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Climate Lockdowns Have Begun!

BY ATTORNEY BOBBIE ANNE COX | JANUARY 14, 2024

Well folks, I really hate to say this, but it’s another win for the conspiracy theorists. They can take off their tinfoil hats and take a deep bow. Yet another one of their outrageous “predictions” is coming true. For anyone keeping score, sadly the score card is rather one-sided. I think the count is something like Conspiracy Theorists = 1,000,000 wins vs. Logic & Normalcy = 0 wins. Boy how I wish we could win some on the “Logic & Normalcy” scale!

So, I acknowledge that I do have a rather dry sense of humor. I throw sarcasm in there a bunch. A couple of my friends tell me they cannot always tell when I’m being serious or if I’m joking. This makes me think that quite a few of you will be wondering, “Is she serious or is she joking with the title to her article?” To that I answer, I will tell you what I know, and then you decide. (You know how I love to promote critical thinking)…

Yesterday, our unfortunate Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, issued a TRAVEL BAN for an entire county. You read that correctly. No, not a travel advisory, but a full on travel ban ! Meaning, New Yorkers in Erie County are forbidden from going anywhere. What’s another name for that? Well, if you live in a rural or very suburban area (which most of New York State is), where driving on a road is the way you get from point A to point B, then I would say a synonym would be “lockdown.” And what was Dictator Hochul’s, I mean Governor Hochul’s reason for this lockdown of close to one million New Yorkers that live in Erie County? Wait for it. Ready? It was going to SNOW! For anyone who does not live in New York, or who has never been to Western New York in the winter, that area of our state gets a lot of snow. Often. And yet, the governor thinks (all of a sudden, out of nowhere) everyone living there is so ignorant, they must be confined to their homes until she says it’s safe for them to rejoin the world again. Either that, or she’s just testing you to see how far she can take her totalitarian desires. Or both.

For all the keyboard critics who love to jump in and twist my words, I’ll cut you off at the pass and say that I am not admonishing a governor’s desire to keep people safe in the wake of a storm. That’s not at all what I am saying. If a natural disaster is approaching, people should be warned, emergency services ready to roll, and help made readily available. Encourage people to stock up, stay home, and hunker down? For sure! Forbid people from leaving their homes? NO.

There is a big difference between caring about New Yorkers’ safety, and wanting to control people. Huge.

And in fact, Hochul was banning people from leaving their homes even if it was NOT snowing! Sound unbelievable? It sure does. But remember in my article last week, I cited to an ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who fittingly said, “The truth often evades being recognized due to its utter incredibility.” Put another way, when something is so outrageous, it is often cast aside as untrue. Well, here’s what comrade Kathy posted on her Twitter yesterday:

She went on to post several other times about the snow and her travel ban. I was actually encouraged to read that most of the comments she received were negative, logical rebuttals to her power grab. Here are a few…

Ok, so digging a bit into travel bans, you’ll recognize that there have been travel bans based on big storms in the past here in New York. However, those are issued by the local government (i.e. County Executive), after a state of emergency is declared. They are not issued by the Governor, nor are they issued without an emergency declaration.

By the way, the travel ban is still in effect for most of Erie County today. Anybody surprised?

Does anyone see the correlation here between government overreach, their quest for “centralized” power, and their fear mongering? It’s the same thing the Governor and her DOH have been doing with their hideous “quarantine camp” regulation that I have been fighting in court for nearly two years now! The name of that case is Borrello v. Hochul, and you can read the details and case history here. Connecting the dots to the analysis at hand, you will note that the quarantine camp regulation tried to take the power from (elected) judges (in keeping with our law) who have the authority to temporarily quarantine sick, dangerous people, and shift that power to unelected, statewide, DOH employees and appointees who have zero accountability to We the People. Under their quarantine camp reg, the Governor and her DOH would have centralized control over 19 million New Yorkers, to force you to lockdown in your home, or they could force you (with the use of police) to go to a quarantine center/ facility/ camp (pick your noun), without any proof you are sick, indefinitely, with no procedure by which you can regain your freedom, and with no declared state of emergency! The fear factor used to try to justify the authoritarian power grab here is the threat of death… If we don’t lock people up who are possibly exposed to a disease, then you might die. Swap out “possibly exposed to a disease” and put in its stead “unclean.” What does that make you think of?

My next question: do you see any similarities here to Hochul’s probably illegal climate lockdown? I say “probably illegal” because I couldn’t find the supposed legal authority that she’s relying upon to prohibit people from driving. If you know what she is relying upon, feel free to post it in the Substack comment section.

Before you draw your own final conclusion about all this, I will add one last thing for you to consider. In December, a month before Hochul issued this Erie County travel ban, the (Democrat) County Executive, Mark Poloncarz, set up an online portal so residents could check and see if they would be deemed “essential workers” and thus exempt from any futuristic travel bans. Oh, and he coordinated with their “partners” in the federal government to come up with the list! Sound familiar, folks?! Remember Governor Cuomo’s C19 lockdown (“Just 2 weeks to flaten the curve”), which lasted for months, and all the “essential workers” that he exempted? Here’s an article about Erie’s coincidentally-just-in-time-for-a-travel-ban portal, “Erie County’s new online portal will identify essential workers exempt from travel bans.”

