Christina Bohannan interned at Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection
Democrats lie effortlessly. I assume sociopathy is requisite for the role [US Patriot]
Democratic congressional candidate Christina Bohannan often boasts that she once worked as an environmental engineer. She always fails to mention it was an internship.
On Thursday, the Iowa state legislator, who is running to represent the state’s first district in Congress, told a Pella, Iowa, audience that she worked as an “environmental engineer with the Department of Environmental Protection in Florida doing water quality work.” Her résumé shows this was an internship Bohannan held for four years while studying at the University of Florida. No further experience in the field is listed, and she still holds just an engineering intern license in the state.
Bohannan did not return a request for comment.
As a swing-district Democrat facing off against incumbent Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R.), Bohannan has tried to cultivate the image of a pragmatic moderate, burnishing her apparent engineering credentials to speak to local concerns. In a 2020 letter to the Iowa City Press-Citizen, a Democratic official said Bohannan’s experience was of “critical importance for improving Iowa’s water quality issues.”
Bohannan’s campaign website also says she is a “former engineer.” One progressive group touted Bohannan’s “pro-science policies” and experience as an environmental engineer in its endorsement.
In October, a Wikipedia user who identified as Bohannan’s “State House campaign manager” edited the candidate’s page to add she was an “environmental” engineer, the site’s revision history shows.
Bohannan’s effort to appear moderate has also led her to disavow past policy positions. In August, she scrubbed her old campaign site of endorsements for taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries and opposition to voter ID laws. Around 70 percent of Iowans support voter ID, a 2017 Des Moines Register poll found.
In 2019, Bohannan contributed to a bail fund for illegal immigrants maintained by a group that wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and work toward a “world without police.” She has also opposed school choice as a lawmaker while sending her daughter to a private school.
Before her run for Congress, Bohannan served as a legislator in Iowa’s heavily Democratic 85th district. She has been a professor at the University of Iowa’s law school since 2000. Her résumé lists publications on antitrust and copyright law but nothing about environmental issues.
In July, an internal poll by Bohannan’s campaign revealed the Democrat trailing Miller-Meeks by 1 point, the Iowa-based Gazettereported. About 22 percent of the voters surveyed remain undecided.
Austin Independent School District course says gender is ‘innermost concept of self as male, female, neither or both’
Instead of ruining life for everyone, just send these kids to a special needs facility. We do this for rowdy kids and ones with handicaps like autism. Enough of the attack on children and parents by Marxist enemies of the state (AKA Teachers’ Unions, teachers). They are guilty of child abuse and treason. [US Patriot]
A Texas school district encouraged K-12 teachers to take paid time off, at taxpayer expense, to take a course on “how to create supportive learning environments for LGBTQIA+” students as young as five years old.
The Austin Independent School District’s course material, obtained through a public information request, defined gender identity as the “innermost concept of self as male, female, neither or both,” calling it “one’s authentic identity.” The course also provided an example of a girl who questions her gender identity and asked how teachers should properly respond.
“A 14-year-old youth, who recently asked to be called Ronnie not Veronica, discloses to you a desire to go by ‘they’ pronouns,” one PowerPoint slide read. “Ronnie wants to cut their hair short but isn’t sure how their parents will react, making them feel anxious. Ronnie is also stressed because while they have been dating Julie and ‘came out as a lesbian’ in 7th grade, they have started to have feelings for Ted, who identifies as male, and this is confusing for them.”
The Austin public school district did not respond to a request for comment on the substance of the training course.
The district pushed the teacher training amid a series of fights nationwide over whether students should be taught about gender identity and transgenderism. The Free Beaconreported last year that these debates over sex education at the local level are fueled by liberal advocacy groups that push public schools to promote gender ideology to elementary students. One district spiked a sex education plan in Nebraska after parents discovered it was secretly advised by a Planned Parenthood activist, the Free Beaconreported.
The Austin public school district sparked controversy in June when it defied orders from Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (R.), who labeled its pride parade as “human sexuality instruction,” which requires parents to approve their children’s participation. The district rejected Paxton’s claim and followed through with the parade without parental approval.
The “Be a Beacon” gender course is run by Out Youth, which in a February Facebook post claimed that so-called gender-affirming care for transgender children “saves lives.” The training course cited resources from two prominentLGBT groups that also support children receiving puberty blockers and hormone treatment. The presentation cited a book titled, The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.
“Are you, or parts of you, both? How do you know?” the course asked teachers. “If your anatomy changed overnight to the opposite sex, would it change who you feel yourself to be?”
Sean Casten holds up to $500,000 in company that is expected to benefit from Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act
Illinois Democrat Sean Casten is very happy with his party’s “historic” green energy spending. His latest financial disclosure may show why: The congressman holds up to $500,000 in a green energy company that will likely benefit from the spending.
Casten has spent much of the last week touting Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which is not expected to have “any measurable impact on inflation” but does funnel nearly $400 billion toward green energy initiatives. Casten in a statement last week called that spending “a historic win for American families and for the future of our planet.” It could also be a historic win for Casten’s investment portfolio.
That’s because Casten, according to a financial disclosure he filed last week, holds between $250,000 and $500,000 in Greenleaf Power, a Sacramento-based green energy company that sells “carbon-neutral electricity” to utility companies. The Casten-backed green energy bill contains specific provisions that are likely to benefit Greenleaf. The legislation, for example, allocates roughly $30 billion toward “grant and loan programs for states and electric utilities” that obtain “clean electricity” like that offered by Greenleaf. The bill also provides generous tax credits to property owners who install equipment to harness alternative energy sources such as biomass, in which Greenleaf specializes.
Still, none of Casten’s many statements touting the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy spending disclose the Democrat’s six-figure stake in Greenleaf, which brought Casten up to $50,000 in “partnership income” in 2021 alone. Casten’s decision to fixate on Democrats’ work to “fight climate change,” meanwhile, may prove to be shortsighted as the congressman faces a competitive reelection campaign against Republican Keith Pekau. Only 35 percent of U.S. adults are “extremely or very concerned” about the effects of climate change, down from 44 percent just three years ago, according to an Associated Press poll.
Power the Future founder and executive director Daniel Turner called it a “shame that the American people are going to be on the hook” for “provisions that enrich this member of Congress.” He also argued that the “green energy” Greenleaf produces from biomass is not truly “green”—the company generates electricity by burning wood, a far cry from the wind and solar energy Casten has touted in the past.
“It just shows you the political motives behind this piece of legislation,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “The fact that we consider biomass clean is really laughable, because biomass is really just burning trees. So why are we proud of that?”
Casten did not return a request for comment. The Democrat’s latest financial disclosure provides some clarity on his Greenleaf holding, as the congressman’s prior disclosure listed Greenleaf but claimed the asset had no value. Casten filed that 2020 disclosure as he urged Congress to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on “tax credits for clean energy.” In one case, Casten went as far as to attack fellow congressional Democrat Joe Manchin after the West Virginia senator expressed opposition toward the spending.
“We’re trying to drive a car into the future,” Casten said during an September 2021 MSNBC interview. “With all due respect to Mr. Manchin, until we’re lining up to take off the emergency brake this car ain’t driving very fast. It’s certainly not driving as fast as it needs to, and that’s the pressure we as Democrats have to keep focused on.” Casten’s past clean energy spending advocacy also excluded any mention of his Greenleaf investment.
