A New Frontier: Medical Freedom, The Courts, And The Geoengineering Challenge With Leslie Manookian

What if a single court case could redefine your right to refuse a medical intervention? And what happens when the government is given broad authority over what goes into your body?

Leslie Manookian, President and Founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, returns for Part Two to discuss a potentially historic case that may soon be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court—one that challenges long-standing legal precedent and raises fundamental questions about bodily autonomy, informed consent, and the limits of government power.

Drawing on her experience leading successful legal challenges—including the overturning of the federal travel mask mandate and efforts to halt employer vaccine mandates—Leslie explains how this case is unfolding, why it has drawn national attention, and what could be at stake if the Court takes it. At its core, she argues, this case could reshape how medical mandates are interpreted under the Constitution.

She also introduces a new national effort—the COVID Justice Resolution—aimed at bringing accountability to pandemic-era policies and ensuring that similar overreach is never repeated.

And in a surprising turn, Leslie shares details about a bold new initiative she’s taking on—launching a national petition to address geoengineering—an emerging and largely unexamined issue that raises profound questions about environmental exposure, public health, and consent.

Get a free WAPF info pack

Visit Leslie Manookian’s Health Freedom Defense Fund website to learn more and get involved

Join the Nourishing Our Children closed Facebook group

Check out our sponsors: Optimal Carnivore “Discount code WESTON10 for 10% off

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Kendall Nelson and the regular text is Leslie Manookian.

The ripple effects of change are often easiest to see after the initial victory, when ideas begin to move beyond one state, one courtroom, or one moment in time. In part one, we explored how legislative momentum around medical freedom is growing across the country. In this episode, we turn to the legal and cultural questions that may shape what comes next.

This is Episode 575, and we welcome back Leslie Manookian. Leslie is the President and Founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund. In part two of our conversation, she discusses her potential case before the United States Supreme Court on the issues of medical mandates and what it could mean to revisit longstanding precedent around public health authority. She also shares details about a new initiative, the COVID Justice Resolution, which she and some other powerhouse organizations are advancing. Additionally, she discusses the dangers of geoengineering and her efforts to stop the practice through a new citizen petition.

Before we begin, I want to let you know about a valuable free resource from the Weston A. Price Foundation. WAPF offers a free information pack that provides background on the foundation along with its popular brochure, Timeless Principles of Healthy Traditional Diets. You’ll see photographs taken by Dr. Weston A. Price and practical guidelines for living according to wise traditions. To receive your free info pack, visit westonaprice.org and click on the free info pack button. Now, let’s welcome back Leslie Manookian.

—

Leslie, welcome back to the show.

Kendall, so good to be back again.

Seeking Accountability Through The COVID Justice Resolution

I’m so glad you’re here for part two. As everyone will remember, in part one, we talked about the Idaho Medical Freedom Act and how that then turned into the Medical Freedom Act coalition, where you’re trying to take basically the same verbiage and give that to states so that they too can create their own medical freedom acts. If you live in Florida, then you’re making it the Florida Medical Freedom Act. Anyways, it was great talking to you about that coalition, but now I understand that you’re involved in another such project, and this one is the COVID Justice Resolution. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, it’s so exciting. I hope everybody will join us. With the Medical Freedom Act, we created this model bill, which has then been used as a template to go across the country in many states, and it’s been introduced in thirteen states. One of the things that’s happened since the just outrageous policies that were enacted during COVID is that there’s been no accountability. No accountability at all.

We have never in the history of our country, and in fact, even in the Western world, seen such violations of our individual rights and liberty. It was truly civil liberties. Literally, they told you you can’t work, you can’t go to school, you can’t go shopping, you can’t eat, or you can eat, but for a lot of the time, you couldn’t go out and eat, you couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t do anything and someone else deemed certain businesses essential and certain workers essential. This is so outrageous.

They told us to not see our family and our friends. They told us that we had to take this COVID shot in order to live a normal life. They told us that if we didn’t comply, that we were granny killers. They just did all of these things. They literally wouldn’t allow us to see our loved ones when they were hospitalized. It was really, truly outrageous. Nobody’s been held accountable. I haven’t heard of anyone being held accountable.

The only thing that there’s been any accountability on is a couple of lawsuits with respect to violating someone’s religious freedoms. There was a hospital in Illinois, I think in Chicago that got was prosecuted or that lost a lawsuit and had to pay $10 million fine to the employees of the hospital for forcing them to get the COVID shot, something like that. Nothing else has happened. We haven’t seen any public health officials be held accountable. Anybody who was behind the censorship of people like me, nothing.

