Annie Taylor Award and Acceptance Speech by John Eastman

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Below are the video and transcript of John Eastman’s Annie Taylor Award acceptance speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2023 Restoration Weekend, which was held Oct. 26-29th at the Ritz Carlton  in New Orleans.

The Annie Taylor Award for Courage is awarded annually by the David Horowitz Freedom Center to people who have demonstrated unusual courage in adverse conditions and great danger.

Don’t miss it!

Michael Finch:

Many of you have seen this video over the years. But for the first timers, it’ll be a treat. But it’s always kind of fun, so I’d like to cue the video right now, please.

Video (History of Annie Taylor):

There are individuals in our history who exhibit extraordinary courage in facing great odds. This is the story of one such individual.

Niagara Falls, an amazing spectacle of the power of Mother Nature. Individuals have challenged her by crossing on tightropes and riding through the rapids in barrels, but no one had dared to challenge the falls itself. That is, until October 24th, 1901, when Annie Taylor, a spunky 63-year-old schoolteacher, prepared for the ultimate challenge: a plunge over the Canadian falls in a small wooden barrel.

Approximately 3000 thrill seekers had gathered one mile above the falls to witness the event. Several reporters and three photographers were on hand to capture the moment. She told the reporters that she was trying to raise money for two needy friends, and to pay off some of her debts.

Annie’s fearless character had now brought her to the ultimate challenge: the brink of Niagara Falls. Her 160-pound four-and-a-half foot wooden barrel was weighted on the bottom with an anvil to keep it upright in the water. Her assistant strapped her into a special harness and pumped air into a small hole, sealing it off with a cork.

Ironically, a non-swimmer, Annie, was about to embark on an incredible journey through and over some of the most turbulent water in the world.

A small boat towed the barrel out into the main stream of the Niagara River, where it was cut loose and Slammed by the rapids, first one way and then another. Mrs. Taylor was sure she’d hit the rocks, but in fact, the barrel made its trip as planned, and the tremendous power of the falls carried her down to the depths.

Miraculously, the barrel was not smashed open on impact, and after considerable tumbling at the base of the falls, it eventually popped free and floated to the rocky shoreline. There, her assistant pulled the barrel to shore, where a small crowd anxiously awaited to see if she had survived. The lid was opened, and someone shouted, “She’s still alive.”

Later, when asked about her ordeal, she said, “At first, the shock didn’t seem so great. It was only after the barrel hit the churning water that I began to suffer. The water kept pounding and spinning the barrel around and back under the falls. That’s when I fell unconscious.” Finally emerging from her barrel, Annie Taylor said, “No one ought ever do that again.”

Like Annie, there are some among us who dare to challenge the odds in ways that require character and fortitude. To honor them, we have created an award in the name of this unsung heroine of the past, a woman of independence and courage, inexplicably unmemorialized by the cheerleaders of the feminist left. The award thus serves the twin purposes of rescuing American heroes from the oblivion to which a left-wing media would prefer to consign them, while in the process rebuking the pretenders of the left, whose only real cause is themselves.

This is the 28th anniversary of the presentation of the Annie Taylor Awards. Since 1994, previous recipients include men and women who, through their actions against great odds, have exhibited high integrity and courage. From 2012 on, we honored Arizona Senator Russell Pearce and Justice Department whistleblower J. Christian Adams; anti-jihad activist Pamela Geller; voting rights activist Catherine Engelbrecht; human rights activist Baroness Caroline Cox; conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza; Hollywood producer Gerald Molen; U.S. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann; University of Colorado Regent Sue Sharkey; DC Mayor and school reformer Adrian Fenty; activist Cleta Mitchell; Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions; Sheriff David A. Clark Jr.; writer and activist Milo Yiannopoulos; Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton; political strategist Steve Bannon; Young America’s Foundation President Ron Robinson; former Google engineer James Damore;  conservative activist and Brexit founder Candace Owens; Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and Professors Jason Hill and John McAdams; Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson; and author and journalist Andy Neal. Last year’s recipients were Congressman Louie Gohmert and activist Brandon Straka.

And now the awards for this year’s recipients.