Beyond the American public’s waning concern about climate change, it’s unclear if the Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law on Tuesday, will have a sizable impact on climate change. A climate scientist who led an independent analysis of the package told the Associated Press the legislation will reduce global warming “not a lot.”
Data suggests ‘economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly’
America’s recessionary drumbeat just got louder as a key economic gauge from the Conference Board dropped for the fifth month in a row, weighed down by a slowing job market, weak manufacturing new orders, and deep consumer pessimism.
The Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States, which is a forward-looking gauge designed to predict business cycle shifts including recessions, fell by 0.4 percent in July, following a 0.7 percent drop in June, the Conference Board said on Aug. 18.
“The U.S. LEI declined for the fifth consecutive month in July, suggesting recession risks are rising in the near term,” Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director for economics at the Conference Board, said in a statement.
While the U.S. economy met the common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession when gross domestic product (GDP) printed negative for two quarters in a row earlier this year, recessions are formally called by a panel of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). They use a broader definition than the two-quarter rule, relying on a wide range of indicators, including the labor market, which has remained on a relatively solid footing.
The Biden administration has seized on the NBER’s criteria for declaring a downturn, insisting that the economy isn’t in a recession, with White House officials often citing labor market strength—though there are signs that it’s cooling.
Even though unemployment is at 3.5 percent and the latest non-farm payrolls report showed U.S. employers adding a forecast-beating 528,000 in July, a growing number of U.S. corporations have announced hiring freezes or layoffs, while the number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance has been slowly trending up.
Mild or Severe Recession?
The slowing labor market was one of the factors singled out by Ozyildirim in his comments on the LEI’s fifth consecutive monthly slump.
“Consumer pessimism and equity market volatility as well as slowing labor markets, housing construction, and manufacturing new orders suggest that economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly throughout the US economy,” he said, adding that the Conference Board projects that the U.S. economy won’t grow in the third quarter and “could tip into a short but mild recession by the end of the year or early 2023.”
While the view that America’s recession will be short and mild has its advocates, economist Nouriel Roubini, who got the nickname “Dr. Doom” after correctly predicting the 2007–08 financial crisis, calls that view “delusional.”
Roubini said in a recent interview on Bloomberg TV that he believes persistently high inflation will force the Fed to keep monetary settings tight, which will tip the U.S. economy into a “severe recession and a severe debt and financial crisis” that will be long-lasting.
Similarly, former President Donald Trump recently warned that, unless the country changes course in key areas—including energy policy—he believes something worse than a recession is on the horizon.
“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona at the end of July. “We’ll have a depression.”
Once again, Woke clearly does not equate to Awake. [US Patriot]
The flood of illegal immigrants and drugs coming over the U.S.–Mexico border constitutes an “invasion,” a majority of respondents to a new poll say.
Respondents were asked to label the statement, “The U.S. is experiencing an invasion at the southern border” as completely or somewhat true, completely false, or don’t know.
More than half, or 54 percent, said it’s true. Republicans were much more likely to say the statement is true, with 76 percent agreeing compared to 40 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of respondents.
Democrats were most likely to say the statement was completely false, and independents were most likely to say they don’t know.
Under Joe Biden, the United States has recorded unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border. Due to relaxed immigration enforcement policies, many illegal aliens have been released into the U.S. interior, while deportations have plunged.
Amid the immigration crisis, a number of Texas counties have declared the situation an “invasion,” including Parker County. Officials also cited drugs being brought across the border.
Seven out of 10 Republicans in the new poll said the drugs being brought over the border are responsible for the increase in drug overdoses in America, along with 35 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of independents.
‘Open Border Policy’
A majority of Republicans also agreed with the statement the United States is implementing “an open border policy” along the border.
A person’s main source of news impacted their choices, pollsters found. Republicans who watched Fox News, for instance, were more likely to describe the border crisis as an invasion than those who have a different primary source.
Fox regularly reports from the border, including showing footage of migrants crossing the border between ports of entries, which makes them illegal immigrants.
The most cited source of news for Democrats and independents was ABC/NBC/CBS, while Republicans were most likely to source from Fox.
Respondents were also divided by political affiliation when answering whether there are enough immigrants in America already.
Six out of 10 Republicans agreed, versus 30 percent of Democrats and 37 percent of independents.
Democrats were the most likely to say immigrants are an important part of the American identity. Seventy-four percent agreed, compared to 49 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of independents.
Most Republicans, meanwhile, agreed with the statement that there is a “deep state,” or embedded political class, working to open the borders to more immigrants. Compared to 19 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of independents, 58 percent of Republicans agreed.
The NPR-Ipsos poll (pdf) was conducted online on July 28 and July 29. The sample of 1,116 adults included 516 Democrats, 317 Republicans, and 141 independents. (Now we know the reasons the poll only came up with 54% [US Patriot])
The margin of error was plus/minus 5.1 percentage points.
AIDS part 2. When neither sexual partner has brakes, neither does the spread of the disease. [US Patriot]
Growing scientific evidence suggests that Monkeypox is being spread via sexual intercourse between men, as opposed to skin-to-skin contact as stated by public health officials.
According to a report by NBC News, a string of scientific studies and reports from health authorities across the globe in recent weeks indicate that the narrative of public health experts may be “precisely backward.”
“A growing body of evidence supports that sexual transmission, particularly through seminal fluids, is occurring with the current MPX outbreak,” Dr. Aniruddha Hazra, medical director of the University of Chicago Sexual Wellness Clinic, told NBC.
NBC cited a Medium essay by Dr. Lao-Tzu Allan-Blitz, a resident physician in global health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in which he writes that there is “mounting evidence that sexual transmission is the most common mode of transmission” across the United States and Europe.
The essay noted that monkeypox, which up until now was endemic to Central and West Africa, is largely being transmitted through anal and oral intercourse between men.
Allan-Blitz told NBC: “It looks very clear to us that this is an infection that is transmitting sexually the vast majority of the time.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) men who have sex with men are still those who are overwhelmingly affected by monkeypox, with 96.9 percent of those who have contracted the virus identifying as men who have sex with men.
Transmission Through Sexual Activity
More than three quarters, approximately 76.5 percent, of global monkeypox cases are among men 18 to 44 years old.
Overall as of Aug. 17, there have been a total of 37,736 laboratory-confirmed cases of monkeypox, and 179 probable cases, including 12 deaths, reported to WHO.
NBC also cited a study (pdf) published July 28 in the British Medical Association’s journal, which found that among the 197 monkeypox cases examined in London men, 56 percent had lesions in the genital area and 42 percent had them in their anorectal regions.
A separate study published July 21 in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that among the 528 infections diagnosed between April 27 and June 24, 2022, 98 percent were in gay or bisexual men.
“Transmission was suspected to have occurred through sexual activity in 95 percent of the persons with infection,” the study states, and 73 percent had anogenital lesions.
Elsewhere, a study published in the Lancet on Aug. 8 examined 181 monkeypox cases in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, of which 92 percent of patients identified as gay men, bisexual men, or other men who have sex with men. That study found that “participants reporting anal-receptive sex were more likely than others to have early systemic symptoms before developing skin lesions.”
“One explanation is that anal sex might damage the epithelium [a very thin layer of tissue] and enable blood entry, allowing greater viraemia at an early stage when local lesions have not yet developed,” researchers wrote.