Basically, I started the Medical Freedom Act coalition and had a bunch of colleagues join in. I talked about them before. CHD, Brownstone Institute, Stand for Health Freedom, Feds for Freedom, Independent Medical Alliance on and on. There are so many wonderful partners that we have in this. We teamed up and this initiative is really being led by Children’s Health Defense and Michael Kane and Mary Holland of Children’s Health Defense. Michael Kane is their new leader of advocacy there.

Michael and I had been talking for months about starting another coalition. We did it around this. It brings together six organizations. CHD, Health Freedom Defense Fund, Stand for Health Freedom, Brownstone Institute, Autism Action Network, and the MAHA Institute. Six national organizations. All of us are resolute in our conviction that there needs to be some a resolution calling on government to ensure that the overreach of COVID never happens again.

After our first meeting, we all agreed to this and Jeffrey Tucker, who’s the president and founder of Brownstone Institute, he’s an amazing writer and communicator, and he literally, within a very short period, put his pen to paper, essentially, although it’s on a keyboard, and he wrote the COVID Justice Resolution, which you can find at CovidJustice.org. He drafted it, and then we collaborated on it and made different edits and tweaks to it. It’s basically calling on the United States Senate to sign this resolution and then which resolves that the overreach of COVID can never happen again. It’s really this wonderful thing. All of your readers can sign on as well. Please do. Go to CovidJustice.org, read the resolution and sign on.

If you’re an organization, you can sign on. If you’re an individual, you can sign on. You can also send it to your senators and to your Congress person. This is basically just calling out how outrageous what happened was and demanding that they all resolve that it never happen again. We think it’s really important that we do this. Now, I’ll tell you that when we were getting the Idaho Medical Freedom Act passed, something really funny happened.

I was standing there with the bill sponsor in the house and we were in the health and welfare committee. The health and welfare committee and the sponsor was talking to someone who was also on the committee. That person said to him, “When are you guys going to give up on all this COVID stuff?” Literally, they want it to go away. They want to forget what they did. They want to forget that they literally arrested people worshipping outdoors at a church on their own little markers.

They want to forget that they completely made up, literally, the advice that you should stay 2 meters or 2 yards 6 feet from someone else. There was no scientific basis for that. I don’t know if people know that, but it was never, ever. There was nothing. They want us to forget that they made our kids literally play music in little tents, that they put plexiglass around their desks, that they made us stand on dots in the grocery store and follow traffic patterns in shops.

They want to make it go away because it is so disgraceful what they did because they were all complicit, or at least those who want to make it go away. They were complicit. They didn’t stand up for us. The police chief Steve England in Hailey, Idaho, he literally put up a notice on Facebook on the police chief’s page or on the Hailey police department page that if people didn’t start complying with the masks, the mask mandates, he was going to arrest them.

This is the purpose. We want to make sure that they can’t make it go away. That they can’t ever forget. That we won’t ever let them forget what they did and that we are going to hold their feet to the fire to resolve that they will never do it again. That’s what this is about. Within a very short period of time it had 20,000 signatures. It’s at 30,000 now. We’re just hoping that there will be a groundswell of support and that this will be shared all over the place.

It should be. Of course, we’re not getting any support from the media in spreading this because they don’t want it to be spread. We really need you to help us share it on social media and to share it with your networks, with your friends and your families, and get everybody to sign it. I think it’s a wonderful initiative, and I’m so grateful to CHD for bringing together this small group and for leading the way on it. It’s really beautifully and well done. I hope everybody goes to read it and thinks about what it means. Really ponder this and then help us.

I might have missed this a little bit, but you said it’s before the Senate or you’re going to bring it before the Senate. If so, does it become some law or what happens with it?

Yeah, so it’s not before the Senate yet. Either the Senate or the or the House in the two bodies, in the Congress, they can issue resolutions. They can enact a resolution that they then get passed. We are calling on the Senate to take the COVID Justice Resolution and to pass it. We are hoping that people will start pushing their senators to sign it and that the whole US Senate then will adopt it.

Basically, it’s like a bill but it’s different. It’s just a resolution. It doesn’t have the full force of the law because it’s not a law. It’s a resolution rather than a law or a code or statute. It’s more than symbolic. It’s a positive step towards acknowledging what happened and insisting that it not happen again. That’s how it works. Did I answer that?