Michael Finch:

Thank you very much. This year, we’re giving one award. It is a really special award. And there are some incredible names on there, I don’t think anyone in 28 years deserves the award more than this year’s winner. It’s going to be a little bit different. He’s going to accept the award and then give longer remarks not just to thank you, because it’s a story that we all — some of us are not familiar with. It’s a story that we all need to hear and how seriously our freedoms are being threatened. I’m going to ask, because she’s had to suffer through a lot of this as well, this tyranny, I’m going to ask Elizabeth Eastman to come up and do a very short introduction, and then I’m going to present the award to John Eastman. So, Elizabeth Eastman, please.

Elizabeth Eastman Introduction:

It truly is a distinct honor to introduce my husband of more than 30 years. I’ll try not to cry. You know, when, when I took those vows that said, for better or for worse, it was like I did not read that fine print. Good heavens. You know. But we’re still married. And I suspect ’til death do us part is in the cards, it is in the cards. No, no, no. It absolutely is in the cards. We have been blessed by two wonderful children. Like I say, we’ve been married for more than 30 years. We met in graduate school. We are both out of Claremont Graduate School. We’re both PhDs out of Claremont. Prior to John coming to Claremont, he completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Dallas in Politics and Economics.

When we met in graduate school, it was one of our professors, perhaps some of you will recognize the name, William Allen, who’s recently been in the news. He was part of the Black History curriculum — he supported drafting the black history curriculum in Florida, in the state of Florida. So he’s been in the news quite recently. But I think he realized, and John will certainly attest to this, he knew that John would never finish without somebody turning the screws.

So we defended on the same day; I defended at 9AM, he defended at 1PM. And then that evening, we had a party to celebrate my seventh month of pregnancy, because our son was born two months later, and then our daughter was born two years later. And we now have an 18-month-old grandchildren – granddaughter — so things are going well. But I will say that once we finished our PhDs, I said, “Okay, one of us has to get a job because I’m pregnant, so I know what kind of work I’m going to be doing, right?” John went on to law school to the at the University of Chicago, did extremely well, had a clerkship with Justice Michael Luttig, who we pray for, and Justice Clarence Thomas. After that, he joined the law firm of Kirkland and Ellis in Los Angeles to work on the appellate practice work there for two years. And when it came down to having to decide where he could represent the pro-bono, represent through pro-bono work, the Boy Scouts of America, K and E said no, and John Eastman said yes. And I said, “Just so long as we can make that mortgage payment, we are just fine.”

And sure enough, he found a way to make that mortgage payment. He started his teaching career at Chapman University. He taught there for many years, subsequently became dean and would likely be working there today, but for the fact that he represented Donald Trump.

So that was history. But hey, you know, so life’s a merry-go-round. He found other things to do. But within that time, he founded the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute. Claremont has remained a supporter of John, and he remains employed at the Claremont Institute. We’re truly grateful for that. But throughout his career, he’s lectured to a number of justices and judges, a number of student groups, as well as law schools, etc.

A distinguished teaching career, a distinguished publishing career, and a distinguished career to lecture many people on the Constitution. He is a great defender of the Constitution, and interestingly enough, in this day and age, that has, well, brought him to be in that barrel, going over the cliff. He will certainly share that with you. But I will say it’s been an adventure. It’s been a roller coaster. I can’t say whether we’re going up or whether we’re going down. It seems to change daily. But say what you will might happen, my husband is on the front lines. It’s no fun. But I always tell people it’s the entire country. And there’s a great deal to fight for and it’s worth fighting for. So I present you my husband, John Eastman. Thank you.

Michael Finch:

Thank you. Thank you Elizabeth. And John’s going to tell the story about what happened, what the government’s trying to do to him. I just want to say I’m going to quote Christopher Flannery, who is one of the founders of the Claremont Institute and a longtime friend, of course, of John. “John Eastman is standing up to the tyrannical violence of this machine because he thinks the Stalinist Democrats are not just tyrants, but usurpers.”

I agree with him. And so think he is an American hero. Ladies and gentlemen, very proud to present the award to John Eastman, Professor John Eastman.

John Eastman:

Wow. Thank you. I am humbled. What’s gone on in this country and in the world over the last three weeks kind of put this in perspective, but I’ve got a strange feeling that somehow the election of 2020 going south on us, because it was stolen, contributed to what we’ve seen in the last three weeks. So I think my work on behalf of President Trump has meaning for what we’re seeing. This would not have happened if President Trump had been given the office that we, the American people, elected him to have.

