If You Need an Exemption, You Were Never Free

It's 8 PM and I've just walked through the door after a long day, only to receive the call that sent my blood pressure through the roof. My son—a Division I athlete who just stepped onto campus as a freshman, ready to begin the next chapter of his life—was not cleared to participate in practice today.

Not because he's injured.

Not because he's academically ineligible.

Not because he lacks a physical.

He was barred from his first full day as a college athlete because he doesn't have a meningitis vaccination. Now I'm hunched over my laptop, crafting the perfect grovel—not a grant proposal or a research paper, but a "personal statement" begging a university to allow my scholarship athlete son to participate in the program he's worked his entire life to reach without injecting himself with a pharmaceutical product that has never been properly tested against a real placebo.

My son, who is in peak physical condition as a college athlete, who rarely gets sick, who has dedicated his life to optimizing his health and performance—this healthy young man apparently poses such a mortal threat to public safety that I must compose an academic dissertation justifying his right to bodily autonomy. To be fair to the University this is a state law.

My family and I hold strong philosophical objections to government-mandated medical interventions. We believe that medical decisions should remain a matter of personal choice, made in consultation with healthcare providers who understand an individual's unique health profile and circumstances.

After careful examination of available scientific literature and data regarding meningitis vaccination, we have concluded that the risk-benefit analysis does not support this intervention in my particular case. As a healthy athlete with no underlying health conditions that would place me at increased risk, we believe the potential risks associated with the vaccine outweigh the potential benefits for someone in my demographic and health status.

The rage that courses through me as I type each carefully measured word isn't just about vaccines or mandates or bureaucratic incompetence. It's about what we've become as a people. It's about the profound, soul-crushing realization that in the land of the free, we now write permission slips to exercise the most basic human rights.

Fuck them.

But then the internal war begins. Should I use this moment as my line in the sand, my chance to resist this institutional tyranny? Part of me wants to tell these bureaucratic parasites exactly where they can shove their mandates. But then I think about my son—an independent young man who just wants to start practicing with his team and take his summer classes. He's worked his entire life for this opportunity, and here I am, faced with the agonizing choice between principle and his future.

We could just craft the exemption and move on, I tell myself. It’s not about me.

Pick our battles.

But then I think about all the other kids who simply rolled up their sleeves without question, never seeing the data that exposes the mathematical insanity behind forcing these interventions on healthy young people.

My heart starts racing. My face flushes red with fury at the systematic deception, the institutional cowardice, the complete abandonment of informed consent.

This is the devil's bargain they've designed: Make resistance so costly that even principled people will choose compliance to protect what they love most.

But then I catch myself falling into the trap, the same psychological snare that's captured millions of Americans. I feel my shoulders relax as my mind starts its familiar dance of rationalization:

Come on, Roger, you're being dramatic. This exemption process exists to protect your freedom, right? They're being reasonable—they're giving you a choice. It's not tyranny if there's an exemption. Stop being so paranoid. You're starting to sound like one of those conspiracy theorists.

WTF is an Exemption… Really?

Let's examine what the word "exemption" actually reveals about this perverted system. An exemption suggests that exercising independent medical judgment, examining scientific evidence, and challenging orthodoxy with critical thinking is somehow deviant behavior requiring special permission. The very concept assumes that the default human condition is unthinking compliance with whatever medical intervention the state deems necessary. You do not have the inherent authority to make decisions about your own body or your child's body—that authority belongs to the state. They instruct you what needs to be done, and if you dare defy it, well, it's on you to prove your case with a fucking doctoral dissertation.

Let's forget the inconvenient fact that these medical interventions have never been proven to actually protect others (yes this not up for debate). Let's ignore the simple logic that would suggest: Hey, if someone else is vaccinated and it actually works, wouldn't that protect them from my unvaccinated son?

But no—stop asking those kinds of questions, peasant. Stop using your brain. Stop exercising the critical thinking skills that separate humans from livestock. Just submit to the needle and be grateful we're even allowing you to breathe the same air as the compliant masses. The exemption process isn't about accommodation—it's about making resistance so humiliating and bureaucratically burdensome that most people will choose submission over the degrading spectacle of having to justify their basic human rights.