Wise Traditions | Leslie Manookian | Freedom — Freedom: The COVID Justice Resolution is a positive step towards acknowledging what happened and insisting that it will not happen again.

Yeah, so I imagine so it is the symbolic act that we can never have this happen again. What do we do with the people who committed all these crimes? Is there anybody who’s going after them or is there anything we can do to make them accountable? If not, they’re just going to do it over and over again, you would think, especially if there’s profit in it for them.

Of course, there’s this whole pandemic enterprise that’s been constructed. This is one of the big problems. It’s very unlikely that the Department of Justice or FBI are really going to pursue these. They have shown no inclination to do so whatsoever so far. There was a lot of talk about it during the election, but I haven’t seen any movement on it since then, or really even much talk about it since then. I think that’s very disappointing.

Although it’s not legally binding in any way, it’s something that we the people can do because we do not have the ability to make the Department of Justice investigate someone or make the FBI get involved with something. We do have the power. Congress is known as the people’s House. That’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s the people’s House, and they’re supposed to be our representatives and do our bidding, not the bidding of their corporate sponsors. If we can get a million signatures on this, I think it’ll really be something that’s more powerful. It would be really helpful if people would share it.

The Congress is known as the people’s house. They are supposed to be our representatives and do our bidding, not the bidding of their corporate sponsors.

Challenging And Overturning Jacobson v. Massachusetts

You also have some other really exciting news. You’ve got a potential case to bring before the Supreme Court that would essentially challenge Jacobson v. Massachusetts. I’d love for you to tell us about that.

Y this is something that has been going on. It’s hard to believe but we are in our fifth year. This is our second case. Basically, in the spring of 2021, the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is easier to say as LAUSD, issued a mandate for all employees to get the COVID shot when they were just emergency use authorized. That was in March, and we filed suit challenging that.

The following day, the school district rescinded their mandate. They issued a statement, “It wasn’t really a mandate. It was like a recommendation and you can just test instead, you don’t have to get it. You can just test once a week or something like this.” It’s a bit silly, but that’s what they said. What they did was the case still had to make its way through the court. As the case is making its way through the court, they went to the court and they represented that they did not have a mandate and did not intend to implement a mandate.

The court, in July of 2021, dismissed the case. It was filed in federal court in front of a district court and the court dismissed the case and said that the case is moot because the school district doesn’t have a mandate anymore and because the school district’s not intending to issue one. Basically, they said this. We were disappointed because we really wanted the school district to be scrutinized by the court, the legality of what they had done because it’s very clear that emergency use authorized products may not be mandated. That’s the way it goes. It was moot and that’s just the way it was. The court actually said, “It’s not ripe. It’s a legal term, but it’s not ripe anymore, there’s nothing for us to adjudicate and so it’s dismissed, but you can always bring the case back if there’s another issue.”

Seventeen days later, after the school district convinced the court to dismiss the case, they issued a new mandate of the COVID shot. It was supposedly approved, and then they issued their new mandate. We were just shocked by this move, but we shouldn’t have been because their corruption knows no bounds. Anyway, they did that. We met with all the school teachers and employees and stuff again and we said, “Let’s file a new suit.”

The first lawsuit was challenging that the COVID shots were emergency use authorized. The new lawsuit challenged on a very different basis. What we argued in the case was that the COVID shots don’t stop transmission or infection and, therefore, are a private medical matter. We also argued that natural immunity is real and that the courts have to acknowledge that.

We argued that the Supreme Court case called Jacobson v. Massachusetts from 1905 doesn’t apply because COVID is not smallpox and because the COVID shots don’t stop transmission or infection. We also said that if Jacobson does apply, then it should be overturned or it should be at the very least narrowed. I actually want to pull something up, but I’ll do that while I talk. This is what happened.

We file the case and with the same court, you have to file in front of the same court, so we did that. It went to the same judge because it’s going to go to the same judge. The case made its way through the court and it basically took until we filed that case in November, I think of 2021, and in September of 2022, the judge dismissed the case, the court dismissed the case and said that the case was bound by Jacobson, by the case from 1905, by the Supreme Court ruling. That is because of Jacobson, the court could not adjudicate our lawsuit.

The court had to defer to the Supreme Court because of Jacobson even though Jacobson did not say what the court said it said. The court said, “Jacobson says that as long as there’s a public health issue and there’s a vaccine that there’s no need for the court to get involved and that.” Basically, the judge in the district court said without further guidance from the 9th Circuit, we’re not going to make new law.