I also have to offer a bit of an apology. I was dean of the law school at Chapman University and saw our elected officials, the attorney general’s office in particular, refusing to defend an initiative of the people of California, Proposition Eight, on same-sex marriage. And I thought, I’m going to run for attorney general to try and be in a position to defend what we, the people in California, had done.

I lost in the primary, not by much, to Steve Cooley. And then he went on to lose to a lady by the name of Kamala Harris. So if I had won that primary, I think I would have beat her and we wouldn’t have to be dealing with her on the national stage right now. So my apologies for that.

I want to give you a little bit more about who I am. My wife did a wonderful job. And by the way, our children, we often get a question there. They’re both wonderful children. They’re now not so children: my son is 30 and my daughter, 28. They’re both married. Starting to produce grandchildren for us is the thing everybody wants. People ask us, “How did they come out so conservative?” And we have two different answers to that. I’m going to tell you mine first and I’ll tell you the true story. Mine is when they hit those teenage years and started rebelling against the parents. I got my old Grateful Dead shirts out and they rebelled in the right direction.

The real story is my wife declined to take on tenured positions to stay as part time so she could be home with the kids. And she read everything they read and were assigned to read throughout grade school, elementary school, middle school, high school, even into college. And we talked about it every night at dinner. So no matter how bad the instruction they were getting was, they got that counterbalance from us. Every night. Every night. Every night. And it works. It works. And every single one of us should rededicate ourselves to that.

So who am I? So I clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court of the United States. A fabulous, fabulous thing. But I also, I also was a law professor and a dean. I’ve been involved in over 200 cases in the Supreme Court of the United States. Got that one there [shows photo]. I’m arguing the case in the background. The artist had my wife and children, were in the in the Justices’ box, the guest box for the Justices during that, over 200 cases dealing with pushback against the administrative state or the Kelo case, dealing, trying to defend property rights or religious freedom. Over and over and over again. And this was one of the cases that I argued. I also frequently testified before Congress. Here [shows photo] I was testifying against the IRS for the outrageous behavior they did in blocking True the Vote and a lot of other conservative organizations from getting their, getting their nonprofit status.

So I’ve been frequently called on as a constitutional expert. I was the expert in Florida in 2000 when they were trying to figure out what to do with their electoral votes. But already dark clouds were on the horizon back in 2000. I saw it and I complained a bit about it. But like many of us, I did not do much else.

And then I got a call from this guy [shows photo]. He called me and asked me to represent him in one of the election challenges that would just been filed in the Supreme Court in United States by the state of Texas. I filed a brief on his behalf. And here it is. Before the Supreme Court. Normally representing the president of the United States before the Supreme Court of the United States would be a capstone on any lawyer’s professional career.

My daughter was so excited, she even made a copy of this, framed it, and gave it to me for Christmas that year. Our daughter, I should say. Thank you, Elizabeth, for raising her so well. It was an illegal election, and we articulated that in this brief. What made it so illegal? Well, Article two, Section one of the Constitution is pretty clear. I often joke the Constitution is written so clearly that even lawyers can understand it. By the way, lawyers, you know, you’ve all heard lawyer jokes, right? There are zillions of them. I’m here to tell you that’s not true. Only two of those jokes are actually jokes. The rest of it is all true. Article two. This is pretty clear. Each state shall appoint, in such a manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors.

That’s unambiguous. We choose our presidential electors by the manner that the legislature has set out. That means that the county clerk in Milwaukee doesn’t get to change the rules. The secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doesn’t get to change the rules. The court in Pennsylvania doesn’t get to change the rules. And when they did, and there’s no dispute about that they did that, the Constitution says the election was conducted not only illegally, but unconstitutionally.

That’s what we were dealing with. I’ll just give you a few examples. In Georgia, the secretary of state entered into a settlement agreement about six months before the election that completely obliterated or eviscerated their signature verification process. They started running portable election precincts in Atlanta. Now, if you know anything about Atlanta’s electorate, it’s pretty heavily Democrat, and they were running precincts all over town together to sweep up as many ballots as they could. That’s illegal under Georgia law, because you’re supposed to have a fixed place of a precinct, and notify people where it is so party of candidate observers can be there to make sure nothing nefarious goes on. Little hard to do that with a portable bus that kept moving every 10 minutes.

