Even after three special sessions, in Texas, there is still no clear legal language that forcibly defends the individual’s right against corporations that are attempting to force or intimidate Texans into receiving medical treatment that they do not want. Former SREC member and lawyer Warren Norred provides some guidance on what we can do to resist these mandates.

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Jonathan Schober:
Vaccine mandates, it seems like everybody wants to tell somebody what to do with their body. Here in the state of Texas many people are facing the decision. Do they take a vaccine or do they risk losing their job and everything that’s involved with that? Well, today we’re going to talk about of those topics. And also some of the things that’s going on in the legislature where now have ended three special sessions. I’m joined today with Warren Norred. He’s a former SREC member with the Republican party of Texas and doing a lot of work with vaccine mandates and helping people through the litigation process. Warren, welcome to the show.

Warren Norred:
Thanks for having me Jonathan. I appreciate it.

Jonathan Schober:
We got a lot of information about the governor said he was going to not allow mandates. I don’t know if that’s really a true statement of whatever happened. Why don’t you start now that with a third session is over, why don’t you kind of start with the law of the land as it is in the state of Texas.

Warren Norred:
It’s a funny thing. And we used to have these things called statutes and state legislatures would pass them and then governors would sign them and then judiciary folks they would judge people that were brought up for violating the statutes, but as we’ve learned, so in the last two years that we’ve done away with all that, now it’s the government-

Jonathan Schober:
What that schoolhouse rock. I’m just a bill that doesn’t apply anymore.

Warren Norred:
Yeah. You seen that, that SNL skit where the guys dress as an executive order and says, yeah kid I pretty much just am. That old schoolhouse rock, that’s a nice theory, but probably, dead old people wrote that a long time ago so we don’t do that anymore. Now we declared emergency and we do what we want. And so now I have been highly critical of some of the governor’s orders. However, I’ve come strongly out in favor of GA40. GA40 Says no VAX mandates for employees, for anybody, you can’t require this. And this has been some point of an issue. You have the president over here saying, well, you’re going to have to do this my way and then you have the governor saying, no, we’re going to do it my way and then people are going, who wins?

Right? And so I think that we win. It would be nice, of course, the governor said, we’d like to have a fourth special session, but I don’t see a lot of emotional drive to do that. And so there’s less work to be done and a fourth special session to take care of that issue and resolve this issue as well as the voter fraud issue, moving down from a felony to a misdemeanor. That’s another one that we could come back and clean up. There’s cleanup so that needs to be done. I’ve sent a demand letter, some of you may have seen it a demand letter and then I followed up with a press release. We’ve sent a demand letter to Lockheed, we’ve sent one to Bell, and there are others that we are percolating around.

And to say, look, you don’t get to just tell people that they have to get a VAX. There is a federal law that says, once you’ve been employed, you can’t have medical inquiries that are not job related. And they’re like, oh, it’s job related. Well, no, if it’s related to everybody, then it’s kind of like the reverse of standing when you want to sue somebody, not everybody can sue anybody. You can’t just say, we’re going to implement this state company wide because some guy in DC says so. Of course, what did the guy in DC say, he said, federal workers have to do this. Well, how does that work out? OSHA puts together a law or a regulation. And then somebody has to say, your’re not following the regulation and they’re being dangerous.

And then OSHA gets to come in and say, well, you’re acting dangerous. And then we get to defend ourselves. The real problem is spineless corporations that want to sell stuff and stand in the good graces of Biden. And there are many woke companies, even the ones that are defense contractors that you think would be immune from that. But the problem is this, Jonathan, the people that work at these contractors to my east and west, about half of those guys could have retired at any time in the last 10 years.

They’re usually old crochety men and they usually are coming to work because they feel it’s important, because they feel like they’re contributing to the defense of their country and they don’t really need the money and they could stop working at any time. When you tell them, I know you’re a very important cog in our machine and I know, you know, where all the bodies are buried and I know, you know how to make this airplane fly in a way that nobody else does, but I’m going to let you go because you won’t get the jab. I have friends who got the jab, I have loved ones and I have family members that have gotten the jab.

I don’t care if you get the jab or not. My issue is do you have the right to walk in and tell someone to do that? That’s going to be the route and there are lawsuits being filed everywhere. But it’s funny how everybody’s noticed that a burger company In-N-Out is showing the spine that Lockheed has not shown. Lockheed, right? Bell, Raytheon.

