"I'm Not Going to Stop": A Conversation with Attorney Jeff Childers (Coffee & Covid)

On freedom of speech, accountability, and coming together to fight for what matters the most

Last week, I had the joy of interviewing Jeff Childers, whom we all know and love for his informative and unapologetically witty Substack, Coffee & Covid. 🦠💉

I feel a very deep appreciation of Jeff’s work. He has been providing education and, frankly, therapy to lots and lots of people throughout COVID times. (Covid Times would be a good name for an insane newspaper… any takers?). And of course, one question that I wanted to ask Jeff and then forgot was how he finds the time to write such thorough and hilarious articles every day while also successfully running a law firm. The mystery remains.

In our interview, we talked about many important things: courage, freedom of speech, Missouri v. Biden, philosophy, epistemology, “great social realignment,” accountability, and hope.

We talked about how 2020 came with an unexpected blessing of connecting to the people who had previously lived in different universes, politically speaking—how both “liberals” and “conservatives” lost old friends and then found new friends in surprising places.

Personally, I find it to be the biggest blessing of the ummm, COVID times. Under pressure, the otherwise uncouth “new normal” brought tremendous new aliveness to how we relate. I my own life, the friendships formed post-COVID are all vibrant, quality friendships, the real kind—a very pleasant thing!

Of course, when sincere friendships and collaborations form across political lines, it doesn’t mean that everyone now miraculously agrees with everyone else on every single point. If that occurred, l would find it more than a little suspicious and look for liars in the room. :) So no. But I find great existential beauty in how we can combine our complementary strengths and the knowledge we’ve accumulated inside our echo chambers—and how we can transcend and sometimes just blatantly overlook our differences and work together toward an important common goal.

In general, I find tremendous beauty and awe in the very fact that we are all different—with different strengths and different gifts—and that we are actually capable of walking our journeys that are unique to us—and allowing others to walk theirs. That is how we defeat Klaus Schwab in the spiritual realm—by not being control freaks like him, by defeating the tyrant in the mirror, by excelling at our strengths and being fierce in our defense of dignity—including the dignity of those with whom we disagree. I think that meaningful democracy is something like this. :)

But back to the interview.

History and important legal cases

Prior to 2020, Jeff focused on his very successful practice as a business lawyer in Florida. When Alachua County, the county in Florida where he lives, instituted a mask mandate, Jeff felt a spiritual pull to stand up to tyranny—and so he filed his first case against a government entity.

Being thrust into constitutional law, in June 2021, he won the first case in the U.S. against mask mandates, Green v. Alachua County, First District Court of Appeal.

Here’s what Jeff said in his interview with the Epoch Times:

I had never practiced constitutional or civil rights law in my entire career. I didn’t even know where to start.

But I fired off a demand letter to the county commission, hit the books, and within a week or two, I filed my first complaint against any government entity. I didn’t even know where to serve it. Who do you give it to, the mayor? I had to figure all that stuff out.

And as I do with any case with novel issues, I called my peers for advice. And every one of them said, “Jeff, why are you throwing your career away over this?” It was a real gut check. These are people I have profound respect for.

But I decided to push through and tackle it. And the result put me into the middle of the hurricane. We won. We won on appeal. We got the only appellate decision in the entire country, as far as I know, finding that mandatory masking was presumptively unconstitutional.

We started to get all kinds of cases, and very quickly, we challenged the vaccines. On my first vaccine case, we won, as far as I know, the first broad preliminary injunction against the government vaccine mandate in the country. We got death threats over that one.

The preliminary injunction “prevented the City of Gainesville from requiring a COVID-19 vaccine for employees or terminating employees that do not get the vaccine.’

Medical kidnapping

In his Epoch Times interview, Jeff also touched upon something that’s killing me, namely medical kidnapping. To his day, the very thought of it breaks my brain and insults every cell in my body. How is this is our reality? How is it possible that innocent people went to the hospital for help and become victims of sadistic imprisonment? How is it possible that they were kept in the hospital against their will, subjected to procedures and medications also against their will, and sometimes had to die as a result?

When COVID-19 hospitalizations were at their peak, many patients were entering the hospital for some completely different treatment, but were tested and admitted as COVID-19 patients and were put on a ventilator or given remdesivir against their wishes.

I can’t tell you how many calls we got from panicked relatives who wanted us to use the legal process to force hospitals to offer patients alternative treatments or let them go. And the hospitals wouldn’t do either one.

In one case, three corporate law firms were hired by a hospital to defend the hospital’s position and keep that patient in the hospital when all the relatives wanted to get him out. The hospital said he wasn’t sufficiently stable to move. The relatives said they were willing to sign whatever releases the hospital wanted. They wanted him off the ventilator and in a different facility. We had a facility that was willing to take him and a doctor who was willing to take over his care, but the hospital probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting us to keep him in the hospital.

That’s what I call a hospital kidnapping case. It doesn’t make any sense. If you’re the patient and you don’t want them to treat you anymore, why can’t you make that decision in a free country?

How can a human heart cope with such horror? I guess it’s by taking a stand. And even in the middle of this, Jeff remains an optimist, a point that he reiterated during our interview, too.

When I started, I had nothing to work with. It was all just people’s hypotheses and what Dr. Anthony Fauci said. Now, I can point to all these studies. So there will be accountability. I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take. We’re up against well-organized, well-resourced opponents who aren’t going to give in easily. They can slow it down, but they can’t hold it back forever. We will get accountability.