As a result of the growing evidence which supports that Monkeypox is predominantly being spread through sexual intercourse between men, scientists told NBC that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health authorities need to update their communication strategies regarding the virus to “more strongly emphasize the centrality of intercourse among gay and bisexual men.”
People wait in line to recieve the Monkeypox vaccine before the opening of a new mass vaccination site at the Bushwick Education Campus in Brooklyn, New York City, on July 17, 2022. (Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)
WHO, CDC Narrative
Currently, the CDC and the WHO state that Monkeypox can be transmitted via “close, personal, often skin-to-skin contact” which includes contact with fabrics such as clothing or bedding that have been used by someone with the virus, as well as contact with respiratory secretions.
Despite the mounting evidence, the WHO says it’s too early yet to know if the virus is predominantly transmitted through intercourse.
“Completely reading the situation as uniquely due to anal or oral sex is highly likely to be overreach,” Dr. Rosamund Lewis, technical lead for monkeypox at the World Health Organization, told NBC News. “The correlation may appear to be strong, but that does not explain the whole picture of disease caused by this virus. So we need to keep an open mind.”
The latest report comes amid a shortage of Monkeypox vaccines amid a surge in cases.
On Thursday, vaccine maker Bavarian Nordic warned it was no longer certain it would be able to meet demand as cases of the virus continue to surge across the globe, even with an upgrade to its existing manufacturing site in Denmark.
As a result, the Denmark-headquartered company is now looking into transferring its technology to a third-party producer in the United States in an effort to enable bulk production.
Since receiving Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, Bonnie Eisenberg experienced relapse of her breast cancer 8 years after being in remission.
The 73-year-old was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer in 2012. After successful treatment, she had been in remission since 2014.
Ever since then, her doctor has measured tumor marker levels in her body to monitor for relapse.
Tumor markers are usually proteins that indicate possible tumor or cancer growth. High levels of tumor markers may indicate cancer but it is not definitive.
There are many markers that can be tested, but the one that her doctor particularly focused on was the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), a tumor marker common to cancers of the breast, colon and rectum, prostate, ovary, lung, thyroid, and liver.
Since 2014, Eisenberg dutifully took monthly CEA tests along with others. The tests continuously returned with numbers in the normal range, which her doctor said was from 0 to 4.0 ng/mL.
Eisenberg’s average CEA results had been at 0.4 ng/mL, indicating her cancer was under control.
“Everything’s been going fine,” Eisenberg told The Epoch Times, “I was one of his best patients. He never worried about me.”
However, that changed after she got vaccinated. She received her first Moderna shot in January 2021 and experienced various common adverse effects including fever, shakes, “you name it, I had it,” she said.
Bonnie Eisenberg and her husband. (Courtesy of Eisenberg)
That month, her CEA test rose to 3.7 ng/mL.
However, since it was still within the normal range, both Eisenberg and her doctor were not concerned.
After all, tumor cells are not limited to cancer patients. It is a known fact that everyone can have cancerous cells; what matters is whether the immune system can keep the cancer in check.
Eisenberg took her second shot in February 2021 and again suffered the same adverse effects.
Her CEA numbers jumped to 5.2 ng/mL that month.
This took her out of the normal range. Yet because Eisenberg has been such a stable patient, and because her result was so close to the normal range, both she and her doctor dismissed the results.
“Maybe I should have been a little more on the doctor. Since I was so good. We weren’t really that concerned about it.”
Boosters became available in October 2021. Eisenberg was not happy to take it given her previous adverse reactions, but she and her husband took it anyway. She experienced the same terrible adverse reactions.
In October 2021 and December 2021, she had CEA tests taken.
On Dec. 13, 2021 at 8 o’clock in morning, she received a call from her doctor. He was very concerned.
“When you’re getting a phone call that early in the morning, something’s wrong. He says to me: ‘Bonnie, we have to scan you.’ What’s the matter? [I asked]. My mark was up to 17.6 [ng/mL]—I was in trouble.”
Eisenberg was immediately sent for a CAT scan, as well as MRI and PET scans.
On the PET scans, it showed that her previously dormant breast cancer has “metastasized,” meaning that it has spread to locations outside the breast.
“When he hit me with this, even now … it’s just a very hard thing to accept. It’s just something that should have never taken place.”
“[The cancer] went to all my bones … it didn’t go to any of my body organs, but it was over every bone you could think of. On the PET scan I lit up like a Christmas tree.”
A metastasizing breast cancer would automatically put her in stage 4, the worst stage for cancers.
Eisenberg is convinced that the vaccine is responsible for her cancer recurrence. The increase in CEA levels correlated well with her vaccine timeline, and she is adamant that she will not get any more vaccinations, fearing that she will really die from it.
In the same month (December 2021), Eisenberg started targeted therapy. The main medication she takes for her cancer costs about $14,000 a month “but I just have a little copayment coverage for it.”
She also has a hormone blocker as well as a monthly injection of denosumab ($3,000 each) to prevent bone fractures. Luckily, her insurance covers the cost of denosumab.
Eisenberg has responded very well to her drugs, and her cancer is back in remission now.
Since she started treatment again, her CEA numbers dropped from 4.7 in January 2022 to below 1 ng/mL in June 2022. Her numbers are just like how she was before vaccination.
The bright spots representing cancer cells are also gone on her new PET scans.
Nonetheless, things have not returned to normal; the drug side effects Eisenberg complains of are likely to accompany her for the rest of her life.
“I have to be on [medication] for the rest of my life. I can’t stop it … he [the doctor] can lower the milligrams and stuff like that … but you always have to be watched. What I have is not going away.”
Her breast cancer medication reduces white blood cell counts, significantly weakening her immune system and puts her at risk of infections. This new worry hangs on Eisenberg’s mind, and in crowded places, she feels compelled to put on a face mask.
The drug also causes her hair to thin, and as a “hair girl,” Eisenberg is bothered by the reality that she can no longer straighten her hair.
The denosumab injections can also cause loss of bone mass leading to eventual breakdown. Eisenberg is glad to have greater intervals introduced between each injection and possible reduced dosages for her medications.
Given her stage 4 relapse, Eisenberg is considered fortunate to be back in remission.
Eisenberg shared her experience with other women also in remission who have not been recommended to do monthly tests, or women who responded very poorly to potent breast cancer treatments.
She hopes that her story will be able to help others so that the same does not happen to them.
“Whatever erupted inside me from the shot, something happened because they don’t even know what it does to the immune system … [the doctors, people at Moderna] don’t even know; there’s no answers. Nobody has any answers. I don’t care who you talk to. You’re not gonna get an answer. They don’t know.”
“There’s possibly other girls like me now. They don’t even know what’s happening inside them because if they’re not tested properly, they’re not going to know.”
In the history of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a total of 93 breast cancer cases have been reported as an adverse effect of a vaccine, of which 77 of the cases are reported after COVID-19 vaccines.
What Current Research Shows Us
The current research suggests the COVID shots altered the innate immune system, which is likely to alter the adaptive immune system.
Within the body, we have the innate immune cells that are quick-acting, inflammatory, and target all foreign molecules the same way.
Some of these innate immune cells will eventually activate adaptive immune cells, called the T and B cells. These cells begin to work a few days after infection and require activation from innate immune cells to function properly. These T and B cells target infections and cancers through specific and varied pathways. They create an immune memory afterwards so that the immune system will be able to act faster the next time.
