Truth or Covid? (or, “why we know everything they’re telling us is a lie”)

Michael Lesher

Remember the good old days at the beginning of the COVID coup – before the new dogmas started to tangle themselves into self-contradictory knots?

Back then, if you wanted to know what to think, the Infallible Ones always had simple answers.

What was the enemy? A virus called SARS-CoV-2. Where did it come from? Chinese bats and pangolins. When would it end? After a few weeks of “lockdown” and the introduction of “vaccines.”

How did you protect yourself from it in the meantime?

By isolating yourself at home, wearing a muzzle, obsessively washing your hands, leaving your shoes outside the door, avoiding other human beings, scrubbing the walls and counters – above all, by obeying whatever orders the Infallible Ones gave you.

And if you didn’t obey? You would die.

But “oh, what a tangled web we weave,” as the poet said, “when first we practice to deceive.”

The Infallible Ones’ teachings were soon mired in baffling inconsistencies. A “few weeks” of lockdown gave way to months, which in turn gave way to threats of recurring confinements whenever the authorities deemed it expedient.

Summertime assurances of the “success” of the national incarceration – which had upended the health care system, educationally crippled a generation of children, and tossed away the livelihoods of millions of innocent people, though the Infallible Ones seldom mentioned any of that – were succeeded by “expert” scoldings to the effect that we Americans had been too selfish to be confined at all.

When randomized clinical trials proved that face masks were useless, the Infallible Ones told us to wear two masks instead of one.

When the Infallible Ones abandoned the canard of “asymptomatic transmission” – after it had fulfilled its function of stoking public hysteria – they adopted the equally silly canard that “the unvaccinated” were unique breeding grounds for viral mutations.

Even the virus itself, which the Infallible Ones had originally pronounced so unique, became the very opposite of unique as the Infallible Ones translated it into an ever-enlarging ensemble of similar viral “strains” in which new ones appeared just often enough to offset the gains supposedly made by the “vaccines.”

And meanwhile – most important of all – what was supposed to be a temporary suspension of constitutional government became a “new normal”; the law, or what had always been the law, turned out to be as obsolete as the idea of dealing with an infectious disease by giving medical treatment to the genuinely sick.

In the world of the “new normal,” anyone who mentioned “civil rights” was hustled off social media and into First Amendment limbo. Democracy was mocked as a reactionary’s pipe dream – when it was mentioned at all.

That’s the record, in brief, of the past two years. And if we have learned anything from this cavalcade of deceit, it is, or should be, that the COVID coup is fundamentally not about medicine or science. It is not about inflated “case” rates or jiggered statistics or fake news or the pseudo-studies circulated by propaganda outfits like the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Yes, all those things have figured in the derangement of constitutional democracy that has characterized the COVID coup. But at bottom it’s not about any of them.

The real nature of the campaign is at once simpler and far more dangerous. What we’re experiencing is an attack on the very foundation of ordered liberty, an assault that is already in the process of submerging democracies beneath what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called a “permanent ‘state of exception.’”

To put it bluntly: our ruling classes, in one country after another, have effectively switched off their nations’ constitutions and the whole set of civil liberties that are supposed to accompany them – not by formally abolishing them, mind you, but by adopting the extra-legal mechanisms of a “state of emergency” in place of normal constitutional procedures, with the result that the ordinary rules of democracy and the rights of individuals have, for most practical purposes, been indefinitely suspended.

That’s why the COVID coup began, in my own country, with declarations of an “emergency” in four-fifths of the states – and why, with very rare exceptions, those “states of emergency” remain in effect to this day, nearly two years later.

Again, this cannot be explained away as a response to a respiratory virus. When an “emergency” involves suspending constitutional government for two years, it should be obvious that the “emergency” has ceased to be a real emergency (if it ever was one) and has become an extralegal norm – and this is even more emphatically true when virtually no one in the political opposition, the civil rights bar or the mainstream media so much as mentions this fundamental fact.

My point is that those of us who recognize what is happening are going to have to shift our tactics. We can no longer attack COVID19 propaganda in piecemeal fashion, challenging one medical falsehood at a time. That approach, I’m afraid, is likely to be self-defeating.