In Pennsylvania, the secretary of the commonwealth and in response to a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters, I know that’s a bipartisan, nonpartisan organization, the League of Women Voters filed suit in August of 2020, said, “The signature verification we do here in Pennsylvania and have been doing here for 100 years under the statutes, violates federal due process. Because when you disqualify a ballot because a signature didn’t look anything like the signature on file, you’re not giving notice to the voter and an opportunity to cure.”

So the purpose of the lawsuit was to get notice and an opportunity to cure on top of this signature verification process. The Secretary of the Commonwealth unilaterally said, “This is an easy suit. I just don’t think we have a signature verification process at all. So I’ll tell you what, why don’t I get rid of signature verification altogether and then we can dismiss the suit with this collusive settlement.”

She realized after doing that, she was a little bit out on a limb. So she filed what’s in Pennsylvania called a warrant, a king’s bench warrant, an action in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If I ever run into Ms. Boockvar, I’m going to say, you know, you haven’t had a king in Pennsylvania since 1776, but the partisan elected Pennsylvania Supreme Court obliged and obliterated signature verification, not just weakened it like they did down in Georgia, but just got rid of it.

There are about a dozen statutes that not only have signature verification, but explain how it’s supposed to be conducted. And the court said, “Well, those are just, you know, archaic statutes, that are a holdover from an old era. They really don’t have any meaning anymore,” and just unilaterally got rid of signature verification. And we’ve estimated it affected about 75,000 pro-Biden votes, 120,000 altogether but 2 to 1 absentee balloting was going for Biden. So it affected about 75,000 votes in the state of Pennsylvania, where the margin was 80,000. That one issue alone almost closes the entire gap.

There was another issue in Pennsylvania. There’s a very clear law when absentee ballots come in, they’re supposed to be locked away under seal and key until 7AM the morning of the election, where they start pre-canvassing, looking at the outer envelope, verifying that it’s signed and dated and the address filled in. That’s another thing the Pennsylvania Supreme Court got rid of, said we don’t know what “fill in” means. So if they didn’t fill in the address, you still have to count the ballots because “fill in” is vague. But the law in Pennsylvania was very clear. You cannot disclose the results of that pre-canvass meeting. In other words, you can’t tell anybody whose votes have been disqualified until after the close of polls.

Well, at 8:30 p.m. on Monday night, the night before the election, the deputy secretary state sent a notice around to all the county clerks, saying, “We’re going to give you this information early in the day on Election Day” — illegally – “so that you can have your party operatives notify their voters to get them out to vote.”

Now, that’s illegal enough. But here’s the really troubling thing. The Friday before Democrat operatives in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh started advertising on their Facebook and Twitter pages for workers to help with the ballot curing effort. Three days before the ballot curing effort was made possible by this illegal action by the deputy secretary of state.

In Wisconsin, they came up with this creative thing called Democracy in the Park. In Wisconsin, you have to mail in your ballot personally or deliver it in person to the county clerk or one of the county clerk’s employees. So they deputized a bunch of Biden volunteers to go to all 200 parks in Madison, Wisconsin, on the two Saturdays before the election. They called them human drop boxes. Now, mind you, drop boxes in Wisconsin have been held to be illegal. So human drop boxes were doubly illegal. They collected 17,500 ballots in that one maneuver. Illegally. 20,000 votes was the margin in Wisconsin. That one issue alone was almost the entire margin.

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Mike Gabelman was hired by the legislature to do a thorough investigation. His subpoenas were ignored left and right by government officials. Ask Steve Bannon what happens if you ignore a subpoena from a legislative body, or Peter Navarro. They go to jail. Ask what happened to the secretary of State or the attorney general in Wisconsin for ignoring the subpoenas. They get awards.

Anyway, they ignored the subpoenas, but he uncovered a massive fraud in Wisconsin. One of the laws in Wisconsin says when you go into nursing homes to get ballots, you have to have a bipartisan team to go in there to make sure undue pressure is not brought on people in nursing homes to cast ballots a certain way. The secretary of state of Wisconsin barred those bipartisan teams from going into nursing homes. There’s the illegality that opened the door for fraud. We now know because of Justice Gabelman’s investigative report, that malevolent actors walked through that fraudulent door. Turnout rates in Wisconsin, nursing homes went from 20 to 30%, historical average to nearly 100%, including in memory wings of nursing homes. And scores and thousands of the ballots were in the same handwriting. So the door was opened by the illegality, people walked through the door and committed fraud in numbers ten times greater than the 20,000 margin of vote in Wisconsin. And I’m not making this stuff up. These things have subsequently been held to be illegal.

