An Amsterdam courtroom is not where most Americans go to think about constitutional government. But it should be. Because when a lawyer stands before judges and calls COVID-19 vaccination “the largest genocide of the world’s population ever,” he is not just filing a brief. He is throwing a match into a barrel of public distrust. And distrust, once it catches, does not respect borders.
On March 9, Dutch attorney Peter Stassen told the Amsterdam Court of Appeal that the COVID-19 vaccination program has produced “the largest genocide of the world’s population ever.” That line is deliberately maximal. It is also the kind of accusation that forces a civics question we tend to dodge: What happens to a constitutional society when public arguments become apocalyptic, but the institutions meant to arbitrate truth are no longer trusted?
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What Stassen wants
Stassen is involved in a Dutch case that names high-profile defendants including Bill Gates, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. The matter is still moving through pre-trial procedures, and Stassen is appealing for the right to present testimonies from experts who, he says, can expose large-scale deception, harm, and deaths in relation to COVID-19 measures and the broader narrative.
The court is expected to decide on April 9 whether Stassen may present those expert witnesses. The names he has associated with that witness list include Sasha Latypova, Dr. Joseph Sansone, Dr. Mike Yeadon, Katherine Watt, and Catherine Austin Fitts.
None of this is a footnote in civic life. A court fight over who gets to define “expertise” is one of the central battles of modern governance. The question is not whether courts should become scientific panels. They should not. The question is whether courts can maintain legitimacy when scientific disputes become political identity.
The rhetoric is the point
Stassen’s argument, as he framed it, is not merely that mistakes were made or that regulators fell short. He used sweeping language, calling the mRNA injections a “military biological weapon system,” and saying “COVID-19 was not a public health incident, but a covert global military operation.” He also described what he sees as an all-encompassing propaganda machine, telling the court, “We are dealing with professional liars.”
And the rhetoric does not stop at politics or medicine. Stassen also called the operation a “satanic mind-bending system,” spoke about bankers “creating money out of thin air,” and framed the courtroom drama in explicitly spiritual terms, referring to his experts as “children of God” and the defendants as “children of the Devil,” while citing the Epstein Files as confirmation of satanic allegiances.
That is not technical litigation language. It is moral language, almost theological at times, designed to split the world into the deceived and the wicked. And here is the hard truth that a lot of constitutional commentary refuses to say out loud: once politics becomes salvation theater, constitutional process starts to look like complicity.
In other words, if someone truly believes genocide is occurring, then compromise becomes immoral, and ordinary procedural delay becomes evidence of corruption. That is how a society loses the ability to argue without threatening to burn itself down.
Why Americans should care
Americans will be tempted to react to this story in one of two lazy ways.
- Option A: Mock it as conspiracy theater and move on.
- Option B: Applaud it as finally “someone telling the truth,” and treat skepticism as proof of guilt.
Both reactions miss the constitutional problem. The Constitution is not a fact-checking service. It is a disagreement machine. It assumes people will clash. It builds lanes for those clashes to occur without violence. Courts. Legislatures. Elections. A free press. Due process. Cross-examination. Records. Accountability.
But those lanes only work if the public accepts a baseline premise: that institutions can be wrong without being evil, and that losing a case does not automatically mean the system is a sham. Once that premise collapses, “genocide” language becomes politically useful precisely because it makes the old civic rules feel too small to matter.
The real pre-crisis question
Whether you think Stassen’s claims are persuasive or far-fetched is almost beside the point for a constitutional audience. The larger question is this:
Do we still have a shared method for deciding what is true enough to govern by?
In the United States, we learned during COVID that emergency power expands faster than trust can keep up. Agencies issue guidance. Governors issue orders. Courts struggle to keep pace. The public watches experts disagree in real time. Then, years later, everyone fights about whether the disagreement was honest uncertainty or intentional deception.
That is the gap Stassen is exploiting in a Dutch courtroom, and it is the same gap that will haunt American institutions during the next crisis, whether it is a pandemic, a cyberattack, or something we have not named yet.
What constitutional process requires
Constitutional democracy cannot promise perfect outcomes. It promises something else: process that is visible, contestable, and restrained.
- Visible, so citizens can see how decisions were made.
- Contestable, so dissenters can challenge claims without being treated as enemies of the state.
- Restrained, so fear does not become a permanent blank check.
The danger in Stassen’s kind of courtroom rhetoric is not only that it might be wrong. The danger is that it invites people to conclude that only total victory counts as justice. And constitutional government, by design, is not built for total victory. It is built for continuing argument under rules.
If you want the Constitution to survive the next national emergency, you do not start by asking who the heroes are. You start by asking whether your opponents still deserve due process, and whether your own side can live with procedures that do not guarantee the verdict you want.