Innate Immune System Alterations: Interferons
Interferons (IFN) are antiviral proteins. There are three major types: type I, II, and III, categorized based on the receptors each IFN binds to.
One of the most important IFN is type 1 IFN; it acts globally, targeting many tissues and organs to protect from infections, autoimmune diseases, as well as cancers.
Studies show that they are particularly important in the early response to infection and cancer.
“Impaired type I IFN signaling is linked to many disease risks, most notably cancer, as type 1 IFN signaling suppresses proliferation of both viruses and cancer cells by arresting the cell cycle,” the authors, led by Dr. Stephanie Seneff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote.
Dr. Stephanie Seneff. (Courtesy of Stephanie Seneff)
IFN-alpha and IFN-beta are type 1 IFNs; these molecules alert other cells of a virus or cancer, and also stop infected and cancerous cells from proliferating, causing diseased cells to die.
However, research on spike protein and mRNA vaccines suggests that IFN-alpha action may be impaired when exposed to spike protein.
A study that exposed human cells to spike protein DNA to induce the cell to produce spike protein found that the cell shipped out the spike protein with two forms of microRNAs (miRNAs) that inhibited molecules that activated IFN-alpha/beta.
miRNA are short strands of RNA molecules that bind to the DNA in cells and can therefore regulate cell activity. These two miRNA inhibited an essential protein that activates the IFN-alpha/beta pathway. This implies that vaccinated individuals will have a reduced IFN-alpha/beta response and poorer immune clearance.
Seneff said that the reduced symptoms in the vaccinated are likely because of this reduced pathway, since the initial symptoms of COVID-19 are caused by actions of the interferon action. This is why many vaccinated individuals are getting infected with rebound symptoms.
“[The vaccinated] don’t get the symptoms … don’t feel as sick, but actually, you’re spreading the disease like crazy because you’re not fighting it off.”
This also means that the virus will stick around in vaccinated individuals for longer, and if the disease is not cleared after a long period of time, it can cause severe disease down the line.
This hypothesis also concordant with hospitalization and mortality rates in New South Wales, an Australian state where over 95 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, with many people receiving one or two boosters.
Hospitalitization rates and mortality rates are significantly higher in the boosted and fully vaccinated cohort, with lower rates in the unvaccinated and patients that have only received one dose.
Reduced T-Cell Response
T-cells and B-cells are adaptive immune cells, meaning that they engage in specific and targeted attacks rather than attacking all foreign invaders the same way, which is what innate immune cells do.
Both cell types are very powerful, but both need to be activated first through innate immune system pathways to develop strong, specified attacks.
Killer T-cells engage in close combat with diseased and cancerous cells by punching holes into them whereas B plasma cells work long-range, releasing antibodies into fluids in the body to surround and neutralize toxins, bacteria, and viruses. B-cells also play a role in cancer, though their function and importance are not well understood.
T-cells have been extensively studied for the important role they play in cancer by killing cancer cells directly. The activity of T-cells have often been used to predict disease outcomes in cancer patients.
However, recent studies have shown that innate immune function has been altered in those injected with the COVID shots. A preprint study found receptors that activate T-cell action, including TLR7/8 (toll like receptors 7 and 8), are reduced in vaccinated individuals.
Further, a Chinese study of people who have been vaccinated with the spike protein-inducing COVID-19 shots found that gene activity for what proteins and pathways are turned on and off have changed across most immune cells.
This raises questions about our traditional understanding of the innate immune cell to T-cell activation pathway and whether vaccinated individuals will have an immune system that responds similarly to how it was before vaccination.
The study found T-cell activity was reduced as well as an increased inflammatory response in the immediate weeks following vaccination, which, in the long-term, puts people at risk for cancer.
“These data suggested that after vaccination, at least by day 28, other than generation of neutralizing antibodies, people’s immune systems, including those of lymphocytes (T-cells, B-cells, natural killer cells) and monocytes (innate immune cells), were perhaps in a more vulnerable state,” the authors wrote.
These findings overlap with pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole’s observations at his medical laboratory, Cole Diagnostics.
Cole told Jan Jekielek on American Thought Leaders that after vaccinations started rolling out in the older population, he noticed the reappearance of Molluscum contagiosum, a parapoxvirus that most people get in childhood and is kept in check by the immune system from the teenage years onward.
Though the uptick is unusual, as Cole saw more cases he grew concerned that the vaccines may be driving a form of “immune dysregulation,” meaning a possible breakdown to established immune controls. Since these viruses are normally kept in check by T-cells, which also keep cancers in check, a loss of immune memory against viruses could be a sign of loss of control in cancers.
“About a month or two later, all of a sudden there are certain types of cancers that I commonly see in the laboratory, after 500,000 patients … I started seeing endometrial cancers go up and there’s certain type … Melanomas, I started seeing thicker and earlier as well.”
Since then he has shared his findings in other lectures and found that other doctors and nurses around the world have made similar observations of increased rates of cancer cases.
An analysis by The Expose on VAERS data also indicated an uptick of cancer after COVID-19 vaccines by 143,233 percent.
An undated photograph of Cheryl Rolf and her late husband John Rolf (Courtesy of Cheryl Rolf).
Developing Cancer After Vaccination
In addition to cancers relapsing, there are also cases of sudden cancer development in previously cancer-free people after vaccination.
Cheryl Rolf shared her late husband John Rolf’s experience with a sudden onset of esophageal cancer within a month or two after vaccination.
“He was vaccinated with the first vaccine March 1st of 2021, and then the second vaccine on March 29th,” Cheryl Rolf, his wife told The Epoch Times during a phone call.
A few days after his second vaccination, John, who had always been healthy, started to cough, and soon he would sporadically choke on his food, and “that gradually increased in frequency over time.”
In August, John’s doctor sent him for a scan, showing suspicious growth at the base of the esophagus, and by late August, John was diagnosed with stage 3 esophageal cancer.
“The oncologist said he marked [John] curative,” Rolf said. “He planned for him [John] to fully recover from this.”
Esophageal cancer is a rarer form of cancer that predominantly affects men aged 45 to 70. Smoking, long-term heavy consumption of alcohol, bile reflux, nerve problems in the esophagus, and obesity are all risks of esophageal cancer.
Considering John’s age of 68 years at the time, he was at risk. However, he had no medical or family history of cancer. He also did not have stomach reflux, nor did he smoke, and only drank alcohol occasionally. He was not obese.
In early September, John started his chemo and radiotherapy and it was a particularly tortuous experience for him.
John’s trouble with swallowing soon worsened, coupled with nausea and an altered sense of taste from chemo, he soon “seemed to have given up trying to eat or drink.”
“[John] was supposed to be taking more food and fluids in—he was getting some in—but he was also spitting up an awful lot of yellow phlegm … he couldn’t just drink things like you and I do. He gets to take a sip and try to get it down.”
Dehydration and weight loss meant that he also needed hydration once every three days.
John finished his treatment regimen in mid-October 2021 and doctors planned for him to make a physical recovery from the therapy, gain his strength back, and then remove his tumor through surgery.
However, on Oct. 25, three days after he received his last hydrofusion, John passed away in his sleep.
“I got up and he said ‘I want to sleep some more’ and he didn’t get up. I went and looked [later] and he had passed away.”
Rolf called 911 and moved John onto his back and gave compressions until the paramedics came, but John was gone.
“It was a horrific experience.”