But the courts punted every single time almost. They said, well, if you brought the challenge to the – oh, one other thing in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, if you absentee vote, you have to be submit an ID with your vote, your absentee ballot application. So it’s one of the minor checks against fraud. Unless you’re indefinitely confined, you don’t got to figure out a way to get down to the FedEx thing to make a copy of your driver’s license or your whatever other ID you had. So the county clerks in Milwaukee and in Madison, heavily Democrat areas, posted on their Facebook, “If you’re afraid of COVID, you can claim” – illegally – “indefinitely confined status and not provide your voter I.D..” Another illegality that opened the door for fraud. A lawsuit was brought challenging that, and the courts dismissed it on the front end. They said, “Well, we don’t know whether they’re actually going to do that illegal thing come Election Day. So the case isn’t yet ripe.”

And then when they did that thing on Election Day and the suit was brought after the illegal thing had been done, they said, “You can’t wait till your guy loses and bring a suit. You’re too late.” How many of you heard 65 cases around the country? All ruled against Trump, but all but about eight of them didn’t even reach the merits.

What’s that? Yeah. No, it’s not true. Most of the cases didn’t even look at the merits. They dismissed it because it was the wrong person bringing it. They dismissed it because it was too early. They dismissed it because it was too late. Jurisdictionally, the courts abdicated their responsibility to get to the bottom of what was going on. We had this happen all the time.

So we’re confronted with all this stuff. Every one of those things violated Article two that assigns this power to the state legislature. So I’m brought in to do this brief on behalf of the president in the Texas versus Pennsylvania case. And the Supreme Court punted, too. They said, Texas doesn’t have standing. I don’t think that was true. They just didn’t want to touch the case. And so there’s another provision. And then I’m looking at, okay, what do we do next? I the courts aren’t going to take it up, we’ve got one last shot here to deal with this. You’ve heard of the so-called fake electors scheme. It’s the same scheme that then-Senator John Kennedy’s electors in Hawaii did in 1960.

Richard Nixon won Hawaii on Election Day. The governor of Hawaii certified his election and his electors met on the designated day. But the Kennedy electors had filed an election challenge. And so they met on that designated day as well. Why? Because if the election challenge went their way and they didn’t meet and vote on that day, there was a serious constitutional question on whether those votes could be counted, even if they were later certified.

How do we know this? Once in our history this happened. Let me see. I’m looking around. No, I don’t think any of you were there. 1856 in Wisconsin, there was a blizzard and the electors couldn’t meet on the designated day. One of the few things Congress has authority over in the election of a president is setting the date for the electors to meet and cast their votes. And the Wisconsin electors, because of the blizzard, couldn’t meet. And Congress debated for two full days on whether they could count those electors or not. The acting vice president, we didn’t have a vice president at the time, but the person filling the role of the vice president is the president of the Senate, counted the votes. He unilaterally determined to count those votes because Congress itself hadn’t been able to resolve the issue.

It still remains an open question whether if somebody doesn’t meet on the designated day and they’re subsequently confirmed as the actual winners, whether their votes can be counted. In Georgia, there was a pending election challenge. It was filed on December 4th. We didn’t get a judge appointed to that case until December 30th. The judge issued an order on the morning of January 4th, setting the initial status conference for January 8th, two days after the joint session of Congress would have mooted the case.

These were the kind of things we’re dealing with. And so the question I had was, Is there anything else we can do about it? So you look at the 12th Amendment, the 12th Amendment’s language here is identical to the original Article two language. This is not why we had it. Remember that anybody. No, no. The Thomas Jefferson election 1800. I don’t think we had anybody here there, either. But if you’ve read your history books, you know, Aaron Burr got the same number of votes as Thomas Jefferson. Everybody knew he was supposed to be the vice president candidate, but it tied, and it got sent to the House of Representatives and some 28 ballots later in the House of Representatives, somebody finally said, “Look, everybody knows Thomas Jefferson’s supposed to be president.”