Now I think this was a really bad decision, and so we appealed. Did our attorneys. We appealed it. This case was brought by Health Freedom Defense Fund, California Educators for Medical Freedom, and several individual school teachers. We sued the school superintendent and the people responsible for the policy. What happened was the case was dismissed, as I said, in September of 2022, and then we appealed.

The appeal went in front of a panel of three judges. We went to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and we had an oral argument in front of three judges. This was pasted all over social media because the president of the school board actually said, “We didn’t do anything wrong. I would do it again.” Basically, what happened was basically, the lawyers for LAUSD got skewered in oral argument in mid-September of 2023. After that, the attorneys must have gotten in touch with the superintendent because that day, the superintendent contacted the school board and said, “We need to rescind the mandate.” They tried to rescind the mandate like they did the first time in order to evade judicial review.

It’s so unbelievably cynical. They just don’t want an adverse ruling. They rescind the mandate. At that meeting where they did that, which was twelve days after they got skewered in oral argument, Jackie Goldberg, the school board president, said, “We did nothing wrong. I would do it all again.” Literally, which actually proves that the case isn’t moot.

She completely argued against her own argument. I’m like, “You people are such so unhinged that you actually harm yourselves.” What happened was we waited until June of 2024 for a ruling and we won. The three judges issued this blistering ruling saying that we were right, that we deserve our day in court, that we had the right to plead our case at this stage, that we had plausibly pled that the shots didn’t stop transmission or infection and that their reading of Jacobson was similar to ours, that Jacobson did not apply to this case because the shots did not stop transmission or infection and found in our favor.

They sent the case back to the district court. The school district did what’s called requested an en banc review, which means that a broader panel of judges, not just three judges of the appellate court, but 11 judges of the appellate court review the 3-judge ruling. That’s not supposed to happen unless there’s a genuine belief that the three-judge panel got it wrong, which I don’t think they did.

They’re abusing their power, but that’s what they did. It’s supposed to be something that’s like a major issue, a major mistake or conflicts with law in other states in other areas in the district, things like this. They didn’t do that. It was literally, I think political. What was really interesting about it was that the first two times to get a decision out of the 9th Circuit took 9 to 12 months. That decision came in three months.

It was after we had oral argument last March in the case in front of the eleven-judge en banc panel. It was fantastic for us again. We walked out of there, heads so high, we thought for sure we’d won. Three months later, we hear that they’re vacating the three-judge panel’s ruling and overturning. It was terrible. Here’s the thing. It was such a horrible ruling. The en banc panel actually stated that it doesn’t matter whether the shots stop transmission and infection. All that matters is that a state official could have believed that the shots would help individuals. That’s what they said.

That’s so ridiculous.

It’s beyond ridiculous, but it’s also terrifying because what it does is it opens the door to almost limitless state power as long as they claim public health. Let’s just say this. They could say going forward that public morale is really low, that people are really depressed and down, and so for public health, they’re going to mandate Prozac for everyone.

They could say birth rates are so low, we are going to force all women under the age of 35 to act as surrogates and carry other pregnancies. They could allow the school district to say, the teachers are not productive enough, productivity has fallen too low, and so in order to improve morale and productivity, we’re going to mandate ADD medication. This could be skewed in so many different ways.

Think of it this way, what if the president says there’s some a public health emergency next year and he wants to mandate that everybody take Ivermectin, which a lot of people in the country believe is horse paste and veterinary medicine. This can go so many ways. Basically, I think they shot themselves in the foot because they actually contradicted their own precedent. The 9th Circuit has issued rulings in the past that says that Jacobson, this case from 1905, requires a balancing test between state action, necessary state action, and liberty interest of the individual.

They just ignored that they have said this. The Supreme Court has said that too. Basically we’ve got this conflict because the 9th Circuit has now said this and the Supreme Court has said in Jacobson that that the state has power, but it doesn’t say that the state has the power to plunge a needle into your arm or to condition employment on receipt of a vaccination, or that the state can require you to harm yourself if this could pose a direct harm to you. All that Jacobson said was that Pastor Jacobson, who was the plaintiff in the case, could be required to pay a $5 fine. That’s it.

It sounds like all in all, with all of this stuff, the stars have actually aligned for you because now you have a really good chance of going in front of the Supreme Court. Is this the first time since Jacobson that a medical mandate case will have gone before the court?

