Very few people are talking what might be the most important story so far this month: A three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just took a step toward restoring our most basic religious and medical freedoms. As Fox News (almost alone among the large media outlets) reported:

A California lawsuit suing the state over a COVID-era vaccine mandate received new life on Friday after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s dismissal …

Critically, the court recognized the plaintiffs “plausibly alleged” that the vaccine for COVID-19 “does not effectively ‘prevent the spread'” of the disease, rather it merely mitigates symptoms for those who contract it. Therefore, the court said, there is an argument to be made that there is no legal basis for forcing workers to take the vaccine against their will. [emphasis added]

Several California parents also sued last year over a state law that eliminated religious exemptions for school-mandated vaccines. The federal lawsuit brought by Advocates for Faith and Freedom, a nonprofit law firm dedicated to protecting religious liberty, challenged SB 277, argues that the legislation restricting religious exemptions violates the constitutional rights of parents to make medical decisions for their children.

Essentially, this lawsuit allows Los Angeles Unified School District employees to sue the nation’s second-largest school district, which told them in 2021 they had to take the vaccine or be fired; eventually, that policy led to more than 1,000 people losing their jobs.

This decision might open the floodgates for lawsuits in dozens of other states and government scenarios. In fact, only yesterday — four days after the Ninth released its decision — did the Los Angeles City Council end a similar mandate forcing all city employees to take the vaccine.

It also forces us to revisit the recent, hideous past we’d all like to repress. Go get a glass of water and force yourself to remember this piece of history, lest you be doomed to repeat it. Close your eyes, and you can hear all those gaslighting voices again, those whispers from the Accuser.

You Are a Vector of Contagion

You don’t love your neighbor. You are not a real Christian at all. You’re a menace to public health who doesn’t care if people die.

You’re a hair-splitting Pharisee who’d rather be seen at the temple offering tithes than keep his fellow citizens safe from a deadly disease.

Your worship services aren’t holy and your campaign rallies aren’t patriotic. They are superspreader events, and that makes you a murderer.

Herman Cain deserved to die, but George Floyd was a martyr.

Your scruples about the abortion roots of the COVID vaccine are empty, legalistic quibbles that mask a paranoid, conspiracy-theory mindset.

You want us to take horse dewormer and inject ourselves with bleach.

Shall I go on? Or have the flashbacks started so I don’t even need to … ?

They’ve Gotten Away with It So Far

We heard it from the government. From social media monopolies enforcing the will of the Chinese-dominated World Health Organization. We heard it from our pastors, as they shrugged off the duty to worship almighty God and keep holy the Sabbath day in favor of watching Netflix and cashing in their PPP loans from the feds. The Vatican solemnly taught it, and bribed or bamboozled evangelical pastors eagerly repeated it.

We heard it from our employers, our pharmacists, our neighbors, and those Karens we once called friends.

The public health dictatorship that Anthony Fauci and his allies foisted on the world after the virus he helped to fund escaped from a Chinese bioweapons lab was the most repressive regime Americans ever endured, except for those who once were slaves on actual plantations. It blared its demands for obedience from more media than the North Korean government ever dreamed of using.

And mostly it succeeded. The global dry run for totalitarianism that was the COVID panic was almost 100% successful, despite the self-sacrifice of courageous refuseniks like Dr. Robert Malone (censored and cancelled), my cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough (kicked out of his practice and stripped of board certifications), Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya (harassed on campus and vilified), Steve Bannon (now headed for prison), Naomi Wolf (unpersoned and called a “mass murderer” by old friends), and other courageous commentators such as Steve Deace, Eric Metaxas, and The Stream’s own Jason Jones.

They Got Away with It, So They’ll Try It Again

None of the villains have paid any kind of price so far — not Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx, who tricked President Donald Trump into complying. Not blue-state governors such as Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, and Gretchen Whitmer, who dumped virus patients into nursing homes, stoking the death rate to justify fraud-prone mail balloting. Not the panjandrums at the WHO, who led the censorship of our media and lied about the virus’s origins. Not the vaccine companies that rushed an untested, abortion-based vaccine onto the global market, knowing that their “customers” had no option to refuse it.

Our masters got the taste for locking us in our homes, closing our churches, scapegoating us as vectors of contagion, and forcing needles into our arms. And so they are bound to try it again. Just watch for the real-life Hitchcock horror feature that’s coming our way, The Birds’ Flu. Soon to open in a country near you.

It’s Not Even a Vaccine

And a major U.S. court has just admitted the central fact: the emperor had no clothes. There’s a strong case, the court admits, that the COVID jab was never a vaccine at all. It didn’t prevent transmission. So it was none of anyone’s business whether you took it or you didn’t. So forcing people to take it was unconstitutional and immoral, like forcing people to take birth control (as in China).

So when all those religious leaders, from Pope Francis in Rome to Robert Jeffress in Dallas, said you had to choke down your objections to the vaccine, even the fact that it depended on cutting the kidney out of a living female fetus, they were serving a lie from the father of lies, who was a murderer from the beginning.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. With Jason Jones, he also is coauthor of God, Guns, & the Government.