Fourteen cases of esophageal cancers have been reported to VAERS in total for all vaccines, of which one included metastatic cancer (stage 4). Eleven esophageal cancer cases were reported as an adverse event of COVID-19 vaccine, including the single stage 4 cancer case.
Multiple Myeloma After mRNA Vaccination
Stanley Pruszynski also shared his wife’s sudden development of multiple myeloma after two doses of the COVID-19 Moderna vaccine.
Multiple myeloma is a “cancer in the blood … there’s no cure for it because you can’t cure blood cancer,” Pruszynski said.
It affects immune cells, making patients particularly at risk of dying from infections.
The majority of multiple myeloma patients in remission relapses in a few years, and most will later succumb to complications of the disease, particularly infections.
Pruszynski’s wife, Bonnie, then 69 years old, has been very healthy throughout her life. She was adopted into her family, therefore it is unknown if her family has a medical history of cancers, but she had no medical history of previous cancers.
Pruszynski said that Bonnie was very fit. The two would go on walks of five miles a day, and usually it would be him who would want to take a break.
However, two weeks after her second Moderna dose in February, Bonnie developed flu symptoms with constant coughing and night sweats and would get little sleep.
These symptoms persisted and medication did little to improve her condition. She began to feel weak and would ask for breaks on walks before Pruszynski did. She was often scared, she would fall and need to hold onto the walls when navigating their apartment.
In April, Bonnie fell and was taken to the emergency room.
On admission, her hemoglobin level was so low that she was given a blood transfusion.
“They [doctors] tried running some blood tests; the blood wasn’t separating properly to do the testing … well, it turns out that it was because of her hemoglobin levels,” Pruszynski said.
In June, Bonnie was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and started chemotherapy. She started stem cell therapy in December 2021 and spent Christmas in the hospital.
Stem cell therapy is a dangerous yet ambitious therapy to reset the immune system.
First, stem cells will be harvested from the body and stored. The other white blood cells in the body will then be wiped out, often using chemo and radiotherapy. Once the immune system is obliterated, the stem cells will be transferred back into the body to restart the immune system anew.
Bonnie’s fatigue improved and her cancer went into remission, but she still feels weak. The two now walk a quarter of a mile a day, compared to the five miles they used to.
Bonnie now works remotely with reduced hours. Pruszynski estimates that her salary is likely halved.
Pruszynski said that Bonnie has had high blood protein levels for many years. This condition can be a precursor to diseases and often comes with symptoms, though Bonnie was not affected.
Pruszynski therefore suspects that the vaccine, particularly the spike protein it generates, which is known to be toxic, may have triggered something in Bonnie’s immune system leading to blood cancer.
“They give her an estimate of maybe five to 10 years, maybe less. They don’t really know. They don’t have a clue but eventually it will kill her.”
There are a total of 89 multiple myeloma cases reported to VAERS, including plasma multiple myeloma, recurrent myeloma, and recurrent plasma multiple myeloma for all vaccines, and 65 of the cases were reported for COVID-19 vaccines.
Cases of the polio virus are re-emerging across the world, including in the U.S., and appear to be attributed to strains of the virus resulting from vaccination.
In July, A 20-year-old man residing in New York was diagnosed with polio, resulting in paralysis in his legs. While mainstream media outlets covered the story, journalists and commentators exploited the incident, blaming it on an individual’s decision to not receive a polio vaccine.
As Dr. Leana Wen, a notorious advocate for face masks and placing restrictions on people who opted out of receiving a COVID-19 jab, wrote in The Washington Post:
“Because of low vaccination rates, polio is back and appears to be spreading in at least one part of the country. Other vaccine-preventable diseases will also reemerge unless we take urgent steps to reverse this tragic trend. In July, an unvaccinated 20-year-old man residing in Rockland County, N.Y., was diagnosed with polio, which resulted in paralysis in his legs.”
Similarly, NBC News ran a story alleging the case was directly linked to low vaccination rates titled: “Polio Vaccination Rate For 2-year-olds is as Low as 37% in Parts of N.Y. County Where Paralysis Case Was Found.”
“Polio has been circulating for months in New York City area and poses an ongoing risk to the unvaccinated, CDC says,” reads the headline of another CNBC story.
The New York man, however, was actually infected with a type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus, a result of an oral polio vaccine, according to the New York State Department of Health.
The vaccine responsible for crippling the individual is what’s known as a “live-attenuated vaccine,” which in contrast to inactivated vaccines, retains the ability to become more deadly and infectious if mutates while replicating. The virus can then be shed into the environment, enabling it to infect vulnerable individuals.
Despite the re-emergence of polio being triggered by a vaccine, health officials and mainstream media outlets have continued to push vaccination as the solution to a potential outbreak.
“‘Silent’ spread of polio in New York drives CDC to consider additional vaccinations for some people,” claimed CNN.
In other words, the re-emergent case of polio being used by journalists and public health agencies to push vaccination is actually a direct result of an individual receiving a polio vaccine.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a key figure in a December 2020 White House meeting seeking to encourage then President Donald Trump to investigate allegations of election fraud, has filed a motion in the Department of Justice’s investigation of Trump, calling for the release of the key document justifying the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Agents on Aug. 8 seized more than two dozen boxes of records from Trump’s Florida resort, which contained 11 sets of documents with classified markings, according to an FBI property receipt made public on Aug. 12.
Trump has said that he had declassified all the confiscated records before leaving office and demanded the immediate release of unredacted affidavit behind the FBI warrant.
Byrne, who recently testified before the House Jan. 6 Committee, argued in his Aug. 18 motion that Trump had such powers to declassify as president, citing a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2020 where he said the former president twice exercised the same presidential authority.
The affidavit should be unsealed along with other records shedding light on the raid to promote transparency and accountability in government, Byrne argued in the court filing.
“Trump’s position was that … if this was not just some police state raid but there was a good reason for this raid, then, let’s see it,” Byrne told The Epoch Times.
“If Trump was telling the truth” and he in fact declassified all the documents, and the FBI submitted an affidavit accusing Trump of mishandling classified documents, “that means they were lying to the court,” he said.
“Trump was only mishandling classified documents if those documents were in fact, classified, but if he declassified then he was not mishandling classified documents.”
Byrne during the closed door meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, urged the former president to launch a probe into the election fraud allegations.
Frustrated with the suggestion of having former Trump attorney Sidney Powell appointed special counsel to spearhead a limited investigation into alleged fraud, then White House Counsel Pat Cipollone allegedly told Trump: “Hey if you want to do this you don’t need my permission. You don’t even need a pen or a piece of paper. You can just say, ‘I hire Sidney Powell as White House Special Counsel,’ and it’s done,” Byrne wrote in the filing.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne is surrounded by private security as he arrives at the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. House Office Building to be interviewed by the House select committee investigating the events on January 6, on July 15, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Later, responding to questions about Powell’s lack of a security clearance, General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was present at the meeting, allegedly told Trump that he could “ do the same thing with a clearance.”
“You can grant any clearance you want, on the spot, verbally,” according to a sworn affidavit by Byrne filed with the court.
According to him, Trump acted on the suggestions, verbally appointing Powell a White House special counsel and granting her top secret security clearance. He says after that the White House attorneys angrily left the room but didn’t dispute Trump’s actions.
Trump ultimately rescinded the decision upon the persuasion of his then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, according to Byrne.
