth circuit, which is higher up than the district federal court that happened in here in New York, which came down, uh, allowing the religious exemption to as a, as a basis to avoid compliance with a Western Michigan university's vaccination requirement. Right? Like, so that's a higher court. It's better to have the sixth circuit than a federal district court. So that's, that's a higher court. It's better to have the Sixth Circuit than a federal district court. So that's that's at least two.

Right. So that's the same one that was the same judge that issued that granted their TRO the same day as he denied ours. And theirs was appealed by the other side up to the Sixth Circuit. And that's where that decision comes from. OK, so they lost. So that's I mean, that's two significant cases. Here's the question I have for you, though. A judge ruling that that New York health officials must allow employers to grant religious exemptions is not the same as saying all employers must grant religious exemptions. So is it is it up to a

private employer to decide whether they want to grant a religious exemption? That's an excellent question. Private employers have a lot more latitude when they're acting, you know, alone. I think when private employers, for instance, the Biden vaccine mandate requires private employers with over 100 employees to mandate the vaccine. Now, I think there you have the government using a private company to essentially accomplish what the government can't do, because Biden knows he can't mandate vaccines for all Americans. He's trying to get the government to do that work for him. So there I think you have a very strong legal challenge.

And the private company at the very least would have to grant religious exemptions. I actually think you can argue that whole mandate is unconstitutional. But when private companies are acting alone, that's a harder issue. I do think you might have a First Amendment challenge in certain circumstances, though. And the same should be applied to schools, right? I mean, if you've got an objection, a religious exemption, then your kid should be able to assert that same right. That should be your parental right.

Public school, I think for sure. Private school is in the same category as what we just talked about. The private company gets it gets harder. But I I would like to see a legal challenge on that. Maybe I will hire you to file such a legal challenge for me in our school. It's like you don't want to sue your school, but you want them to be reasonable. So give me a prediction on how this shakes out, you know, six months from now, how do you think the law will look? Oh, I don't know. That's hard to say. I think we're going to see again, a lot of people seeking religious exemptions because they see that

those are successful. So I suspect that in a lot of ways, these mandates, especially the federal one are just a threat. They're trying to get people to do things. And then I think when they don't comply, they can't fire everybody. And there are, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of people who aren't going to get this vaccine in order to keep their jobs. So I think there's going to be some unrest for a while. As we saw with Southwest Airlines, for instance, there was a boycott. I think there's going to be a lot of strife. And then I think at some point, there's going to have to be a recognition that, you know, you just can't force this on millions of Americans who don't want it. I'm not exactly sure how it's going to play out.

From what I understand, as of within like 24 hours ago, Biden hasn't actually issued that mandate. He said he was going to and he, you know, he rattled the saber, but he hasn't actually done it. Just saying he was going to do it, I think, gave all these employers an excuse to say, well, we have no choice and blame it on him. But it's worth following to see whether he actually does it and whether your employer is obeying his threat as opposed to his actual enforceable order. Janine, so good to meet you. Thank you so much for the good fight. Thank you. Thanks to all of our guests and our listeners. Tomorrow, Bridget Phetasy and Dave Rubin. Go ahead and check out youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly to watch the show and we'll talk tomorrow.