The New Battle Cry: Faith, Freedom, and Resistance to Overreach

By Jeff Childers | Commentary, Coffee & Covid

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! And it’s a C&C special edition. Things are moving faster than we dreamed possible. Yesterday, Florida made the historic announcement that it would end its liberal vaccine exemption program by ditching vaccine mandates altogether. You can’t believe the apocalyptic meltdown the left is having. Let’s dig in to this spectacular story.

In Monday’s C&C post, headlined “Pharmapocalypse,” I discussed President Trump’s historic Truth Social post questioning the covid shots — for the first time— and considered the potentially epic implications. Well, it only took two days. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Florida plans to become first state to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates.” Surgeon General Ladapo and Governor DeSantis didn’t just push back against jabs; they re-framed the entire debate in moral terms instead of scientific jargon. The freakout was stupendous.

CLIP: Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo announces plan to end ALL state vaccine mandates (1:52).

The biomedical authoritarians went crazier than sprayed roaches. You’d think that Florida planned to ban vaccines instead of mandates. Eric Fingle-Dingle tweeted, “Florida is a now a pro-child-death state.” Stanford immunologist Jake Scott said Florida is “destroying one of humanity’s greatest public health triumphs for no reason.” No reason! Urologist and “sex med” doctor Ashley Winter (155K followers) called the announcement tragic and whined that students should be forced to swear oaths to take vaccines.

The American Medical Association promptly begged Florida to reconsider:

And so on, and on, and on, ad nauseum.

Until yesterday, no other state government has been brave enough to tackle the left’s most sacred of sacraments, its pinnacle public health ‘achievement,’ and its most rewarding profit center: vaccine coercion. And the reason they gave (yes, Jake, there was a reason) was rhetorical genius, a skilled lawyer’s tool for making an unloseable argument.

Let me teach you that technique.

💉First, I’ll steelman the pro-vaccine argument. In its most persuasive form, it goes something like this:

NOTIONAL PHARMA SALESMAN: Vaccines are a simple and low-risk way to prevent some illnesses and deaths. But some people who want vaccines can’t take them for one reason or another. So, to protect those folks, the rest of us should be coerced into taking them. True, the vaccines will also cause some deaths and disability, but fewer than the disease will. It’s basic math.

That argument contains a sneaky trick. The trick is that it disguises something we call a premise, which is an unspoken assumption underpinning the argument. The hidden premise allows the real argument to be distracted and derailed onto favorable ground for the arguer.

They hid the premise, but I won’t. Boiled down to its essence, the hidden utilitarian premise in the pro-vaccine argument is: it is morally permissible to kill one person if you can save two.

Because they shroud that premise, the pro-vaccine folks get to shift the argument away from the thorny issue of morality and plunge headlong into a bottomless black hole of jargon-rich scientific debate. In other words, they want to trick us into arguing about the numbers— about whether vaccine injuries are actually rare.

They want us to say, “you guys are fudging the facts about how dangerous these jabs are, either alone or when taken together.” Don’t take the bait.

The prevalence of jab injuries is a fair and important debate. But it is an unwinnable argument. Resolving it involves deliberately hard-to-get data, vast amounts of propaganda, built-in biases, bewildering risk-reward ratios, impenetrable statistics, and fathomless expert opinions on all sides. Thanks to their obfuscation skills, that smoggy scientific argument could last another hundred years, during which time they’ll just roll out new medical technologies and claim to have “fixed” any problems that can finally be proven.

But yesterday, Dr. Ladapo didn’t blink. He didn’t take the bait. Instead, he correctly challenged their underlying premise.

💉 Let’s consider Dr. Ladapo’s actual argument. Here’s what he said:

JOSEPH LADAPO: “Every last vaccine is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery! Who am I, or anyone else, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and God. Pretty much every state has mandates, but it’s wrong.”

Dr. Ladapo ripped out the hidden utilitarian premise and held it up to the light. He leapt right over the scientific jargon and even the legality of mandates, and grabbed the issue of morality by the necktie. In essence, Ladapo argued it is ‘wrong’ —immoral— to coerce a human being into taking an injected substance that they don’t want.

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