As long as we focus on disproving each particular COVID “narrative,” the Infallible Ones can continue to manage the debate in mass media as a conflict between the interpretations of “experts” and those of “conspiracy theorists.”

And that allows them to skirt the real issue. COVID fascism is not a comedy of scientific errors. For all intents and purposes, it is a coup d’état. And it must resisted accordingly.

Still, if we aren’t going to debunk every lie swirling through mass media or dished out by the “experts,” how can we be sure that we stand on solid factual ground as we resist the coup unfolding all around us – particularly if, as I’m arguing, we must begin by asserting that our struggle is about regaining our freedoms, not about correcting a medical policy?

Actually, there are many reasons we can be sure. And now, as we approach the third year of the coup, I want to offer a short list of them.

1. The COVID coup has consistently relied on unconstitutional methods.

The first and most unmistakable clue about the real nature of the coup is its aggressive destruction of constitutional government.

Right from the start, it involved suspensions of the legislatures; from there it moved quickly to arbitrary rule by executive fiat (mask “mandates” followed by “vaccine passports”), and then indulged head-on in violations of constitutional rights, as in the imposition of mass “quarantines” without a court order – an illegal act even under “emergency” dispensation.

I have argued this in print for over a year and a half, so I won’t belabor the point now except to stress the complicity of mass media in the unprecedented assault on our basic rights. The most important lie, of course, has been one of omission: the press simply never mentions the absence of any constitutional basis for the repeated attacks on freedom.

But I would like to call attention to a small but very revealing lie that crops up every time the press reports a new COVID19-related “order.”

Last month’s story about sweeping new muzzling requirements in California was a case in point. “California is ordering a statewide mask mandate for indoor public spaces,” blared the Los Angeles Times. But “California” does not and cannot issue a “mandate.”

Promulgations of legal requirements belong to the appropriate organs of government – and that means that an honest report would have necessarily told readers how the mandate in question came to be. What body passed the law? Who signed it? Which agency issued the regulation, if it was a regulation, and what was the statutory authority for it to do so?

In my opinion, it was no accident that the Times never informed its readers that the new California “mandate” was a unilateral edict signed by Tomas Aragon, the head of California’s Department of Public Health – an edict that did not even attempt to identify any authority for such an action in California’s statutes or regulatory code.

I repeat: in a constitutional government, health regulations are always grounded in such authority; “mandates” that ignore this are violations of law at best, dictatorial usurpations at worst. And the propagandists in the media, though they know this, obviously do not want you to know it.

The same story – political crime furthered by media complicity – emerges just as clearly from New York’s latest assault on the Nuremberg Code. The fiat recently issued by the state’s dictator – officially, Governor Kathy Hochul – claims to acquire authority for a statewide “vaccine mandate” from New York’s Public Health Law, section 225.

But that statutory section does not address vaccination policy at all – and since the COVID19 “vaccines” do not even prevent person-to-person transmission, there is no legal way the section’s general language about “the preservation and improvement of public health” can be construed to give the state’s governor the power to force 5-year-old children to be injected with experimental drugs, as Ms. Hochul has ordered.

In short, the “governor” – the word really must be put in quotation marks at this point – is acting outside her legal powers. And if we had a political opposition and a functioning court system worthy of the name, she might be facing impeachment instead of routine accolades from the tame “liberal” press, which calls this democracy-wrecking child poisoner “a moderate Democrat.”

Consider, by contrast, the intense debate over the 1985 decision of New York State’s public health council to rewrite its regulations so as to force the closing of gay bathhouses. That decision – taken at the height of the AIDS outbreak – was denounced by liberals at the time and is sharply criticized by students of political history to this day.

Imagine the reaction if New York’s governor had simply written a unilateral order closing all gay bathhouses in the state, thumbing his nose at New York’s legislature and the whole existing regulatory system on the grounds that, in his view, New York faced an “emergency” that justified the suspension of democracy!

But that is exactly what has happened in states across the country – New York and my own state of New Jersey among them – for nearly two years: state executives have issued fiats suspending legal processes on the grounds of a hazily-defined “emergency,” and have followed them up with a series of unilateral decrees that drastically altered the lives of their citizenry – in direct defiance of their states’ constitutions.