Jonathan Schober:
Southwest airlines, Delta. We can go through the list. It funny, it’s sad that a burger company has more spine than defense stretchers and honestly has more spine than some churches that should also be pushing back on some of this. Bless God for In-N-Out, is it In-N-Out or is it water burger? I’m not sure which one I’m a bigger fan of, right now, I’m a bigger fan of In-N-Out.

Warren Norred:
Water burger got bought, is it pure Texan anymore? I don’t know.

Jonathan Schober:
Look I spent 20 years at a big company. I spent 20 years at Dell. I know that they’re going to do this. Are there any thoughts or advice that you’d give someone that is again, I don’t care if you want to get the jab. That’s not the point. If you want the vaccine knock yourself out. That’s fine. The point is should someone and specifically your employer, forcibly mandate that you get this medical procedure? What’s some general guidance that you could give to literally millions of Texans that are having to deal with this? What would you say?

Warren Norred:
First of all, make sure you play the game. What I want to believe is that these spineless, even though spineless woke employers, don’t want to fire people. If there’s a deadline comply with the deadline, just turn in your exemption form. People are generally saying you got two exemptions, that’s not true, there are three, but generally speaking, the two exemptions are religious and medical. I’ll just say it. If I were a female of childbearing years, I would go to my family doctor and I would say, doc, would you say I should get this? There’s a reason why all the nurses are quitting the hospitals they’ve seen too many of these issues. Have women had problems with labor in the past before the vaccine? Yes they have.

But eventually anecdotes become data, when you amass enough of them, and it is the experience of people that are working in emergency rooms and labor, that there’s a lot of vaccinated, young women that are struggling with various things. Always? No, not always, but the point is if I had ever had COVID and survived, then you have natural immunity that far outstrips the immunity that the VAX gives you. At the beginning of this thing a year ago, they’d say, well, we don’t know which last longer your antibodies go away.

Well, the VAX they say, the booster is routinely, right? As a matter of a comment in filling out your form, you say, I have natural immunity, but I wouldn’t say it that way. I’d say I have a medical exemption. And I’ll get my doctor to say, yes, there’s indication the vaccine may actually damage your natural immunity. If you’ve already survived this you’re going to survive again. And if you weren’t going to, then the vaccine wasn’t going to help you either.

The strongest immunity is the natural immunity, and I get my doctor to write a note and that’s if I were anybody of any sex and of any age, that’s what I would do. I wouldn’t have the doctor put a lot of detail on that. It would be a bunch of none ya, none your business. This is my right. And people will say, Warren, I don’t want to do any of it. Okay. I know you don’t want to do any of it. And I’m happy to stand behind that. But I tell you, okay, I’m talking to hundreds of people from one company and I’ll say, look, I want one vaccine exemption form from a VP of human resources that’s mediocre so that they have to accept that.

Well, if they have to accept that, if they accept that one, then they’re going to have to take all the ones that are a bit less than that. I want a thousand exemption forms. I want some of them to be really good, that are two or three paragraphs, I want some of them to be mediocre and 15 paragraphs. I want everybody to turn in all manner, so that it forces them to put together their committee of, I don’t have any better jobs to do and then to do this. I want to force them to say that this half page exemption form it’s really well done, but it’s pretty short, and this one’s really long.

I want them to show me where you kind of say, this one’s good enough and this one’s not. What some people don’t realize is that we’ve got a one page exemption form that people who are parents of the children, going to school, you go to the college of state. It’s a one page exemption form and assume that you are of good faith and that’s what we should all do here. Can we just assume good faith? If somebody says, well, I’m not really a member of the church, but I’m very uncomfortable about this vaccine. It’s a non-human structure you’re building in my body. Okay. Well, that’s a conscientious objection. You fill that out. If somebody says, well, I’m not sure that’s a sincerely held belief. Look, you’re jeopardizing your job, not to take the VAX, and you’re filling in an exemption form.

I think that, that by itself demonstrates a sincerely held belief, certainly a valid, real anxiety. If this was a smallpox vaccine from 500 years ago, and we have been using a form of smallpox vaccination in human culture for almost 500 years, we were using it a hundred years in the Massachusetts versus Jacobson case. Everybody wants to cite. We could talk about that in just a one minute so people hear about it, but people would just take it, but it’s a lousy vaccine, it’s untested, it’s under emergency use. Again, let me make sure I cover them all health exemption I would get, if you can, and people say, should I get more than one exemption? Yes. Do all the exemptions. Because there are probably going to be one of two organizations, two different committees that should look at these in a big firm.