Let me explain what’s going on and what’s happened. We have petitioned the Supreme Court to review the 9th Circuit’s ruling. Let me just explain that when Jacobson was decided in 1905, you and I couldn’t vote. Jacobson was used as a justification for a very infamous case called Buck v. Bell, which was when the Supreme Court determined that it was acceptable to snip the fallopian tubes of women deemed too unintelligent to have children. Literally. Talk about a moral stain on our society.

I believe Jacobson’s a moral stain as well, but anyway, so it was used for that too. It was used to justify that heinous thing in like 1920-something. My point is that that was a very, very different social climate, political climate, and just era. That ruling shouldn’t be used to inform what we’re doing here. I don’t want to go back to us not being able to vote and Jim Crow laws being in place and things like that. What America would? That would be insane.

What’s happened in the last 50 or 60 years is that there’s been a series of Supreme Court rulings that say that you have a zone of privacy around your body into which the state cannot intrude, that you have the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions, and that you have the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions. That you have a liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical interventions even if they might save your life.

A series of Supreme Court rulings in the past 50 or 60 years says that you have a zone of privacy around your body that the state cannot intrude upon. You have the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions.

There’s all this stuff that’s happened in the last literally 30 to 60 years which says that there’s a balancing test between state interest and liberty interest and that each and every one of us have a liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical interventions. The only way that can be contravened is when you pose a threat to yourselves, to yourself or to others. There’s a case known as Sell which actually outlines the different criteria that must be met.

You’ve basically got Jacobson from 1905 and then you’ve got all of this more recent case law that says no, this is you have a liberty interest. We’ve got this conflict. What happened during COVID was all these courts just said public health rules because of Jacobson, but they ignored all this more recent stuff. We’ve got this conflict which is exactly what the Supreme Court is supposed to adjudicate when there are conflicts.

So far, the Supreme Court has declined to do it. Our case because it’s about major constitutional issues, not just about COVID, it’s about whether or not you have the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions. That’s what we argued, that the COVID shots are a private medical matter. It changes it from being a COVID issue to a personal liberty issue. This is why we think that there’s a much greater likelihood that it will be accepted.

Basically, then there’s another piece of it you need to understand which is that when the school district petitioned the 9th Circuit to conduct the en banc review, they got twenty-some AGs, Attorneys General, to submit an amicus brief, which is a friend of the court brief, on their behalf. That means that I think it was 22 Attorneys General from all these different states said, “We support this. We support them and we want this state power.”

We submitted a petition to the Supreme Court at the end of December of 2025, and thirteen Attorneys General came in on our side. Now you have a very clearly a serious divide between what two different major factions and sets of Attorneys General believe. That increases your likelihood of being taken by the Supreme Court.

There’s something else that’s so exciting that happened. This is just unbelievable to me. In some ways, I think that you could argue that the school district really shot itself in the foot by getting those Attorneys General to come in at that stage because it set it up for there to be this divide and for us to have a greater momentum.

Basically, by petitioning the 9th Circuit for an en banc review, they got a ruling that was in their favor at the 9th Circuit. We, the plaintiffs, get to appeal to the Supreme Court and we get to frame the argument. I would much rather be the plaintiff framing the argument than the respondent, the defendant. Basically, what then happened, which is just amazing, is that the school district waived its right in late January to respond to our petition to the Supreme Court.

In order to have the Supreme Court review your case, you have to submit what’s called a petition for a petition for a writ of certiorari. The Supreme Court will grant or not grant your petition. Here’s the thing. The Supreme Court gets something like 700 petitions every year and only accepts around 1% of them. Your chances are very low.

Most of them they never even consider, they basically just get dismissed and they’re not a concern. The school district waived its right to respond to our petition and I thought, “Are they that arrogant that they think that they don’t have to respond and they’re just so confident of their position that they just think it’s going to go away, that we’ll be denied?” I think they did that on January 22nd and they had until January 29th. On February 5^th, the Supreme Court issued something called a call for response. The Supreme Court ordered the school district to respond to our petition.

Now they wouldn’t do that unless they were seriously considering taking the case, correct?

They wouldn’t do that unless they were paying attention to the case. Yes, at least one judge and likely many judges are paying attention to our case. This is why it’s so interesting and so exciting. People who are Supreme Court watchers, they say that this increases your chances for a consideration many fold. Yeah, it’s a really big deal.