They passed the 12th Amendment to fix that problem. But this language stayed the same: “The president of the Senate,” that’s the vice president of the United States, “shall open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” And what role does Congress have in this? Just to be present. “This shall happen in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives.” They’re just there to make sure the vice president doesn’t do anything untoward. Why do we know that? Because in the records of the federal convention, the one thing that is clear is they did not want Congress having a role in the choosing of the president, none whatsoever, because it would destroy separation of powers to make the president subservient to Congress. We did not want a parliamentary system, and that separation of powers has served us well to protect our liberty for over 200 years. They want to destroy that with Congress usurping powers that the constitutional founders deliberately declined to give to it.

So this is what I said to the vice president of the United States. By the way. what is sad state of affairs, he’s pulled out of the race. I always thought it a little bit odd, petitioning his fellow citizens to become the leader of the free world by making a pitch that he was just a potted plant who had could do nothing on January 6th. It’s an odd thing, don’t you think? Anyway, so this was the advice. More than 100 state legislators in all of the swing states had told him their election had been conducted illegally. It was likely that the illegality affected more ballots than the margins in each of those states. “The election,” quote, “should not have been certified.” That was the president pro tempore of the state Senate in Pennsylvania on behalf of a majority of the state Senate. It should not have been certified. “Give us some time, because our governors refused to call us into special session. We’re now coming back into regular session. Give us to some time to assess the impact. And if we determine that the rightful winner of that election is not the one that’s certified, we’re going to let you know. We’re also going to let you know if Biden, in fact, had won the election. We’ll let you know that, too, after we’ve conducted this brief review so that the American people can understand and believe that the actual winner of the election was the one that was certified and going to be sworn in.”

That’s all we asked. For taking such a position, and for appearing on Steve Bannon and a number of other shows, I got the most extraordinary letter. First of all, a complaint by a group called States United Democracy Center. And another group filed a complaint against me with the Supreme Court. United States called the 65 Project. I’ll talk a little bit about the 65 Project. The head of the organization says their mission is 65 Project is named after the 65 cases that that were brought. “Our mission is not just to have every lawyer that work on any of those cases disbarred, but to make them so toxic in their firms and their communities that right wing legal talent will never take on election challenges again.”

That’s a direct quote. That’s their mission. Think about what that means, not just for election integrity in 2024 or 2028. We will never have a free election again if lawyers aren’t willing to step up and bring challenges to the illegality that occurred. Now, I know, I know, you know, lawyers. The reason Shakespeare gets such a laugh line about “First thing we do, we kill all the lawyers,” but that’s not what Shakespeare actually meant. The line is given by a guy named Dick the Butcher, who’s involved in organizing a coup against the existing government. And the first thing you do is kill all the lawyers because they will stand in the way of people who will undertake a coup, and they want to destroy the lawyers who are trying to stand up to the coup that we are witnessing.

It started in 2016, the Russia hoax, the altering, the falsification, the doctoring of documents to the FISA court, to spy on the opposing political candidate for president, to continue to spy him after he was elected and to continue to spy him after he was inaugurated into office. This is the biggest political scandal in our nation’s history, and we’ve hardly heard a word about it.

So this is what I was tasked to do. It was the greatest honor of my life to be asked to do it. It kind of brought all my education and my experience together all at once. And I thought, wow, what a great thing. And like I said, my daughter gave me a copy of that brief as a Christmas present that year.

There I am with Rudy out in front of the White House, speaking to a half million people on the mall, a half million people who were angry about what they had seen with their own eyes, but even more angry with our leaders, trying to tell them that there was nothing to see here, nothing to see here, go home and be like sheep. Don’t raise any question.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. So I get this California bar thing. We start on Monday, week ten – week ten — of a full-scale trial before the California Bar court. I’ll give you a couple examples of the charges against me. They said that when on the Mall, I said there was some serious fraud. Dead people voted, for example. They claim that was a false statement. And in the same paragraph where they claim that this is a false statement, an example of moral turpitude that ought to get me disbarred, they say, “And we know this was false and he knew it was false because the auditor general of Michigan has said only 616 dead people voted.”