You cannot support that and support constitutional democracy at the same time. The propagandists may not like to admit it, but when they sing the praises of mask “mandates,” they are celebrating dictatorship.

And the democracy-busters are everywhere. In New York City, outgoing Mayor Bill DeBlasio slapped a “vaccine mandate” on all municipal employees, topping off the outrage by extending the same requirement to 184,000 private business and organizations.

The mayor’s constitutional authority to order this assault on bodily integrity was so obviously shaky that a local judge promptly stayed his order. But that didn’t bother DeBlasio, who said, “I hope [this measure] will be emulated all over the country because it’s time to get even tougher to end the COVID era.” Got it? When you’re being “tough,” who cares about the law?

2. The one thing no one in the mainstream wants to mention is the biggest thing of all: that our civil liberties are evaporating.

DeBlasio and Hochul are both Democrats, and it’s tempting to focus on the hypocrisy at the leftward end of the mainstream political spectrum. But it’s not just the “liberals” who have betrayed the Bill of Rights.

We’re constantly told that the U.S. Supreme Court is dominated by “conservatives,” but when New York’s rampaging governor decreed that healthcare workers must submit to COVID19 vaccination – even if they have religious objections to the experimental drugs (she claimed personal knowledge that God doesn’t support exemptions for these particular drugs) – only three justices out of nine were prepared to offer any relief.

I don’t always agree with Neil Gorsuch, but the ominous conclusion of his dissenting opinion in that case (Dr. A. v. Hochul) deserves to be committed to memory:

How many, indeed?

Business elites are pursuing the COVID agenda as viciously as the politicians, if not more so. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has stated publicly that he will fire every employee in New York who doesn’t submit to the “vaccine” experiment, even those who attempt to work from home.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the erstwhile champions of “free enterprise” actually stood up for freedom when it’s being robbed from the people who work for them? But I don’t see any criticism of Dimon from the business press, which has fallen as silent as the civil-rights crowd.

And please don’t let anyone tell you that these “vaccines” aren’t experimental, or that pressuring people into taking them doesn’t violate the Nuremberg Code’s prohibition against human medical experimentation without informed consent. The case for applying the terms of the Code is simply overwhelming.

As we all know, the drugs in question were rushed through privately-administered trials that did not include the animal testing protocols normally required by the Food and Drug Administration.

The data from those trials – the only ones ever conducted – remain sealed from public view, and we already know from Brook Jackson about serious irregularities in the limited tests performed by the manufacturers while they were conveniently insulated from public view.

That means that these drugs remain untested, and their massive use is the first real experimental trial they have ever had.

In fact, the manufacturers insisted on – and received – blanket legal immunity before they would issue their drugs to the public. This unprecedented action – one that protected the drug makers rather than the public – resulted directly from the manufacturers’ awareness that, given the lack of prior testing, no one could predict the results of the drugs until they had actually been tried out on large numbers of people.

You cannot have it both ways. If you insist that you haven’t safety-tested your products before issuing them – and that’s what Pfizer, Moderna and J&J all did insist when they developed the drugs in 2020 – you can’t deny that the people you inject with them over the following year are participating in an experiment.

Besides, the propagandists themselves are giving away the game: they openly refer to the massive vaccination program now underway as “proof” that the drugs are safe. But this means that they are relying on the results of actual use as a substitute for a clinical trial.

“The vaccine does work,” Dr. Mark Sawyer, who served on the FDA advisory committee that approved the drugs in 2020, told CNBC. “[T]hat’s been clearly shown by both death rates and hospitalization rates when comparing vaccinated people to unvaccinated people.”

Mind you, the propagandists really have no choice about saying this; the United States, like other countries, is actively vaccinating whole groups of people – pregnant women and young children – who were completely excluded from the manufacturers’ trials. But to cite that experience as evidence of the drugs’ safety means – again – that people now getting their jabs are actually being herded into an enormous human medical experiment.

And of course they’re not being told the truth about this.

Human medical experimentation without informed consent is not just another legal lapse. It is a crime against humanity. Think of that when read the next op-ed singing the praises of the “vaccination” campaign.

3. The “facts” fed to the public are manifestly worthless.

Yes, I know: I began this essay with the statement that we can’t fight COVID fascism one lie at a time. But even a quick sampling is enough to confirm – for anyone who still needs proof – that we’re all eye-deep in propaganda so deceitful that none of it can be taken seriously.