“He doesn’t have to sign anything, if he gives an order, that makes it legally effective,” Byrne told the court, describing it as “the Trump White House standard operating procedure.”
Backing Trump’s Claims
Mike Davis, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, has also backed Trump’s claims.
Trump “has the constitutional authority to declassify anything he wants,” he told NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times, in a recent interview. “And so, when he sent boxes out of the White House, he declassified them.”
Davis said the Justice Department should have released the affidavit but would likely try to “hide it as much as they can.”
A federal judge on Friday signaled a willingness to release a redacted version of the affidavit despite opposition from the government lawyers, who argued that doing so could undermine ongoing investigations and imperil the safety of witnesses involved.
Secret Service personnel in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Aug. 8, 2022. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
Byrne saw the judge’s move as a “judicious decision.”
“The FBI should not have to reveal whoever was their sources, they should protect their sources,” he said. “But beyond that, they shouldn’t be able to keep this affidavit a secret.
“I think the country needs to know what the FBI is saying that caused the attorney general to sign off on this extraordinary application. Unprecedented.”
Because of the raid and activities of the kind, the FBI has become “so delegitimized now in the eyes of so much of the public,” Byrne said. “It’s creating a terrible fear and oppression in the minds of the American public.”
“I talked to a lot of non-Republicans and they’re all starting to sound like Republicans. They see this as police state tactics.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray has come out in defense of his agency, saying agents have received “deplorable and dangerous” online threats in the wake of the raid.
“I like Christopher Wray,” said Byrne. “But I think he’s got a very narrow window to save his organization. And I hope he does.”
Dr. Robert Malone on Aug. 19 sued the Washington Post, alleging statements in an article about him were defamatory.
The Jan. 24 article says Malone offered “misinformation” when he said during a speech that the COVID-19 vaccines “are not working” against the Omicron virus variant.
As proof, the paper linked to studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from January that found a booster shot on top of a primary series was protecting well against severe disease. The studies were published in the agency’s quasi-journal, which has a stated goal of being aligned with the agency’s messaging. The centers have repeatedly promoted COVID-19 vaccination during the pandemic.
Later in the speech, Malone said that the vaccines “do not prevent Omicron infection, viral replication, or spread to others.” That quote was not included in the Post’s article.
“I said nothing about disease and death at that point in time,” Malone told The Epoch Times, accusing the Post of taking a “selective misquote” and using the CDC study to contest an assertion he never made.
The Post did not respond to a request for comment while an automatic message from the article’s author, Timothy Bella, said he’s on parental leave until December. Bella provided no evidence in the article that the vaccines were protecting against Omicron infection.
An interview request from Bella to Malone before the article was written, reviewed by The Epoch Times, shows Bella telling Malone that “I have respect for you and your body of work” and that he hoped to “shadow you” during Malone’s time in Washington, where the doctor delivered the speech at a protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Ten Statements
Ten of the statements in the article were defamatory, including the statement that Malone’s claims have been “discredited;” that Malone during the speech “repeated the falsehoods that have garnered him legions of followers;” and that Malone’s claims are “not only wrong, but also dangerous,” according to the 19-page suit, filed in federal court in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“The qualities WaPo disparaged—Dr. Malone’s honesty, veracity, integrity, competence, judgment, morals and ethics as a licensed medical doctor and scientist—are peculiarly valuable to Dr. Malone and are absolutely necessary in the practice and profession of any medical doctor and scientist. WaPo ascribes to Dr. Malone conduct, characteristics and conditions, including fraud, disinformation, misinformation, deception and dishonesty, that would adversely affect his fitness to be a medical professional and to conduct the business of a medical doctor,” the suit states.
“Dr. Malone’s statements concerning COVID-19 and the purported ‘vaccines’ were 100% factually accurate. He has never committed fraud on [sic] engaged in any medical disinformation or misinformation. Further, the so-called ‘vaccines’ do not work, as is abundantly clear from both the scientific and anecdotal evidence to date,” it also says.
Malone previously served the Post with a written notice threatening legal action if it did not retract and/or correct the allegedly defamatory statements, but it refused to make any retractions or corrections, according to the filing.
Malone has also threatened to sue other media outlets, including the New York Times, but decided to start with the Post because the case “is really straightforward,” he said.
A document made public on Aug. 18 for the first time shows that an FBI agent authored the request for a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s resort in Florida.
The document, an application for a warrant (pdf), was made by an FBI special agent.
The document also shows that an agent, possibly the same one, authored the affidavit, or a sworn statement that outlined to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida why it should grant the application.
The identity of the agent who signed the application and the name of the agent who signed the affidavit are redacted.
The application was made on Aug. 5, and approved the same day by U.S. District Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the unsealing of the application on Aug. 18.
Agents executed the warrant on Aug. 8, taking boxes of items and documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
While opposing the release of the affidavit, government lawyers said in a recent filing that they did not object to making public other documents related to the raid, including the application, as long as minor redactions could be made “to protect government personnel.”
Releasing the affidavit, on the other hand, would harm an ongoing investigation into potential criminal conduct by Trump, the lawyers argued.
Reinhart on Friday ordered them to produce a redacted version of the affidavit to him by Aug. 25 at noon. He said he was leaning towards releasing a redacted copy, though a lawyer for media outlets calling for its release said the process will take weeks.
“I find that on the present record the Government has not met its burden of showing that the entire affidavit should remain sealed,” Reinhart said in a written order after a hearing.
A slew of documents have been filed under seal in the case. Some, including the warrant itself, were unsealed by Reinhart with light redactions on Aug. 12.
Neither federal lawyers nor Trump’s counsel opposed the release of those documents, which indicated that the FBI’s Washington Field Office was running point on the raid. The warrant was predicated on the belief that Trump has likely violated laws governing the transmittal of defense information, concealment of records, and destruction of records. Trump has said he is innocent and being politically targeted.
U.S. lawyers filed the application with the court on Aug. 15. Until Friday, none of its details could be viewed by the public.
Other documents were also unsealed: a criminal cover sheet showing U.S. Attorney Juan Gonzalez or the Southern District of Florida stating the case did not originate from several pending matters, a motion to seal the warrant and related documents, and the approval of the motion to seal.
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify the government did not object to the release of some warrant materials, and to show the judge approved the unsealing of the application on Aug. 18. The Epoch Times regrets the errors.
For a damning picture of the modern left, it doesn’t get much clearer than this.
The Democratic Party, which spent the 2020 presidential election year trashing the police and cheering on rioting mobs wreaking havoc on American cities is now desperately trying to rebrand itself for the midterm election year as the party of loyalty to federal law enforcement agencies hellbent on pursuing former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
But as a Twitter post published Wednesday by a member of the previous Democratic administration shows, all it’s really proving is basic ignorance, or utter contempt, for the foundations the country was built on.
The post was published by Tommy Vietor, now a co-host of the blasphemously liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” but a man who rose to public attention as one of the more abrasively juvenile members of the Obama administration.
The tweet included a link to a CNN report (of course) about the surveillance footage that was taken of last week’s FBI raid on Trump’s home in South Florida’s Mar-a-Lago Club, and a comment from Vietor that probably said more about the mindset of the modern left than Tommy ever intended.
The staff at the Trump household had refused an FBI request to turn off surveillance cameras in the home, which would have left the agents free to do anything they chose without fear of exposure.
“Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information,” Vietor wrote.
Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information. https://t.co/J6l1gtMpMc
He’s “very confused” about an American household disobeying an order from the FBI? And a “direct order” at that?
It’s a good bet he wasn’t at all confused by the George Floyd rioters failing to follow the orders of local police as they set about looting and torching businesses in the name of “social justice” in the summer of 2020.
For many Democrats, anarchy in the streets, theft and destruction of property, even outright murder are completely acceptable (just ask the gangsters who benefited from the bail organization Vice President Kamala Harris supported).
But failing to fall into lockstep obedience with the feds when they show up armed with a search warrant and plenty of weaponry? That passes Vietor’s comprehension.
Naturally, being a blue-checked liberal, Vietor has plenty of simpering sympathizers in the social media world (even the Twitter bots Elon Musk talks about have more brains than that herd), but fortunately for the future of the republic, there were more than a few responses to set Vietor straight:
You say, “No thank you, I prefer to film my home during your official duties.” The official duties of the officer are not private, and first amendment permits filming officers.
Now, it’s easy to dislike Vietor and the rest of the coterie of sophomoric arrogance that surrounded the Obama White House. (The State Department’s Marie Harf was another, along with Harf’s old boss Jen Psaki.)
With Obama administration posts that included membership in the National Security Council and special assistant to the president, Vietor helped saddle the country with the bogus Iran nuclear deal that even Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to the Obama White House, admitted had been sold in an “echo chamber” of mainstream media ignorance. (And to New York Times Magazine, no less.)
But he’s worth paying attention to, if only to see where the leftists of the Obama years are leading their party and — regrettably — the country today.
His podcast is an influential voice in leftist politics — the DigitalTrends website ranked it as the third-best political podcast for 2022. (No. 1 was NPR’s “The NPR Politics Podcast,” which says everything that needs to be said about DigitalTrends’ political preferences.)
To his marginal credit, Vietor appeared to learn something from his Twitter post, as one respondent explained a search warrant does not give law enforcement — even the big, bad FBI — powers to do more than search the premises involved.
“A search warrant authorizes…a search, per 4th Amd. It does not create other powers or cancel out civil liberties,” the user wrote.
“I remember when people used to be skeptical of the police, *especially* when they were dealing with someone we thought was a criminal.”
Vietor seemed to get the message — or maybe he’d just finally realized how cringingly submissive his initial tweet came off and remembered that he’s supposed to be a man.
“Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this ‘order’ because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous,” he wrote.
Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this “order” because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous.
“A little ridiculous” should have been a first reaction to the blatantly political operation. “Outrageous!” “Infuriating!” “Totalitarian BS!” would have been even better.
But for the leftist mindset of 2022, steeped in the openly anti-American tradition birthed by the disastrous Obama years, the initial reaction is not to defend American freedoms but to question why Americans can refuse a “direct order.”
This is a man who served in the Obama White House, remember, where the abuse of power at federal agencies — such as the IRS, with the likes of Lois Lerner; the FBI with the “leadership” of James Comey; and the Justice Department under political grifters like Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch — had to have been considered almost commonplace.
It’s a basic distortion of the country’s foundation of law and order, pervasive among leftists in the mainstream media, in popular culture and in the Democratic Party from local governments through the House, the Senate and the White House:
They have nothing but contempt for the law; they worship orders.
There are many sorry countries, with many sorry histories, where that attitude is the norm. The United States isn’t one of them.
The media has been hiding economic reports over the last few weeks. As we get closer to the midterms, they will be doing what they can to protect Democrats.
But Americans continue to suffer from inflation, high gas prices, and other stains on their wallets. And now, another sign has come out that the recession is already on us.
From Washington Examiner:
Housing starts measure the annualized change in the number of new residential buildings that began construction. Last month, they declined by a hefty 9.6% to a 1.45 million annualized rate after posting slight gains in June, according to a Tuesday report from the Commerce Department.
If the rising price of ground beef or unleaded regular didn’t tip you off that the economy isn’t great, this will.
The number of housing starts in July fell a steep 9.6%. This number measures how many new residential buildings begin construction.
Even a slight drop suggests a weakening economy. The housing market is always the first industry to suffer in a recession (or a depression).
When things are bad, people cut back on spending. The bigger expenses, like houses and cars, are cut first.
Then everything else quickly follows. These cutbacks force companies to make cuts themselves. In some cases, they lay off as many workers as possible.
So, this number is much more important than you might realize. New housing products dropped last month.
That’s consistent with other numbers that have come out recently. Inflation is hitting construction, as everything is costing more.
The housing bubble from 2020 long burst. Americans don’t want to risk moving or buying a new home, because it’s just too expensive.
The rest will come shortly, whether Biden believes it or not.
UPDATE: And just in, now housing sales just smashed through the floor. From CNBC:
Sales of previously owned homes fell nearly 6% in July compared with June, according to a monthly report from the National Association of Realtors.
Sales dropped about 20% from the same month a year ago.
“In terms of economic impact we are surely in a housing recession because builders are not building,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors.
The fallout from Biden’s leadership just keeps piling up, folks.
In a master-level stroke of inversion, former President Donald Trump has found a new use for his ability to all but ensure the success of Republican candidates.
On Wednesday via Truth Social, Trump unleashed his “endorsements” against three Democrats: Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who is campaigning for New York’s 10th Congressional District, Carolyn Maloney of New York and Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Both Maloney and Nadler are competing for a redrawn 12th Congressional District.
Based upon context, these “endorsements” from Trump can be considered to be either darkly disingenuous or delivered sarcastically with a proverbial wink to his supporters. Judge for yourself.
On Truth Social, Trump wrote first about Goldman, “Lawyer Dan Goldman is running for Congress, NY-10, and it is my great honor to Strongly Endorse him. I do this not because of the fact that he headed up the Impeachment Committee and lost, but because he was honorable, fair, and highly intelligent. While it was my honor to beat him, and beat him badly, Dan Goldman has a wonderful future ahead….”
“….He will be very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party, and will do everything possible to make sure they have a fair chance at winning against the Radical Left Democrats, who he knows are destroying our Country. I would like to thank Dan for fighting so hard for America, and for working so tirelessly to stop “Trump.” He was not easy to beat, but winning against him made me realize just how very talented I am!” he continued.
Trump suggested that Goldman will be a moderate “very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party” a damning descriptor in the uber-radicalized far-left of the 2022 Democrat party.
Minutes later, a similar “endorsement” for Maloney, with some kind words for her opponent Nadler appeared on Trump’s account.
“A vote for Carolyn Maloney in NY-12 is a vote for the future! She is a kind and wonderful person, who has always said terrific things about me, and will support me no matter what I do, just as I supported her very early on. She begged for a check with no quid pro quo, and I gave it to her. In fact, I gave her many….”
According to the Federal Elections Commission, Trump did in fact donate to Maloney’s campaign in 1993, 1994, 1998, 2006 and again in 2009 for a total of $4,000.
He continued and even took aim at Jerry Nadler. “….On the other hand, Jerry Nadler is likewise a hard driving man of the people, whose energy and attention to detail is unlike anyone else in Congress. He is high energy, sharp, quick-witted, and bright. You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man. She will lead our Country into a very GREEN and prosperous future. Carolyn has my Complete and Total Endorsement, she will never let our Conservative Movement down!”
The highlight of the snarky message is definitely the combined swipe at both Maloney and Nadler, “You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man.”