I said, “Dead people voted. You’ve admitted dead people voted.” And they’re saying that I was the one making false statements. This is what we saw, but it’s worse than that now, because they have crossed the Rubicon. Not only are they trying to deprive people, and you think this is going to stop at the election litigation if you represent if you’re a lawyer representing parents before a school board, they’re coming after you next. How about property rights when they’re trying to take property away? You represent those things, you’re going against the common good as they’ve defined it. In all of these things are trying to destroy our adversarial system of justice, which is there to protect our freedoms and our liberty. That’s what’s going on. It’s part of the Marxist coup that started in 2008, 2016 at the very latest.

So here’s the latest. So I won’t show you my mug shot. I wasn’t as clever in marketing as President Trump was. The mug shot on the mugs. He’s made a lot of money. Some clever wag put out the Batman edition in case you can’t quite tell who I am. There it is [shows photo]. Dr. Freeze became Mr. Freeze when his cryogenic thing went wrong. So, you know, Dr. Eastman, I thought Dr. Freeze. That’s pretty good. And it was a good picture, so to speak.

But they’re trying now to criminalize this broad-ranging RICO claim. I’m indicted coconspirator number three in Georgia, I’m unindicted coconspirator number two in D.C. The first couple of people in Georgia have copped pleas in order to get no jail time. I got a call from ABC. It said, “If they invite you to do a plea, will you do it?” I said, “Yeah, I’ll enter into it, here’s the terms. They drop the charges against me. I won’t bring a malicious prosecution against them, and I will swear to tell the truth at the trial.” I haven’t that offer presented to me yet.

So the California bar matter itself has cost us about a half a million dollars for ten weeks of trial. I had to fight a January 6 subpoena to my former employer. They were going to turn over 94,000 pages of my client files without a privilege review. I had to file suit and then fought eight months for the privilege review on that. That costs another half a million dollars. The lawyers down in Georgia wouldn’t even touch this without $1,000,000 upfront retainer. I finally, after speaking to about six or seven people, found somebody who would do it hourly. But he estimates it’ll be about $1,000,000 to a million and a half before they’re done. So I am not critical of the folks that are copping pleas down there for a $6,000 fine and an apology letter and no jail time because they’re looking at $1000000 to $2 million in legal defense if they don’t do it.

But I’ve decided this is the battle for our time and my career, my education, my experience, my Supreme Court practice, my clerkship, my support of family have probably equipped me better than almost anybody else to take the lead on this fight. And by God, that’s what we’re going to do.

And I continue to fight on other fronts as well. I got to tell you, a case we filed on Monday, you may have seen this one in the news, the kind of courage that is starting to catch on with our young people. And I’m optimistic. I know there’s a whole lot of those numbers about Hamas are terrible, but there are young people that are seeing what’s going on and standing up. So the 12-year-old boy in Colorado Springs, he had a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack, and his teacher kicked him out of class because the teacher said that flag is a symbol of slavery. Now, this 12-year-old knew more than his teacher did. And so it’s not, it’s a symbol of throwing off a tyrannical government. And he continued to fight, and his mother went there to met with the principal, and they happened to record it and it went viral. The school has finally backed down, but they still won’t let him wear a simple “I support Second Amendment rights” badge, and his classmates are printed up Gadsden Flags stickers and post them on their lockers, and the school people are taking them down as quickly as they post them up.

He was prohibited, prohibited from running for school student body president because he missed a couple of homework assignments while he was expelled from school during all of this. So we’re filing suit. We filed the suit collaboratively with Mountain State’s Legal Foundation on behalf of Jayden Rodriguez. This is the man who’s going to carry the baton for freedom of our country into the next generation.

And it’s wonderful to represent people like him. Let me close with this. Well, no, let me go to this one first. We set up a legal defense fund, because I don’t want to impoverish my wife and her retirement if I end up in prison for the next 20 years. So I want to try and keep some of our retirement intact, and the total bills are probably going to be about $2 million before we’re all said and done. I’ve raised, you can see here over a half a million dollars from people giving five or $10 at a time. This is a site. The website is at the top. GiveSendGo. It’s a Christian site. People can send prayers as well as donations. And we read the prayers. They’re heartwarming, particularly she talked about the roller coaster. They’re heartwarming, particularly when we’re at the bottoms of those roller coasters. But at one of the bottom points, we both came to the realization that my life is equipped us to deal with this probably better than almost anybody else. And so that’s what we’re doing.