What Happens When The Case Reaches The Supreme Court

In an ideal world, what’s going to happen? You’ve got the Supreme Court interested because you’ve got the divide of the attorney generals, right? That gets their attention. Say you do get in front of them, what’s that going to look like?

There’s something else. The Supreme Court what it will do is the school district will have until March 9th to respond. They requested an extension. Now they have until April 9th and then we have about ten days to reply to their response. After that, the Supreme Court gets together and like I said, most cases never get considered, but they do what’s called conferencing in May. That means they’re going to conference and talk about all the cases that they are considering taking and granting a writ of certiorari to. It almost assures us, some people say that we’re almost assured of being considered at conferencing. This is a really big deal, what’s happening.

On top of it, you also have all of the controversy going on around the whole vaccine program. You have so much going on in the media, you have the change in the vaccine program, you have a report that was just leaked about the dangers of the COVID shots, but even more importantly, that our own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System was not capable of tracking the injuries or deaths that came from the reporting system. There’s just so much going on. This is clearly such a big issue. There’s something else that’s huge, which is that this court is the court that issued the ruling called Dobbs. Do you remember what that is?

Remind us.

Dobbs is the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. At the time that that ruling was issued, it was controversial, of course, because basically, the Supreme Court said that abortion is not a fundamental right and that it’s actually a portion of law that belongs to the states, not to the federal government. They basically kicked it to the states to do, and that’s why some states have now banned it and other states have gone a different direction.

What happened was is that the more left-leaning judges, they basically accused the right-leaning judges of being political in Dobbs. They said, “You don’t really care about liberty.” This is the implication of their concerns or their accusations. The right doesn’t really care about liberty, they were just being political. They only issued Dobbs because they wanted to stop abortion, not because they actually care about people’s liberty interest.

What does our case offer up? An opportunity for them to say, “Actually we really do care about liberty and we don’t like Jacobson, Jacobson was wrong and it needs to be overturned, or at the very least narrowed.” That is exactly what we’ve asked the court to do. When we submitted our petition, we asked the court to consider two questions. The two questions, I’ll just read them to you quickly because they’re so concise.

Does Jacobson v. Massachusetts mean that courts don’t have to consider medical interventions as a liberty interest issue? That’s basically what it is. That it’s not a fundamental right, it’s not a liberty interest, it’s just a basic thing and if it’s only rational basis, then the government has a rational basis to do whatever it wants and basically can.

The second question we said is if as the 9th Circuit held, Jacobson limits courts to rational basis review, then should Jacobson be overruled or should it be limited to its specific facts because it is inconsistent with modern constitutional scrutiny including the court’s opinion as I mentioned in Cruzan and Sell v. United States, which explicitly recognized a person’s fundamental interest in rejecting unwanted medical treatments?

Basically, our case is putting before the court the constitutional issue and this predicament that they’re in which is all this recent jurisprudence conflicts with Jacobson from 1905. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to let the 9th Circuit interpret your rulings in a completely new way than you’ve been issuing for the last sixty years. It’s just it’s so exciting. Now what’s going to happen is they’re going to get together and they’re going to consider our initial petition. They will consider the school district’s response. They will consider our reply to that. They will conference over that and then they will decide after that whether or not they’re going to grant our petition for certiorari. I think it’s going to happen, Kendall.

Yeah, I do too. I have a really good feeling about it. I think now that it’s in front of them and stuff, it’s going to be so hard for them to turn a blind eye to it.

So far, the only vaccine-related cases that they’ve taken in the last six years have been related to religious exemptions. They have not taken anything that’s about the constitutional ethical principle of informed consent and medical freedom and liberty. They haven’t done it. They have shied away from it. I don’t think they can do it anymore because the 9th Circuit ruling, that en banc ruling I mentioned that said that basically it doesn’t matter if it stops transmission or infection, that opens the door to unconscionable state power.

The two 9th Circuit judges who dissented in that opinion said that they believed that this court, the 9th Circuit en banc panel, was opening the door to virtually limitless state power at a time when they should be restricting state power because of all of the egregious overreach that happened and all of the evidence that we have that the government misled and acted unethically and immorally during COVID, unscientifically. It’s really interesting.