The other one is religious. Do I cite scripture? Do I talk about this? Speak the truth. Don’t try to dodge the truth. If you’ve always taken vaccines up to this point and you don’t really have a religious objection to vaccines, but you have is a religious objection to this vaccine. Then you can say that. Say yes as a child, I took all the vaccines since I’ve been pro-life a long time and I’ve just realized, I’ve just been informed that how this thing is made it upsets me. Well, that’s very inconvenient Mr. Smith, that you’re making this decision.

Look, you’re going to dinner with Hannibal Lecter, and he informs you halfway through the meal what you’re eating and you might say, I am not obligated to finish that meal because I just learned new information. Just because I’ve always done it in the past does not mean that I’m obligated to stick with that course of action. That’s why I tell people, just speak the truth and tell them what you think. If you want to put 10 pages of scripture and I’ll just say this again out loud it’s very rare in your life when somebody will ask you to explain your testimony,

Jonathan Schober:
What a wonderful opportunity as a person of faith, as a person that believes that we should share our testimony. Look, I would think if I was with a big company, I would write the entire plan of salvation up there. There’s going to be some committee that’s going to read this thing. I would love for everyone to do that.

Warren Norred:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you very rarely are asked to do that so do it, man. They’re asking for it. Give it to them and you never know whose hearts you’re going to touch with your story.

Jonathan Schober:
What I hear is the point is resist. The point is, if you think that this is just going to be 15 days to slow the spread and it’ll all be over, you are not awake. You’re not paying attention. You cannot just go along. This is not the last step. Anyone that disagrees with that just hasn’t been paying attention for the last year and a half. I think the point is resist, take action, make the employer do something in response. As I understand, I’m not a lawyer, but as I understand Texas employment law, they can’t fire you. They can fire you for no reason, but they can’t fire you for an illegal reason.

Warren Norred:
I keep getting asked the same questions that I want to cover. Can they ask me X? They can ask you whatever they want. That doesn’t mean that they won’t, and even if they ask you something they shouldn’t, it doesn’t matter if you answer and then you don’t do anything about it. What we have to do, and I tell everybody, especially all these big firms, if you guys will all hold hands, just like Southwest airlines pilots did, there’s a concept in the Bible, the rebellion of the intermediary leaders. It is the people with leadership opportunities who can say, no, we’re not doing this. What if they gave a tyranny and nobody came? Is the US government going to stop buying F16s or F35s in December?

But put a hold on that. No, it’s not. If everybody says no we’re not doing that, if everybody puts in an exemption form, then we have the opposite problem, what if three people turn in their exemption forms and they get no other exemption forms, and these are all mediocre employees. It shouldn’t matter with the mediocre employees, but it does. Well, they’re going to get fired, and then all the defense contractors that are in similarly situation goes well, we’re in compliance. You have to force them to do their work. I would not resign because if you resign people that are taking early retirement, can they sue later? Here’s your free legal advice? No, you quit. There are people who’ve quit and retire early for reasons other than COVID. If you were going to muddy the waters by quitting voluntarily and retiring early, then you’re not going to have a cause of action.

I’m not telling everybody to take a particular course of action. This is not legal advice. I tell everybody the same thing. When I was young, I rode a motorcycle, I’ve shot guns, I have ridden on skateboards. I am a risk taker. If you’ve never, ever been a risk taker, then you have the choice to make, am I going to become a risk taker today or am I not? The reality is that you have no choice. You are taking a risk. If you believe that this vaccine is bad for you and it’s damaging you, then you have a choice, a set of choices. None of them are any fun, but you have to make that choice. I would make them make the hard choice, whether they’re going to fire you or not. That’s what I would do, but not everybody would do that. That’s important.

Jonathan Schober:
I agree. Well, let’s kind of change subs, because we alluded to this at the beginning, we got some election integrity laws that were passed. I lose track of which sessions it was in. But one of the things that they did is they moved the criminal penalty. They moved it from a felony down to a misdemeanor. In the third session that didn’t get fixed, in my opinion, that’s broken, it’s something they broke. As you look at the political landscape of what’s going on, whether there’s another special session or we have to wait and till the 88th, what are some things around election integrity that you’ve seen and you have observed that some future legislature may be able to take a crack at?

