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As the title of this video may not be very clear, I am thanking Justice Gorsuch of the United States Supreme Court for what I'm going to get into here in a moment, basically his statement in the case of Arizona versus Alejandro Mayorkas. This is a Supreme Court of the United States opinion. So basically what happened here there was a case involving COVID restrictions etc. that came before the Supreme Court. Now as noted, there is a dissent here where Justice Jackson basically said that that Justice dissented because they felt it was rendered moot, that the whole thing was rendered moot. Okay, but then Gorsuch stepped in here and I came upon this, we'll go ahead and throw this on screen; this came from ZeroHedge but it ultimately was from The Brownstone Institute. The article is titled: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch Shreds Lockdown Authoritarianism. That is a really good article and those who are kind of into this topic are well advised to go read it because I didn't realize that one of the key turning points on this happened unfortunately with the lamentable death of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the appointment of Justice Barrett to the Supreme Court which changed the makeup, definitely changed the makeup of the Court but sort of changed the voting patterns of the Court and resulted in the prior, up to that point going through the COVID situation, four of the what are sometimes referred to the liberal leaning Justices, but I am just going to say four of the Justices were voting in favour of these COVID restrictions and then Chief Justice Roberts was going along with it even though at least ostensibly everybody says he is a so-called conservative Justice whatever, he was going along with those. Then with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the appointment of Justice Barrett, things started going the other way and it kind of allowed Gorsuch to come to the foreground on these issues. Again, it's unfortunate that we lost a Supreme Court Justice but for American liberty I think overall this is a pretty good thing in the sense that it allowed opinions to be written such as this one. 

This is actually a statement, it is an interesting thing. Again it basically vacated, they just said 'no we are not doing this' but then Justice Gorsuch wrote a very long statement on this and a lot of it bears worth repeating; quite honestly the whole thing bears reading for Americans and really anyone around the world because I think these are cogent arguments and I am always a fan of cogent arguments in favour of liberty. Quoting directly:

"Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued Emergency Decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. 

They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. 

They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all State social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedom in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent. 

Federal Executive officials entered the act too. Not just with emergency Immigration decrees. They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.

They threatened to fire non-compliant employees, and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement. Along the way, it seems Federal Officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.

While executive officials issued new Emergency Decrees at a furious pace, state legislators in Congress--the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws--too often fell silent. Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few -- but hardly all -- of the intrusions upon them. In some cases, like this one, courts even allow themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking-by-litigation.

Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action -- almost any action -- as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat." (Just an aside here, that at the beginning of all this was what bugged me the most was sort of an old adage when you read about things like strategy and philosophy is 'when a clear solution fails to present itself, sometimes the best option is to do nothing'. So you know when they say, 'sometimes when a clear option fails present itself, sometimes the best option is to do nothing', and I think there could have been an argument for that or at least taking a minute to fully assess the situation.) Quoting further: "A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties -- the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes.

We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear."

There is way more in there. It honestly is one of the greatest things I have read to come out of a Government body maybe in the whole of my lifetime because it is so clearly articulates and it seems as though everybody kind of wants to put it behind them and I get it, I want to put it behind me too but at the end of the day this was a major thing that happened to the world and it happened again like 'not by bayonet but by nudge' kind of as Justice Gorsuch points out and it had tremendous ramifications. I mean Thailand's economy just as a for example, and again US Supreme Court has no jurisdiction or anything over here, but these notions themselves, they transcend nationality, they transcend culture. I mean these are just notions of just general personal liberty. Again I haven't talked about it as much as I would otherwise like but there is a notion of negative freedom and negative freedom is most of the time just the freedom to be left alone; the freedom to be left to one's own devices; to not be told you have to wear something; to not be told you have to stand somewhere; to not be told you can't go to this place unless you do this thing. That's negative freedom and negative freedom was quite honestly attacked if you will, by folks who thought they knew best. In the beginning I took the presumption that people were trying to act in good faith. I still believe by the way everybody in Thailand was trying to act in good faith and I think a lot of this came about if you look at the timing and everything and how this all went down, a lot of this came about by quite honestly foreign pressure. It was things like the WHO telling Thailand, “this is how you need to do it” and I think folks in Thailand said well these are the experts, that's probably right. Again, most of America I think thought the same thing but as Justice Gorsuch pointed out, this wasn't good, this was the antithesis of good and our liberties are important and hopefully in the future we will guard against being nudged over the edge like this, like we were these past 3 years.