Take the latest fear porn to emerge from New York, always a reliable bellwether for gathering trends in COVID19 propaganda.

The day after Christmas, a deafening chorus of mass media belted out a claim of the New York State Health Department that “the number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 is rising” in New York, adding some gloating if irrelevant details about the police-state measures to be imposed on anyone reckless enough to attempt the traditional New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square.

(For the record, the official harassment included: mandatory muzzles outside as well as inside; required proof of “vaccination” plus personal ID for everyone over 5 years old; a police blockade around the area which banned people from entering until after 3:00 p.m.; and a sharp limit on total crowd size even afterwards. Must have been a delightful party.)

The ghouls responsible for this “alert” clearly wanted us to believe that New York’s children are keeling over in droves from the “deadly virus,” and that if we don’t immediately get every single kid injected with experimental drugs they’re all going to die.

But what does the evidence actually show? Well – nothing.

First, although the headlines made it sound as though all “children hospitalized with COVID-19” were hospitalized because of COVID19, the fine print in the database linked from the articles told a different tale.

In fact, the figures reflected the “number of patients hospitalized, and number of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) among patients with lab-confirmed COVID-19 disease”: in other words, they included all hospitalizations, due to any cause, for patients who had merely generated one positive test result for COVID19 during the relevant period.

Since those tests usually consist of a PCR assay at an unspecified amplification cycle threshold, and since such “tests” are notoriously unreliable, the number of “positive” test results in children hospitalized for causes that included, for all we know, broken arms, strep throat, measles, concussions, etc., tells us virtually nothing about how COVID19 has been affecting New York’s children.

Second, there’s the question of absolute as opposed to relative numbers. How many actual pediatric hospitalizations had occurred in New York when the Health Department sounded its alarm? The ghouls never told us that – and once again, the fine print contradicted their arm-waving headlines.

The Health Department’s press release noted parenthetically that a total of 30 children between 12 and 17 had yielded a positive COVID19 test result in New York hospitals during the preceding week, and that “roughly half” of the total number involved children under 5.

True, that left open the question of how many were between 5 and 11, but I think it’s safe to assume that if children between those ages had been admitted to hospitals in larger numbers than their older contemporaries, the Health Department would have said so.

So let’s say, for argument’s sake, that we’re talking about 60 hospital admissions for children over 5, yielding a week-long total of about 120. Given that there are nearly 4.2 million children in the state of New York, 120 positive tests for COVID19 (via dubious methods) in New York hospitals over a seven-day period hardly seems cause for panic.

And this was just one of a whole string of similar fabrications.

The CDC has been claiming for months that “unvaccinated people who had previously recovered from a coronavirus infection” are “five times as likely to get Covid as people who had received both shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.”

Because this result directly contradicted a much-publicized study from Israel, I took the trouble to review the actual data. And it turned out that the numbers not only don’t support the CDC’s claim; they demonstrate the exact opposite of what the “experts” claim they do.

Setting to one side the methods used to determine who had “previously recovered” from a COVID19 infection, and to ensure that “vaccinated” subjects had not also previously recovered from such an infection (both of which are questionable), the paper’s authors recorded 6,328 hospitalizations “among fully vaccinated and previously uninfected patients,” while among unvaccinated patients who had previously recovered, the total number of hospitalizations was only 1,020.

Even the small proportions of those patients who subsequently tested “positive” for COVID19 were heavily weighted in favor of the vaccinated: 324 as opposed to 89. Now, take a moment to consider how devastating those numbers are for the claim made by the CDC: namely, that vaccination alone gives you far more protection from COVID19 than natural immunity.

The study’s own data prove this to be a lie.

In fact, if the numbers are taken seriously, they suggest that you are more than six times as likely to be hospitalized after being “vaccinated” than after recovering from a COVID infection – and that you are more than three times as likely to be hospitalized with COVID19. When was the last time you heard that explained in mainstream media?

So don’t waste your time on the latest COVID19 “study” touted in the New York Times to bludgeon more gullible citizens into compliance. Just assume you’re being lied to, and you’ll be right often enough that the exceptions won’t matter.