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Court Strikes Down “Quarantine Camp” Regulation in New York State

By Bobbie Anne Flower Cox | American Thinker | July 19, 2022

We have had a tremendous victory here in New York: a Supreme Court Judge has struck down Governor Kathy Hochul’s forced quarantine regulation! On July 8, 2022, Judge Ronald Ploetz ruled that the “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” regulation is unconstitutional and “violative of New York State law as promulgated and enacted, and therefore null, void and unenforceable as a matter of law.”

Shockingly, New York’s Governor, Kathy Hochul, and Attorney General, Letitia James, plan to appeal the decision. Yes, that’s right… the Governor and AG, both unabashedly support quarantine camps! One would think that this fact, in and of itself, would be disturbing enough but add to it the fact that they’re both running for election this November, and you can see just how unconstitutionally brazen and wholly out-of-touch with New Yorkers each of these “leaders” is.

For anyone who missed my prior article on this horrific forced quarantine regime,  the regulation truly shocks the conscience. Without exaggeration, it’s something out of a dystopian horror movie. It gives the unelected bureaucrats in the Department of Health the power to pick and choose who they want to “detain,” if they believe it’s even possible you might have a communicable disease. They don’t have to prove you’re actually sick.

And when I say “detain,” I mean lock you in your home or force you from your home into a facility. The government chooses which “detention center” and the length of your stay there is purely at the government’s discretion. That’s right: No time limit so it could be for days, months, or years…. Furthermore, there is no age restriction so that the government could force you, your child, your grandchild, or your elderly parent into detention.

This illegal quarantine regulation allowed for endless possibilities of abuse because there were no due process protections built in to safeguard against government abuse. Once targeted by the DOH, you would have no recourse whatsoever: No chance to prove that you aren’t actually infected with a disease. No chance to confront your jailers, see their supposed evidence against you or challenge their quarantine order in a court of law before getting locked up. Judge Ploetz stated in his decision that the regulation “merely gives ‘lip service’ to Constitutional due process.”

It gets worse. In the true fashion of a dictatorship, the government could tell you what you could and couldn’t do while in quarantine. For example, bureaucrats and politicians could decide to deprive you of your cell phone or internet access, thereby totally cutting off your communications with the outside world. They might also decide to restrict your food intake or force you to take certain medicines or “treatments” that the government deems appropriate. They could even choose to discriminate against those with certain views or beliefs, creating political prisoners, all in the name of supposed “health and safety”.

Judge Ploetz noted in his decision that, “[i]nvoluntary detention is a severe deprivation of individual liberty, far more egregious than other health safety measures, such as requiring mask wearing at certain venues. Involuntary quarantine may have far-reaching consequences such as loss of income (or employment) and isolation from family.”

I fully concur and so, when I first read this regulation last year, I knew I had to strike it down. It was clear to me that this “regulation” violated the separation of powers that is so clearly laid out in our Constitution. It violated existing New York State laws that have been on the books for decades. It violated due process protections.

I knew that, if I didn’t strike it down, then “quarantine facilities” could become a new norm in New York State. And if that happened, I knew it would spread like a cancer to other states across the nation. At that point, there’d be no place left to run and hide. This was not a fight only for New Yorkers; it was a fight for all Americans.

An inspirational note: When I started this lawsuit, I had no support whatsoever. Because I’ve been handling the case pro bono, nobody else wanted to work with me for free and it was near impossible to find anyone who shared my vision and my strategy for success. You see, this was the very first lawsuit of its kind in the entire nation and, very possibly, in the world. So, it took a tremendous amount of my time, energy, and resources to execute.

The Governor and her co-defendants are represented by New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James. She has hundreds of lawyers working for her, all armed with unlimited resources. After all, it’s our tax dollars they use to pay all those attorneys. It’s truly a David v. Goliath story, especially because, while I once worked in a large, prominent, international Manhattan law firm, for the past 20+ years, I’ve had my own small law office in the suburbs of NYC. Since I’m handling this case pro bono, I don’t have the Attorney General’s team of attorneys or her unlimited resources.

Eventually, I found a few fabulous allies. Namely, my petitioners (Senator George Borrello, Assemblymen Chris Tague, and Mike Lawler) and, eventually, Assemblyman Andrew Goodell, Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay, and Assemblyman Joseph Giglio who filed an Amicus Brief to support my case. Plus, attorney Tom Marcelle, who is now running for New York State Supreme Court judge.

After months of battling against the AG, last week we won the case! I’ve successfully struck down a severely unconstitutional regulation that the Governor and her Department of Health brazenly issued without any care whatsoever for the rights of the people. Now, I hope that other attorneys in states across the nation can use my lawsuit as a roadmap to help them strike down unconstitutional regulations in their states. Even international attorneys are contacting me to learn the details about how I structured and won this case. I hope it will aid them, too.

During one of my recent interviews, the host posted a picture of President Kennedy with a quote, “One person can make a difference, and everyone should try.” She said that quote reminds her of me. Well, I hope that quote and this story inspire you to try!

Senator Borrello and Assemblymen Tague and Lawler are calling on the Governor to back off an appeal and to let this decision stand. If you’re a New Yorker, you can help with this effort. Call, email, or write to Governor Hochul (518- 474-8390 Twitter: @GovKathyHochul) and the Attorney General (800-771-7755 Twitter: @TishJames) to tell them that the voters do not want an appeal filed; that an appeal would be going against the will of the people; and that it would be a tremendous waste of taxpayer money.

To find out more about our monumental lawsuit, sign up for weekly updates, or support the lawsuit, go to www.UnitingNYS.com/lawsuit. You can find me on Substack at: https://attorneycox.substack.com/

July 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , , , | Leave a comment