Warren Norred:
Certainly there’s this ongoing issue of how much a machine can be changed. We have to, at some point, say, okay, every machine that we have has to go through certain certification process. Machines we have in Tarrant county are pretty good. They’re not perfect, but they’re pretty good. The people will say, well, we want serialized or not serialized balance, I like paper. One of the ideas is let’s have one day of voting. You have to have a real reason to early vote or to do something other than come to your ballot space and vote. Because the cheating is all in the early voting, the mailing voting and the vote harvesting.

If everybody had to show up, even if we had 24 hours all in one day and people say, well, you encourage all, just take away the politics of it as far as who would show up and who wouldn’t show up. We made it in a state holiday for voting, not every state has a bunch of early voting. Some states have a very short, early voting. I think there’s one state with no early voting. Are we getting better representation than they are by us doing that? But I do worry and I think that the fact that the state house Democrats, they didn’t believe for constitutional carry, that’s okay, no problem. They didn’t leave for the sacred right of abortion. They don’t leave for that.

They don’t abandon their posts for that. But man, when you start messing with trying to true the vote and they leave? It’s clearly more important than we think it is. I have a real issue with that. There’s some things like that, you may be familiar with the problem of felons voting or felons getting involved in elections. Felons can vote after a certain period of time, but that felons can’t run for office unless they’ve had the political disability removed so that they can vote and run for office. I was personally involved in three efforts to remove felons from the roles.

The problem is, it’s very difficult, because you have to prove a negative. You have to prove that this person did not ever get a pardon, which is a mess and they said it’s been fixed. I’m not sure it’s been fixed, but those are the kinds of things I would look at. One of the things that when you become an attorney, I was in my past years, I was an engineer and so, and I would look at attorneys, why can’t you get things right? And although I still trash attorneys all the time, I will admit that it is not easy to write a good law, but what I don’t know is why we ever deliberately lowered the penalty. Our speaker of the house says that was a deliberate move. That was not an accident that slid in that was a deliberate move. Was that something we did to get them back into town? What is that? That brings up another issue.

I make a statutory law. I’ve been involved in many clubs. I’m sure you are too. If you abandon your duties, it should be considered a constructive resignation, you’re out, we don’t play that way. You leave the football game in the middle of it, because you don’t like it, oh, well I guess we have to stop until they come back. No, we don’t. You boom. You out forfeit. You’re done. That’s what I would there.

Jonathan Schober:
I’ll just say there were some noises that were made, there would be consequences to these people, and I’ll just simply say, I’m curious what those consequences were, because I certainly didn’t see any, but I’ll let other people defend that position. Well, Warren, I’m going to take a quick break, but when we come back I do have one other question for them, I’m going to ask you what keeps you up at night?

[BREAK]

Jonathan Schober:
Welcome back to the Elephant Herd. We’re with attorney Warren Norred in Tarrant county. He’s been giving us some thoughts and advice regarding the vaccine mandates and how it’s impacting literally millions of Texans right here, right now today. What I want to do, I want to kind of transition and I always like to have people answer this question with a broader scope. Beyond the topic that we’ve just been discussing, but just as a person, Warren, what is it that keeps you up at night?

Warren Norred:
I actually sleep pretty well at night, but I’ll tell you, you asked a good question. I’ll tell you what, yeah, my friends and I are always asking ourselves what dystopian novel and story are we in? Are we in 1984? Are we in Atlas Shrug? Atlas shrug, it seems like we’re going to a combination of Atlas Shrug and 1984.

Jonathan Schober:
We’re 1984 Shrugged is what we are.

Warren Norred:
That’s exactly where we are, but we saw it, we saw Southwest Airlines pilots rising up, hurricane Brandon, as they say and that’s what worries me and I’ll relate it to what’s going on right now. I’m a civil attorney, I don’t have clients die on me very often for various things. I wouldn’t have guessed it if I hadn’t seen it. This idea of you walk into a hospital and they immediately take you away and you can’t be visited by your friends and family and they use this excuse.

I saw this early on with COVID with the nursing homes where I literally had a pair of people that celebrated their 50th anniversary in November of 2019 in the same nursing home room a few months later, they’ve been married 50 years. He gets COVID and they wheel him out and the next time he sees his wife, they wheel her in to hold his hand as he died, the horror of that. What happens in nursing homes if you don’t have visitors? Well, care goes down and people say, well, what do you want to do? Well, the Coke people, the vendors coming in for soda pop, they weren’t stopped. People who were vendors were coming in all the time. They weren’t stopped. All kinds of people were not stopped, but loved ones were, and we’re seeing the backside of this now in hospitals.