4. The “experts” cannot be taken seriously.

And then there are the “experts.” How many times do these mouthpieces of the Infallible Ones have to contradict themselves before we stop listening to them?

At first they told us (correctly) that face masks offer no real obstacle to the spread of a respiratory virus. Then, reversing themselves without explanation, they insisted that wearing a mask – any sort of mask – provided an essential layer of protection. (Right on cue, the media set up a howl about “maskless” people being sighted at Trump rallies – or similarly disreputable places – as if they had been caught cavorting down Main Street without any clothes on.)

Now the “experts” have outdone themselves by telling us that if we want real protection, we’ve got to “upgrade” to N95 or KN95 respirator masks. Doesn’t that mean that they’ve been lying to us for over a year and a half when they assured us that wearing a cloth or paper mask was the submissive citizen’s way of “doing his part”? Of course it does, but don’t expect the mainstream press to raise that uncomfortable question.

And what about the “vaccines”? When those experimental drugs were first released, I was one of many critical writers who observed that the two-shot regime demanded by the authorities was only the beginning: that soon we’d be ordered to have a third shot, then a fourth, and that eventually we’d be told that “real” vaccination was an unending process, like the “new normal” itself. Nonsense, scoffed the Infallible Ones.

But now Anthony Fauci himself is saying that the very definition of “fully vaccinated” is up for grabs, so that “it’s going to be a matter of when, not if,” that definition changes. Take a moment to wrap your mind around the enormity of this idea.

In the future, your medical status won’t be based on objective facts but on the arbitrary pronouncements of the powers that be.

No matter which shots you’ve had, or how many, or how recently, or whether you’re sick, or likely to become sick, or what sort of antibodies you’ve got, or what medical treatments you have or haven’t undergone in the past, if Dr. Fauci and his fellow ghouls decide to rewrite the definition of “vaccinated” you may find yourself suddenly among that demonized underclass that, according to the editorialists of the New York Times, are responsible for all the world’s troubles.

And when that happens, there won’t be anything you can do about it except to obey the latest orders of the Infallible Ones. Not even your “vaccine pass” will help you.

So it’s not even a matter of the experts constantly contradicting themselves, feeding us one false story after another – though of course they’ve done that. Now they’ve taken Newspeak to an altogether different level, arrogating to themselves the power to change the meanings of actual medical terms.

In the future there won’t be any contradictions from the experts because, whenever they find it convenient, the experts will simply redefine a word or two in order to render their past pronouncements consistent with their current ones.

And who are these “experts”? Most media reports about COVID19 statistics cite the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, directly or indirectly, as their key source of information. But they rarely mention that Johns Hopkins’ coronavirus information arm is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, both of which have significant ties to the pharmaceuticals industry – a fact that should have disqualified it long ago as a source of “objective” data.

As for the Center for Health Security itself, I have pointed out in a previous article its close links with the American Enterprise Institute, the folks who led the way to the Iraq invasion of 2003.

The lies behind that invasion unraveled pretty quickly. But that was because the propagandists at AEI were careless enough to make claims – mostly about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” – that could be publicly verified.

Their partners at Johns Hopkins have been more discreet: when they claimed there would be “no summertime lull” in 2020, insisting that COVID19 deaths were not seasonal and that lockdowns would continue, off and on, for “several years,” those lies could be explained away afterward as over-pessimistic projections – projections that might still come true, for all we know, if everyone doesn’t obey Big Brother.

(By the way, I’m not the only one to notice the disturbing history of the blandly-named Center for Health Security. The German lawyer Paul Schreyer has detailed its long-term involvement in bioterror “simulations” at which subjects like the imposition of martial law and other police-state tactics have often been discussed by the high-level participants.)

So these high-profile “experts” are nothing but the lying professional mouthpieces of a lying political class.

Do you really need to know more about them?

5. The COVID coup involves a radical redefinition of human value.

Finally, we must realize that the perversions of the past two years have not only been political and legal. The Infallible Ones have been tampering with basic terms of humanity and morality – and that should have all of us up in arms.

Let’s start with the obvious. A policy that deliberately discourages doctors from treating sick patients – that, in fact, causes the deaths of countless people who could otherwise have been saved – is not a medical policy at all; it is a crime.