The thing is so now we’ve got 9th Circuit judges who are in our favor, many of them who have argued the same thing that we have argued. We’ve got thirteen Attorneys General in on our side and you have a 9th Circuit ruling that conflicts with not only its own precedent but now it conflicts with all of this Supreme Court precedent that’s been issued in the last 50, 60 years. You can call me crazy, call me whatever you want. I’ve believed since the beginning that this case would make history. I believe it will overturn Jacobson. I really do. I think that this is the issue of our day.

This is one of the issues of our day. I think that the whole AI, technology and all that stuff is an issue as well and going to become a bigger issue just the whole intrusion into our lives. This whole issue of health freedom. This is literally at the top. Do we own our bodies or not? Or are we slaves? If we don’t, then we’re slaves.

I’ve heard you say before when people talk about free speech or religious liberty or something, of course, those are incredibly important but tell me why it is that those might be even secondary to bodily autonomy.

Just think about it. You’re jailed but you can speak. Would you rather be jailed or be able to speak? If they can inject you, you’re a slave. You’re no different than a piece of livestock that they have. You’re an animal to them. Frankly, I don’t really care if I have freedom of speech if I can be forcibly medicated. I don’t care. Great, so I can tell you how much I hate you. Tell you how much I disagree with you while you literally pin me down and forcibly inject a needle into my arm. That’s not freedom and I don’t give a hoot about the freedom to speak if they supposedly have the power and the authority to literally plunge a needle into my arm.

If someone can pin you down and forcibly inject a needle into your arm, that is not freedom.

How Leslie Takes Care Of Herself

You’re spot on. You’re taking on so much. It’s amazing. How do you take care of yourself? What drives you to do this and how do you take care of yourself and how can others follow in your footsteps?

Kendall, I mean I left Wall Street many years ago. I left because it was literally sucking my soul dry. It really, truly was. I think that I’m just kind the person who has to be doing something that’s meaningful to me. You know me, I don’t like live on the surface. Cocktail chat is not my forte. I once had a family member say to me, “Do you ever just talk about the weather or something like that?” I was like, “No.” Who cares?

What gives me meaning in life is doing something that matters. I want to have purpose. I want to have fulfillment. I want to be doing something that makes a difference, that serves humanity and helps humanity. Founding Health Freedom Defense Fund and doing this work that I literally don’t pay myself for. I volunteer. I have volunteered for 25 years, making the movie and doing all the things that I’ve that I’m doing because you know why? It makes my heart sing.

That’s the truth. Nothing gives me more gratitude, more fulfillment, more joy than trying to make the world a better place for my son and for all the other young people out there. I can’t think of a more honorable, fulfilling, rewarding, wonderful thing to do with my life. I have to do a better job at maintaining my boundaries and saying no and things like that and I have to really take a lot of downtime like when I’m off, I sleep a lot and rest. Also, it fills my soul. Having your soul filled up actually really motivates you and energizes you. That’s why I do it and that’s how I do it. I don’t think a life that you feel provides meaning to you is really a life that’s worth living, frankly.

How Geoengineering Adversely Affects The Environment

I know I promised in episode one, our part one, that we were going to talk a little bit about your new petition that’s against geoengineering. I know you might be a little bit hesitant to talk about that right now because of some stuff that’s going on, but can you just say two words about it before we wrap up?

We have an issue and that is that geoengineering and that there are a bunch of different aspects of geoengineering that are affecting our weather. There’s cloud seeding which has been around for decades, there’s government programs to manipulate the weather. Lyndon Johnson was talking about it and in 1962, he wanted to quadruple the program that they used to cause mudslides and torrential rain on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Vietnam. This goes back to the ‘60s, friends.

However, there’s a huge elephant in the room about this and that is the pollution and particulate matter that is a result of combusting aviation fuel. That dwarfs all the other stuff. Bill Gates and people shooting up a couple hundred pounds of aluminum and barium and strontium, I’m not saying it’s good but a bunch of garbage, sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere up 10, 12 miles, it’s horrible. It is a pimple on an elephant’s butt compared to what is emitted from commercial airliners.

This is a huge problem. Basically, the jet fuel, when it’s burned releases sulfur dioxide, which is converted into a sulfuric acid and then rains down on as sulfur as acid rain. Remember when we were kids, young people here hearing about acid rain? This is what happens. It’s an elephant in the room. That’s a problem.

There’s aluminum, barium, strontium, all of these things are also in jet fuel and other garbage. What happens is when the conditions are perfect you see the massive chemtrail in the sky, but it’s really a contrail, that’s what it really is. It’s a persistent pollution and it’s having a dimming effect. It’s not the deliberate stuff that’s being shot up into the stratosphere. That’s stratospheric aerosol injection and solar radiation management. That’s where they’re shooting up. Gates is doing this shooting up this garbage into the sky.

