The Time I Got California's Surgeon General to Step Down

The power of the Notice

I posted this in July of 2022, to my private Substack group, “Building Parallel Solutions”. (It’s a private group for those who are serious about building the parallel society - if you’re interested in joining, just email me: BretigneATgmailDOTcom.)

Since posting it, a new California surgeon general has been appointed. However, my notice of liability also puts on notice the employer of the surgeon general (“Notice to Agent is Notice to Principal”), and so effectively also puts the new surgeon general on notice.

---

I’ll preface this by saying that I can’t know for certain that my actions were responsible for what follows. It’s possible that it was just a coincidence. But it’s the kind of coincidence that is fairly common in the world of NoLs - Notices of Liability.

Almost exactly two years ago, I started working with Lena Pu, learning how to craft and serve Notices of Liability. I had been looking for a group or individual to learn from for some time, without much success. When I found Lena, I found someone who was both extremely knowledgable and extremely motivated, and who operates with complete integrity.

I’ll be talking about NoLs here, and in the membership group, but if you’re unfamiliar with the idea, just think of them as a way to hold individuals in government and other positions of power accountable for their actions when they violate our rights. They are a legal way to put people on notice that they have committed a violation, to give them a chance to stop, and to demand a monetary penalty if they do not.

In the spring of 2021, I filed Notices of Liability against a number of individuals in California, elsewhere in the US, and even in Europe, over the vaccine and mask mandates. One of those individuals was California’s first Surgeon General, Nadine Burke-Harris.

In November of 2021, I sent out Notices of Dishonor to all of these individuals, putting them on notice that they had failed to respond to my Notices of Liability or to correct the harms they had committed.

And then, in February of 2022, this happened: California’s first surgeon general, Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris, resigns. The official reason:

“Burke Harris told the Times in 2021 that the health inequities exacerbated by the pandemic weighed heavily on her.

“The hardest part of the job is sitting in proximity to so much harm and suffering, and sitting there long enough to be a difference,” she said at the time.”

Again, I can’t say with any kind of certainty that I was responsible for Burke-Harris’ departure. But having spent some time around others who have been filing NoLs for much longer than I have, it’s a story I’ve heard repeated often.

In any case, I am very optimistic about Notices of Liability as one of the tools we can use to start holding those in positions of power accountable for their actions - or at the very least, scare them out of their positions. We’ll be talking more about this, and I hope at some point to have Lena join us as one of our guest experts to explain it all much better than I can!

UPDATE: I just want to clarify that this last paragraph was directed to my “Building Parallel Solutions” paid membership group, which is an offshoot of the “Building Parallel Solutions” Substack. In that group, we have regular “guest expert” calls, and that’s what I am referring to in the last paragraph.