And there it is—the insidious beauty of their system. They've designed the perfect psychological pressure valve. Just enough "choice" to prevent open rebellion, just enough bureaucratic process to make resistance feel unreasonable. The exemption isn't protection for my freedom; it's protection for their system. It allows people like me to vent our frustration through paperwork instead of revolution.

The mind desperately wants to resolve this cognitive dissonance. It's psychologically easier to believe that writing permission slips proves the system is fair than to confront the terrifying reality that we're not actually free. The exemption process isn't evidence of institutional benevolence—it's evidence of institutional genius. They've convinced us to be grateful for the opportunity to beg.

Comply or Else

This moment takes me back to watching my oldest daughter navigate the COVID mandates during her college years. What these institutions did to students represents one of the most troubling periods in American educational history. They held young people's futures hostage—their degrees, their career prospects, their very ability to participate in society—over an experimental medical intervention that the data clearly showed provided minimal benefit to their age group while carrying real risks. Risk we are only now fully realizing.

The numbers don't lie, though institutions desperately tried to bury them. A devastating peer-reviewed analysis published in the Journal of Medical Ethics—co-authored by epidemiologist Allison Krug, whom I recently interviewed on my podcast before YouTube decided her expertise was too dangerous for public consumption—revealed that over 31,000 young adults needed COVID boosters to prevent just one hospitalization, while causing 18.5 serious adverse events in the process. You won’t hear that on the nightly news. Watch the full interview here.

Let that nightmare sink in: To POTENTIALLY reduce the risk of one person, we knowingly harmed eighteen others. And for this criminally insane risk-benefit ratio, universities were willing to destroy students' lives, threaten their academic standing, and exile them from campus like medieval lepers.

The study, led by researchers including Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad—who now head the FDA and CDC respectively under the new administration—provided the scientific evidence that should have ended booster mandates immediately. Instead, institutions doubled down on their medieval approach, proving that data, evidence, and basic mathematical literacy were no match for institutional hysteria and pharmaceutical capture.

The beautiful irony? The very scientists who were ignored, censored, and dismissed as "anti-vaccine" when they published this devastating analysis are now running the agencies that rubber-stamped these insane mandates. The researchers who dared to do actual risk-benefit math while the rest of the medical establishment was drunk on pharmaceutical money and political compliance are now in charge of cleaning up the mess.

It's almost poetic justice—except for all the young people who were coerced into unnecessary medical interventions while the adults who should have been protecting them were busy protecting their careers and institutional reputations instead.

The threats my daughter faced from professors, the academic persecution, the forced testing regimens that treated her like a walking bioweapon, the ultimate exile to Orlando for clinical placements because apparently the entire Philadelphia region was too pure to accept an unvaccinated health student—all of it was justified by numbers that any honest epidemiologist would have called barbaric. But honesty, it seems, had become a casualty of institutional hysteria.

And just to underscore the Orwellian nightmare we're still living in, as I write this article, my recent podcast conversation with epidemiologist Allison Krug has been flagged by YouTube for "misinformation."

What was our crime?

Discussing peer-reviewed studies, examining actual data, questioning whether universal medical mandates make sense when risk profiles vary dramatically by age and health status. Apparently, having a trained epidemiologist analyze epidemiological data is now too dangerous for public consumption. The platforms that allow endless streams of actual misinformation somehow find a measured conversation between a psychologist and an epidemiologist threatening enough to suppress.

The absurdity is fucking suffocating, but it reveals something far more sinister about the current moment: We're living through the complete inversion of scientific inquiry, where asking questions is heresy and blind compliance is virtue. As I continue crafting this degrading exemption statement, my fury builds with every word I'm forced to type, every deferential phrase I must include to appease these institutional tyrants following state mandates who wouldn't understand relative risk factors if their careers depended on it—which, ironically, they should.

We believe strongly in informed consent and the fundamental right to make medical decisions based on individual risk assessment. Our family has invested considerable time in understanding the available research, consulting with healthcare professionals, and evaluating the specific risk factors that apply to my situation.