Yet this was exactly the policy pursued by Fauci, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, which for nearly two years did their level best to prevent the use of empirically-proven therapies for COVID19.

As a result, according to Dr Scott Atlas (whose dissenting voice on Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force was generally buried under noisy media slanders), “urgently needed clinical trials by the NIH and FDA were never performed,” while “[i]n another unprecedented move, doctors were blocked from prescribing [hydroxychloroquine], even though prescribing any other approved drug for an off-label use was routine.”

And anyone who tried to tell the truth on social media about drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin was likely to run head-on into social media censorship.

But the evil runs even deeper than that. Today we are being sold a premise never before embraced by a civilized society: the notion that every human being is a public menace by definition, that people are sick until proven healthy and dangerous until proven otherwise, that the mere act of breathing – that is, of living – requires some sort of moral and political justification. And the terms of that justification can only be determined by the powers that be; you and I are not given a say in what relieves us of the status of a public danger.

Just consider how radically incompatible such an idea is with any sort of open or democratic society. If people are defined as public menaces, how can they simultaneously constitute the ultimate public authority – a status that is the defining characteristic of a democracy? How can enemies of the people be “the people”?

If a human being’s right to breathe (unless he’s been injected with experimental drugs, wears a muzzle and doesn’t write anything objectionable on social media) may be arbitrarily curtailed, what rights can a human being possibly be said to possess? It hardly needs to be said that the traditional notion of “citizenship” is no longer intelligible in such a context.

Meanwhile, we must be honest with ourselves. No political party is going to save us from the COVID coup. In the U.S., with rare exceptions, Republicans are sniping at their rivals about “cultural” issues and ignoring the most massive attack on freedom in modern American history. And even when the incumbent Democrats do badly at the polls, they stubbornly refuse to get the point.

A “half-dozen Democratic governors” recently told Politico what they thought the trouble was: “The party,” they said, “needs to find a message that acknowledges voters’ exasperation with the virus and its economic and societal impacts.”

Such comments tell us all we need to know about these professional frauds, who still hope we’ll believe that “the virus” closed our businesses, stole our performing arts, wrecked our health care, tortured our kids and turned loose a batch of untested drugs on our immune systems, with more mandatory shots on the way even as the death toll of this ghastly experiment rises and rises.

But of course “the virus” didn’t do any of that. The bosses did. And if we don’t stop them, they’ll go right on doing it.

And if we needed any more evidence of just how much is at stake, we got it this month from a major life insurance company in Indiana, which announced as the new year began that “the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people” between 18 and 64 years old.

This “unheard of” increase cannot be attributed to COVID19; the insurance executives themselves say that death rates have sharply declined for that illness.

What then? Might the soaring death rates have something to do with the “vaccines” that have been foisted on hundreds of millions of Americans? Or the health consequences of police-state tactics that have ravaged our society? It’s high time we demanded answers to those questions.

With what methods? Addressing fellow academics on December 8, Giorgio Agamben questioned whether it made sense any longer “to fight or act in the name of principles and concepts such as democracy, the constitution, law” and so forth; after all –

“New” in this context does not have to mean unprecedented. We are accustomed to limiting ourselves to a secular political vocabulary. But when the essence of humanity is under assault, we need to think of other and more basic sorts of expression.

What we’re engaged in is a spiritual struggle. It’s a battle for the survival of the human soul, and in that battle our main weapons are likely to be spiritual ones: courage, hope, self-sacrifice, faith.

Remember, the enemies of humanity have a weak point: they do not believe in human beings, and consequently they do not understand the power contained in each soul that refuses to be duped.

Listen to any of their recent pronouncements, and you will notice at once that the Infallible Ones think that they are talking to children. “How to Think About Covid Data Right Now,” reads an actual headline in the New York Times for January 7 – as if it were perfectly natural for the Times to teach its readers “how to think.”

But I suspect that far more people are offended by such condescension than the Times and its fellow propagandists have yet realized. And woe to the swindler who underestimates his mark!

The propagandist who believes he is lying to children might do well to recall one famous man’s warning to the effect that “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

But I will leave my readers to draw their own conclusions about this.

Originally published by Last American Vagabond

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.