Missouri v. Biden

According to Jeff, Missouri v. Biden could be the most important civil rights lawsuit of our times. Here is a Coffee & Covid article on the subject. Quote:

The States of Missouri and Louisiana filed the case on May 5th, 2022. At the time, the states were represented by Solicitors General Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry, respectively.

Although the list of defendants subsequently expanded — greatly expanded — here’s the original much shorter list from the first complaint. All these folks were sued in their official capacities: Joe Biden, Jen Psaki, Vivek Murthy, Xavier Bacerra, the Department of HHS, Anthony Fauci, NIAID, CDC, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security, Jen Easterly, the CISA, and Nina Jankowicz.

For some reason, you’ve heard a LOT about the Twitter files, but not much about the Missouri files: the most damning evidence about how the federal government has been weaponized against Americans has fruited from the incredible efforts of the Missouri v. Biden team. The plaintiffs’ investigators have unearthed evidence of government-sponsored censorship starting well before the pandemic.

For example, we now know that since 2018 — before the pandemic — parts of the federal government regularly met with the social media platforms to control “disinformation.”

In Missouri v. Biden, we have the best possible chance for a fair trial. In various orders, mostly related to discovery, the federal judge on the case has shown he “gets it.” He understands the issues’ breadth and seriousness, and probably the case’s historic nature.

Without further ado, here is the interview again. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed this conversation in real time!!

PS.

Due to time limitations, we could only discuss so many things (and then I continued the dialogue in my head). So this final segment of the article is about my personal thoughts inspired by the interview.

When it comes to the topic of the cozy relationship between the traditional corporate dynasties, the military, the alphabets (once they came to be), the media, and Big Tech, I am as cynical as it gets.

• For instance, the book by Gerard Colby, “Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain,” highlights the charades entertained by various powerful citizens who liked to buy newspapers and play the public opinion like a violin, especially around election times. I think that back in the day, it was broadly understood that politics was mostly a playground of the ultra rich—and it’s only a hundred years ago or so that a semblance of “peasants’ democracy” was born in the West. Curiously, the rise of that democratic perception came around the same time as Edward Bernays developed his theory of influence (“public relations”) with a focus on how to make people “feel” like they had a choice (between different consumer brands) while letting the proverbial “elites” keep on doing their “elite” thing. A coincidence? Methinks not.

• Currently, the proverbial elites are dealing with a major inconvenience of dismantling their own PR of many decades that has developed a life of its own. They are puffing their cheeks like crazy as they are coming up with “new normal” storytelling for the neofeudal times they want to bring upon. It is very good for us that they have this inconvenience. I feel lucky and grateful to be in America where both the official “freedom” PR and the psychological habits of personal space are so strong. At the same time, I believe with passion that from day one, the Machine was designed not for people like me but for the “elites.” C'est la vie.

• The influence of the alphabets on the media is a topic that is well researched. I touched upon it very briefly here.

• The internet was an ARPA project—ARPA became DARPA—and even when it started offering a wide range of “civilian” functions, it remained a military project with a focus on surveillance and social control, as documented extensively by Yasha Levine, the author of “Surveillance Valley.”

• Then we have PRISM, a program that gave the NSA a backdoor into the servers of all major tech companies.

• Then we have much debated Elon Musk, whom I see as yet another human being on this Earth who happens to be an emotionally troubled billionaire launching dangerous satellites and torturing animals with his Neuralink. I don’t expect him to save me, I don’t care to bash him beyond an eye roll, I just don’t care. He is not in my social circles. If he were, I would treat him as yet another human being on this Earth with all the aforementioned traits. Personally, I am more shadow-banned on Twitter right now than I was a few months ago. I’ve been shadow banned for years but now I am really shadow-banned! What to make of it? No idea, but it’s a fact that I am shadow-banned like I am in a cartoon. And by the way, like James Corbett said here, even if he (Elon) really were the benevolent guy many understandably want him to be—if he started to actually undermine the Machine in a meaningful way—as opposed to undermining a phantom of the Machine, the current version of the Machine—he would be momentarily squashed like a bug. I think it’s true. The Machine is very good about keeping its politicians and its billionaires in check. And while the Machine doesn’t mind occasionally sacrificing its senior managers and allowing them to go down with a loud, media-friendly splash (and this is how the existential takes place), it is very keen on keeping the overarching status quo where the proverbial “elites” stay on top—and everybody else, down beneath. As far as Musk, I would be extremely happy if he abandoned his satellites and his Neuralink but I don’t think he will. So there we have it. Same old.

• Aaaand, if we are to believe the work of Sutton, a researcher who held strong anti-communist views—and could hardly be accused of any sympathy toward the USSR—the Bolshevik revolution itself was, in modern terms, a “color revolution” financed by select Western players with the purpose of establishing a captive market, fully controlled by a government they installed. For personal reasons, I have no kind words to say about the Bolsheviks. But now I have to face the fact that the suffering caused to my people was also paid for by the likes of the eugenicist Rockefellers? For mountains of money and vampire-like control? What a life-hating domino our disgusting “elites” have created in our lives! It’s time for us to wake up to our love and our dignity and disallow them from scaring us or turning us into slaves. They are not allowed to do that!!!

• Here we have it. Political theory is one thing, practice is another—and in practice, I think that the difference between “democracy” and “totalitarianism” is in the size of the cage. Mind you, this Soviet expat very strongly prefers a spacious cage to a tiny cage—but this Soviet expat also has a blood memory of a world that comes with no cage at all. However—and this is humbling—the cage, or Steven Newcomb’s System of Domination, will only go away when a lot more people wake up to the real reality and to their souls, in the truest sense—when we come alive. Which is another way to say, there’s work to do. :)

  Why Totalitarianism

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