As someone who maintains excellent physical health through athletics and proper nutrition, and who does not engage in high-risk behaviors associated with meningitis transmission, we believe that a mandate requiring this vaccination is not appropriate for my circumstances.

Fear is Our Enemy

The emotions I feel right now—this burning, righteous anger—serve a purpose. They're not pathology to be medicated away or inconvenient feelings to be suppressed in the name of civility. They're the appropriate response of a free human being confronted with tyranny. They're the same emotions that drove men to throw tea into Boston Harbor, to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause of liberty. These emotions are the immune system of a free society, and we've been conditioned to suppress them.

What strikes me most profoundly is the grotesque irony of how we've surrendered our freedom. Millions of Americans complied with mandates not out of scientific conviction, but out of fear of losing their jobs, their education, their ability to travel, their social standing. They traded their bodily autonomy for the illusion of security, their principles for convenience. They gave up their freedom to avoid losing their freedom—and somehow couldn't see the twisted logic of their capitulation.

But perhaps most disturbing is what this reveals about human nature itself. The same species that produced the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution also produced masses of people willing to enforce medical apartheid on their neighbors. The same creatures capable of extraordinary courage and moral clarity also demonstrated a sheep-like capacity for conformity that would make any totalitarian regime salivate with anticipation.

The Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's obedience studies weren't academic curiosities—they were prophetic warnings about our capacity for moral cowardice when faced with authority. We watched in real-time as ordinary people transformed into enforcers of medical tyranny, as neighbors turned against neighbors, as friends abandoned friends over compliance with edicts that made no scientific sense. The speed with which humans abandoned basic principles of bodily autonomy, informed consent, and individual liberty was breathtaking in its thoroughness and terrifying in its implications.

We witnessed the dangers of groupthink manifest on a civilizational scale. People who prided themselves on being independent thinkers suddenly found themselves unable to process basic risk-benefit analyses when those calculations contradicted the groupthink narrative. College-educated professionals who should have been capable of reading studies instead deferred to authorities who had clear conflicts of interest. The same people who claimed to "follow the science" actively avoided examining the actual science when it threatened their ideological comfort.

This wasn't ignorance—it was willful blindness. It wasn't confusion—it was moral cowardice. It wasn't following experts—it was following the crowd while pretending expertise sanctified their compliance.

Our founding fathers pledged everything—their lives, their wealth, their reputations—for the mere possibility of freedom. They risked execution for treason, financial ruin, and eternal disgrace. They chose uncertain liberty over comfortable subjugation. Today, we won't risk a Twitter suspension, a missed dinner reservation, or an awkward conversation at work. We've become a people so addicted to comfort, so terrified of inconvenience, that we'll trade fundamental rights for the promise that our Netflix won't be interrupted. I continue to write as my mind is racing.

Our family's deeply held religious beliefs emphasize the sanctity of the human body and our responsibility to make thoughtful, prayerful decisions regarding what we introduce into our bodies. We believe that God has equipped our immune systems with remarkable capabilities, and we prefer to rely on natural immunity while maintaining excellent health practices.

Our faith teaches us to approach medical interventions with careful discernment, weighing not only physical considerations but also spiritual principles. The mandate of a medical intervention conflicts with our religious conviction that such decisions should be made freely, without coercion, and in accordance with our conscience and faith.

The distance we've traveled from those revolutionary principles is breathtaking in its scope and devastating in its implications. We've become everything our founders feared: a servile population, grateful for whatever scraps of freedom our betters deign to grant us, writing thank-you notes for the privilege of exercising rights that were supposed to be inalienable.

This didn't start with COVID. It didn't even start with vaccine mandates. This is the culmination of decades of slow, steady erosion—death by a thousand cuts to the idea that individuals possess inherent rights that government cannot violate. We traded our privacy for security after 9/11 and got the Patriot Act. We traded our economic freedom for safety nets and got government dependency. We traded our parental authority for expert guidance and got children who can't think for themselves. Each trade seemed reasonable at the time. Each surrender was just a small price to pay for protection from some manufactured crisis.

Now we find ourselves writing essays to justify refusing medical interventions, as if bodily autonomy were a privilege granted by institutions rather than a fundamental human right. We beg permission to exercise rights that previous generations died to secure. We've normalized tyranny to such an extent that questioning it marks us as extremists.