I have a client who’s currently right now in the Baylor, Scott & White facility and they want to give him Ivermectin a cheap drug and we have this right to try and this brings me back to what the state legislature do. We do this all the time. We have a right to try law in Texas, but you have to have all these hoops that you got to jump through. The legislators get to go home and say, see, we did this great thing.

Jonathan Schober:
We have this law it’s called the right to try that solves everything, that’s what we called the Legislation.

Warren Norred:
Yeah. The funny thing is you get judges who are sympathetic, but they’re going to be overturned on appeal and that’s what the hospitals do. I was talking to opposing counsel and I said, look, we all have situations where the client wants you to do something you don’t think is going to be useful, which is the case here. They think Ivermectin is real good and what they’ll do is they’ll wait to the very last minute before the person’s about to die, then they give it to them and then the person dies and they say, see it didn’t work well, no, it didn’t, did it? But it didn’t work because of what you did. What keeps me up at night is this idea that we now have people that are so ideologically ingrained, that they know best, that they are letting people die and hospitals are turning into organ harvesting.

It sounds crazy, I would’ve never, ever guessed that we were actually doing this kind of thing in this country or in any country. This is the kind of thing that you hear about and you read on Snopes or wherever your truth teller is, and you find out no that it’s all a bunch of garbage, but no, this is happening. People are being told, we will get you some palliative care. We should probably go ahead and start talking about organ harvesting. When somebody gets to the hospital and they want Ivermectin, give it to them. As I said to Scott [inaudible 00:27:40], does your hospital really want this pending widow to think that the hospital killed her husband for the rest of her life? And the answer I got was, I don’t get into the medicine side.

It’s not what I said. The hospital is ideologically so ingrained in what it’s doing that it’s willing to let people die. That keeps me up at night because we all need the hospital from time to time and you saw it through COVID all the time. Well, we’re not letting people come in. What? It’ll be different if they were being consistent, but no, the vendors come in, they do what they want. We saw that with the G7. Masks are super important as long as the camera are on. How anybody could think that this is real in the same way they want to make it. It’s okay. We can be adults and we can say that masks may have an impact in some situations.I’m sorry about my 30 second rant. In Sweden, we had 1.9 million kids in school, never closed the schools, mild social distancing, zero COVID deaths. It’s undeniable. We have closed down and destroyed a year and a half, two years of education in this country for no good purpose. I could excuse two or three months of that, but I can’t excuse that anymore. Not since last year. That’s what keeps me up at night is that we have people in charge of our government that are more concerned with doing these little favors for friends, like alternative energies, and they don’t want to believe that we’ll ever actually have an impact that kills people in the middle of a freeze, because we don’t have good electricity. We can throw money around, we can regulate the things we want to pay attention to and not take care of business, real business and there’s no impact that scares me for Texas. That is what scares me for Texas.

Jonathan Schober:
Yeah. I’ll just sum it up. What I think you’re saying is just the fact that there are so many people that are just completely unaware and ignoring the law of unintended consequences. You can’t take these things. You can’t make these mandates. You can’t do these one size fits all and not expect unintended consequences and most of the time the unintended consequences are going to be extremely negative. Very rarely do you have a beneficial unintended consequence in decision making. Well, Warren, thanks for being on the show. If people do want to get a hold of you, contact, learn more, whether it’s about the mandate or some of the things that you’re doing, what’s a website, how can people get in touch with you?

Warren Norred:
I do posts a lot from our Facebook page, Norredlaw.com. I’ll have a blog post when we do something interesting on our Facebook page. I think that my rhetorical discussion of it is usually more colorful than my Norred law site. If you go W Norred, my personal Facebook page usually has more fun commentary than my Norred law page.

Jonathan Schober:
You’re always good for a snide remark and some cutting sarcasm.

Warren Norred:
It’s a gift. What can I say?

Jonathan Schober:
I think we’re blessed with the same thing. Well, Warren, I appreciate it. Thanks so much for coming on the show this afternoon.

Warren Norred:
Thanks for having me, Jon. I appreciate it.

Jonathan Schober:
You bet. Well, if you’ve enjoyed the show, we appreciate it, if you have any thoughts, questions, suggestions for future episodes, you can text me directly at 512 729 5712.

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