If you have the wherewithal, I know of people who have the wherewithal to send money to support this thing, please do. If you want a tax-deductible donation, don’t go this fight. Call me because there are a couple of nonprofits that are supporting our efforts as well. And we can I can give you information about how to route things through there.

The lovely lady that sent me $5 last week and said, “I wish I could send more, but I’m on a fixed income and Social Security and I can’t afford it.” Those, those are heartwarming. But I also need some people stepping up. I got to raise a million by February when the Georgia thing goes to trial. I need some people stepping up with ten or 20 or $50,000 checks. I’ll bet some of you in this room know folks that are in that league. And please, please reach out to me and help.

So I want to close with this. The Claremont Institute runs a summer series of summer fellowship programs, and I teach in them the Publius Program for recent college grads, the Lincoln Fellows program for Mid-career People, and the John Marshall Fellows program for recent law school grads. And so it’s become a bit self-selecting. I teach primarily in the Marshall Fellows program. And so we wanted to know with all the stuff that I’m dealing with, whether students would still want to come in the program and tarnish their own resumes by having studied with me. And they all came and they always, at the end of the program, kind of roast each other. It’s great fun. We have a fancy dinner, lots of drink, and they roast each other. And this one fellow got up and he roasted everybody in the room and then he started to roast me. He said, “Flash forward to that night. Let me see here. We’ve got Phil Muñoz, Notre Dame professor, debating Eastman about the religion clauses, and a SWAT team comes rappelling over balcony and Jack Smith slams through the wall and arrests Eastman. And we’re all wondering, are we going to be next on or Eastman? And Eastman continued on. ‘Now, the free exercise clause is rooted in natural law principles,’ without missing a beat.” And then he goes on, and he quotes a rapper, “Anybody not trying to make America great again, you’re a pawn, you a clown. Better know where I stand.”

And then he says, “And that led him to his final question for all of us tonight to his colleagues in the program. ‘O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?’ Consider the question’s focus: not whether the flag yet waves, but over what kind of land? Is it waving over the land of the coward and home of the slave, or the land of the free and the home of the brave?

“Our former president got indicted. It’s not a joke that all of us are not on some list. I know you just spent a year watching cities burn and families — the riots and looting, loss and heartache, empty streets and empty churches. Everything coming out of our screens is fake. And every institution we turn to with our trust and hope in outstretched hands, one after another, letting us down like wolves, shedding their sheep’s clothing, more like a priest and a Levite crossing the road. After this week, I know you don’t need more prophetic screams or poetic dreams about the impending dystopia you might have empathy for. Because the anesthetic of decadence has reached its expiration, and the pain from our cultural amputation of truth, beauty and love has finally awakened.

“It’s 1789, and Jacobins are at the gates. So we wait the long night between twilight’s last gleaming and the dawn’s early light, hoping for some future sunrise. We strain in the dark, looking for proof through the night that the flag’s still there, that those broad stripes and bright stars are still gallantly streaming. I’ve prayed for redeeming, asking God for hope. And over this last week, God’s answered my prayer and given me proof in the night. Remember how the song goes: The light in the darkness is not the sunrise, it’s the rockets, it’s the bombs.

“In this generation of darkness, the free and the brave find proof we are still fighting by the incandescent lighting of the rockets’ red glare. With bombs bursting in air, we see by the fighting light of warfare, in the fire, in the combat, we see if there’s still resistance, if there’s a still a cause worth hoping and dying for. That there is a light shining in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it, we know we are still alive because we are still fighting.

“And this week in the rockets’ red glare I’ve seen in your faces, I have met your eyes and I’ve seen that there’s hope there, too. This week, I’ve learned that war is upon us and I’ll have no choice but to fight, and I’ve learned that when I do, I won’t be fighting alone. So I propose a toast.” (This is self-aggrandizing, I apologize, that’s why I put the mug shot up earlier and kind of counteracted.) “From the text of two Corinthians chapter four, to the most spectacular display of courage I’ve ever seen, to Professor Eastman. Hard pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair. Persecuted but not abandoned for our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. May his courage be contagious.”

And to Jayden Rodriguez, pass the baton. Courage is contagious. And thank you all for this wonderful award.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I meant to say with Annie Taylor, there’s a fine line between courage and crazy. A lot of people have accused me of crazy, but it’s courage. Thank you.