The conformity pressure that drove COVID compliance wasn't an accident—it was engineered. Social media algorithms amplified fear and compliance while suppressing dissent. News media coordinated messaging. Medical institutions abandoned scientific methodology for political expedience. Academic institutions transformed from centers of learning into indoctrination centers that punished independent thought. The combination created a perfect storm of groupthink that swept away centuries of hard-won principles in a matter of months.

Every word of this exemption letter I'm forced to write is an indictment of how far we've fallen. Every carefully crafted phrase, every deferential tone, every promise to be a good citizen if only they'll let my son keep his bodily autonomy—it's all evidence of our descent into a soft tyranny that our founders would have met with muskets.

But it's also a choice. We can continue this slide into servitude, continue writing permission slips for our basic humanity, continue pretending that what's happening is normal. Or we can remember who we're supposed to be. We can reclaim the righteous anger that built this nation. We can teach our children that some things are worth fighting for, that freedom isn't free, and that comfort is a poor substitute for liberty.

The exemption letter will be written because it's the current law in our state and I love my son more than I hate the system that requires it. Yet I can't help but wonder: What if everyone on that campus had a basic understanding of vaccine science? What if they all knew about those 31,000-to-1 odds? What if nobody complied with the mandates?

Guess what? They would have to adjust or they wouldn't have a university.

This request is made after careful consideration, extensive research, and deep reflection on both our philosophical principles and religious convictions. We respectfully ask that the institution honor our right to make this medical decision based on our personal assessment of risks and benefits, our religious beliefs, and our fundamental right to informed consent.

We appreciate your consideration of this request and stand ready to discuss any questions or concerns you may have regarding this exemption.

If everyone refused to mask up, refused the forced vaccination, refused to submit to medical tyranny disguised as public health policy—guess what? The whole fucking charade would collapse overnight. Universities exist because students pay tuition and show up. They have power because we grant it to them. Their mandates work because we comply.

The beautiful irony is that institutional power is entirely dependent on our consent to be governed by idiots. They're counting on our individual compliance to maintain their collective control. Every exemption letter written is a small crack in their authority. Every person who questions the narrative weakens their grip. Every parent who chooses principle over convenience threatens their entire system of manufactured consent.

They're counting on our compliance, our exhaustion, our willingness to trade freedom for convenience. They're betting we'll choose comfort over courage, that we'll value security over liberty, that we'll keep writing their permission slips and thanking them for the privilege.

Let’s be real. This is just the beginning. The next "pandemic" is already being planned. The mass surveillance infrastructure is already in place. The digital ID systems are already being tested. Once you hand the state emergency powers, they never give them back—they just find new emergencies to justify keeping them.

They're conditioning us for a future where every aspect of human existence requires government permission. Where your ability to work, travel, shop, or educate your children depends on your compliance score. Where questioning authority becomes a mental health diagnosis. Where resistance is pathologized and dissent is digitally disappeared.

But they're about to discover they've gravely miscalculated. Because some things are worth fighting for. Because some lines cannot be crossed. Because some freedoms, once lost, are too precious to leave abandoned. Because there are still Americans who remember what this country was supposed to be.

We are the immune system of a free society. We are the antibodies against tyranny. We are the generation that will either restore the Republic our founders envisioned or watch it die on our watch.

The time for polite disagreement has passed. The time for comfortable compliance is over. The time for righteous defiance has come.

An exemption isn't an inconvenience—it's a confession. A confession that we've accepted a world where freedom requires paperwork and bodily autonomy needs bureaucratic approval.

Every exemption form filed is an admission that we're subjects, not citizens.

But here's what they didn't count on: Once you see the cage, you can't unsee it. Once you recognize that needing an exemption proves you were never free, you stop asking for permission and start taking back what was always yours.

The revolution isn't coming—it's here. It starts with saying no.

RESIST

---

I try to keep RADICALLY GENUINE as free as I can, but it takes quite a lot of work. If you find some value in my writing and podcast I very much appreciate the paid subscription. It really helps me continue putting time aside for these pieces. Thank you.