That stays up there and it cruises around. It literally they’re trying to dim the sun. The issue is that these jet airplanes are having an impact on our weather. They are having an impact like this pollution that they’re creating is having an impact and affecting our environment and our water and all this. A group of us are working on this. We will have much more to announce in the not-too-distant future.

Get Outside And Get Some Sunlight

What we’ll do is we’ll have you back on and we’ll have a whole episode just about your petition and geoengineering and what’s really going on and we’ll do a deep dive on that. I’d like to ask you just once again, I know you answered last time, but if the reader could do just one thing for their health, I’m going to put you on the spot and make you choose another thing that they can do.

I think something that is so important to do is to go outside and get sunlight or light in your eyes within an hour or two of the sun coming up every day. I can just tell you, when I go out and especially because we live in a very natural place, I walk in my neighborhood and I see mountains and trees and it’s so beautiful so I’m also getting a second dose of second injection of vibrancy which is nature. I can just walk and I see the beauty.

I think if you can get out and get light in your eyes every morning when you wake up, don’t go to your office, don’t whatever. Go outside and walk for ten minutes out in the natural light without any sunglasses or anything like that and it really helps so much with setting your circadian rhythms, with releasing serotonin into your system, which is just making you feel good. If you have the luxury of walking in a park or being near trees or in a beautiful natural environment, it just enhances that. It really gives you like a nice mood boost in the morning. It’s a really beneficial practice to engage in.

If you have the luxury of walking in a park, being near trees, or in a beautiful natural environment, it enhances your circadian rhythms and gives you a nice mood boost in the morning.

Absolutely. Thank you for that. Thank you so much for joining us for this second episode and for all the work you’re doing. On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, we thank you from the bottom of our heart.

Kendall, thank you so much for having me. I’m so grateful for Sally and the Weston Price Foundation and all the board members and all the members and all the people and I’m also just literally, truly honored and privileged to serve in the way that I am not only for Weston Price but in all the other work that I do. I’m grateful that I’ve been given this life and that I get to do things that help make a difference for other people. It’s a true gift.

You’re doing a fantastic job and once again, thank you, Leslie.

Thank you, Kendall.

—

Our guest was Leslie Manookian. To learn more about her work, visit HealthFreedomDefenseFund.org. Now, a note from one of our listeners. This comes from Kathleen in Colorado. “Thank you for the delicious sourdough bread recipe in the Wise Traditions journal, summer 2025, page five. The bread came out great. Fortunately, I had a sourdough starter on hand to make the bread. I’ve tried numerous other sourdough recipes with marginal success, but this hits a home run. I’ll be preparing this bread often. I used fresh milled Kamut flour and bake the bread in a stoneware mini loaf pan, which makes four loaves so I can share with others. As always, the quarterly journals are so full of fantastic information.”

Kathleen, thank you so much for sharing that. Hearing how these traditions are being brought to life in kitchens and communities across the country is truly inspiring. If you enjoy the show, we’d be grateful if you’d take a moment to leave a rating or review wherever you listen. Your feedback helps others discover the show and become part of this growing movement. Thank you for being here with us. Be well, be nourished, and be free.

About Leslie Manookian

Leslie Manookian is president and founder of Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF), a nonprofit which seeks to rectify health injustice through education, advocacy, and legal challenges to unjust mandates, laws, and policies that undermine our health freedoms and human rights. Under her leadership, HFDF has sued government and private businesses overturning medical mandates such as the federal travel mask mandate in 2022 and twice halting the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Covid vaccine mandate for employees.

She wrote and presented the Idaho Medical Freedom Act to the Idaho legislature, landmark legislation that passed April 4, 2025, making Idaho the first state in the nation to outlaw medical mandates for almost all. She is a former successful Wall Street business executive, documentary filmmaker, and qualified homeopath. She conceived, wrote and produced The Greater Good, an award-winning documentary exploring vaccines. She serves on the boards of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Health Freedom Idaho, and the Health Freedom Foundation. She has been featured in hundreds of TV, radio, print, and internet interviews as well as appearing at numerous conferences.

She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, a BA from Middlebury College, and M.L.C.Hom from Lakeland College of Homeopathy and PHom from the Academy of Practical Homeopathy.