Naturally, Goldman and Maloney both vehemently rejected the “endorsement” from the 45th President. Goldman’s campaign attempted to turn the joke around on Trump in a statement reported by The Blaze.
Several establishment media giants have asked a court to unseal all of the documents related to the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last week.
The move came after the Justice Department filed its own request for some of the materials to be released, CNN reported.
Lawyers representing major media outlets like CNN, The Washington Post and NBC News appeared on Thursday before Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the warrant for the Mar-a-Lago raid, according to The Epoch Times.
Reinhart said he was “inclined” to release some of the affidavit from the raid and instructed the DOJ to redact any parts of the document that would undermine its investigation, The Washington Post reported. The judge said he would make a decision after the department submits its proposed redactions next Thursday.
Trump himself has said that he wants the affidavit unsealed.
“In the interest of TRANSPARENCY, I call for the immediate release of the completely Unredacted Affidavit pertaining to this horrible and shocking BREAK-IN,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday.
The news outlets cited “the public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred in these circumstances” in their filing with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
The DOJ itself set things in motion last week when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the department’s request for documents to be released. Garland said the DOJ wants the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago.
However, unlike the media companies, which asked for all the documents to be unsealed, the DOJ did not seek the release of the affidavit filed in support of the search warrant.
In fact, federal prosecutors investigating Trump asked a judge on Monday not to release the affidavit for national security reasons, The Hill reported.
“There remain compelling reasons, including to protect the integrity of an ongoing law enforcement investigation that implicates national security, that support keeping the affidavit sealed,” a filing from the prosecutors reads.
But the media companies argued in their request that “the tremendous public interest in these records in particular outweighs any purported interest in keeping them secret.”
For once, these outlets may be correct.
Though they wave the flag of “public interest” in requesting the unsealing of the documents, make no mistake — the media would simply make more money and be able to drag this story out longer if all the documents were revealed.
But though the media’s motivation may be selfish, it actually would benefit the American people to have access to the documents.
The raid is a very public issue, and since it concerns a former president, the citizenry should (at least in principle) have the information, particularly surrounding what led to the search warrant.
Some have suggested that federal prosecutors’ attempt to keep the affidavit sealed is actually just an attempt to cover up some sort of corruption in the process of the search.
The media outlets are even being reasonable in their request for the documents. If national security is at risk, the government has the right to redact parts of the documents. But that doesn’t mean they should be sealed altogether.
“Even when the government can demonstrate compelling interests, the court must examine ‘whether there are alternative means available’ to address them, such as redaction of a document rather than sealing it in its entirety,” the filing reads.
It doesn’t make sense any longer to keep all the documents sealed. The details of the raid, how it was conducted, the nature of the documents searched for and more have already been made very public. Trying to hide anything else at this point smells of corruption.
The media outlets are right. It’s time to unseal the documents.
“Transparency serves the public interest in understanding and accepting the results. That’s good for the government and for the court,” Charles Tobin, a lawyer representing the outlets, said in court on Thursday, according to The Washington Post.
University ‘fully aware of the situation,’ did nothing to protect students from harassment
Two Jewish students at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz say they were booted from a support group for sexual assault victims and harassed by members of the group due to their Jewish identity, according to a complaint filed with the Education Department.
One of the victims, student Cassandra Blotner, says members of the support group threatened to spit on her in public for proudly being Jewish, while others called her a “dumb bitch” who supports “mass genocide” due to her support for Israel. The complaint alleges the university was “fully aware of the situation,” yet did nothing to protect the students from the anti-Semitic hate campaign.
“These students have been thrice victimized: first, by sexual predators; second, by the anti-Zionist leaders of a support group who expelled the students, including one of its founders, from the organization; and third, by the University which failed to hold accountable those who had discriminated against the students and failed to satisfactorily address the hostile climate on campus for Jewish survivors of sexual assault,” the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law, an advocacy group that helped file the complaint, said in a statement issued on Thursday.
The complaint is another sign that anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist forces on U.S. college campuses are fueling an unsafe environment for Jewish and pro-Israel students. The Education Department is already investigating the University of Southern California for fomenting “a hostile environment of anti-Semitism” and many other schools have experienced a significant rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes. Jewish and pro-Israel students say they are routinely targeted based solely on their support for the Jewish state.
At SUNY, the trouble first began in December of last year. Blotner posted a message on her personal Instagram account: “Jews are an ethnic group who come from Israel. This is proven by genealogical, historical and archeological evidence. Israel is not a ‘colonial’ state and Israelis aren’t ‘settlers.’ You cannot colonize the land your ancestors are from.”
The message allegedly angered fellow members of the New Paltz Accountability group (NPA), which Blotner and another student founded to help combat sexual assault. Members of the group allegedly “denounced the post and demanded Blotner defend her views, arguing her personal post ‘concerns the organization as a whole,’” according to the complaint and other information provided by the Brandeis Center.
While Blotner offered to meet with the group and explain her views, “NPA leaders refused the offer to meet and told her that Zionists were not welcome in NPA,” according to the complaint.
As “the only Jew of the group … it seems that I am being held accountable for the actions of a foreign government (which is something that I am not and is anti-Semitic),” Blotner said in comments to the Brandeis Center. “I am worried for the future of the group and other survivors who come seeking support. Will they too be made to feel this way due to misperceptions of shared posts, lack of cultural/religious understandings, or general difference of opinions?”
Blotner’s original post was also shared by another support group member, Ofek Preis, who is a Jewish-Israeli student. Soon after, Preis was allegedly banned from the group’s lists and barred access to its online portal. The support group also made clear to Preis that it “was only open to those who reject Zionism,” according to the Brandeis Center’s complaint.
Both Preis and Blotner were then subjected to anti-Semitic harassment and bullying online by the group’s members.
The support group “went on to publish numerous statements doubling down on its stance that Zionists are not welcome,” according to the complaint. The group extended “its exclusionary and discriminatory stance to all Jewish Zionist and Israeli sexual assault survivors at SUNY New Paltz,” and promoted “the anti-Semitic narrative that Zionism is a form of racism and white-supremacy.”
Some members posted threatening messages online, saying they would spit on Blotner. Another allegedly called Blotner a “dumb bitch” who supports “mass genocide.”
Blotner and Preis both contacted SUNY with fears about their safety, but the schools did not take any action, according to the complaint.
“The university declined Blotner’s request for a security escort to accompany her to class and advised her not to attend,” according to the Brandeis Center. “Unable to attend class safely, Blotner left campus to be with her family. The hostile anti-Semitic atmosphere for Jewish Zionist sexual assault survivors brewing on campus after [the support group’s] posts caused Preis … to feel so anxious about her safety she was also unable to attend class.”
Denise Katz-Prober, Brandeis Center’s director of legal initiatives, said in a statement that the situation parallels those on other college campuses, where Jewish and pro-Israel students are increasingly concerned about their safety.
“Students are being marginalized and excluded from campus activities on the basis of their Jewish identity, which in some cases is deeply connected to Israel,” she said. “At the same time, Israeli students are being targeted by anti-Zionist hatred that invokes classic anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power and control.”
“When Jewish students, like Ms. Blotner and Ms. Preis, are cast out of social justice spaces and campus activities because they express pride in their ethnic or national identity, that is a form of unlawful discrimination, not political speech,” Katz-Prober said. “This case is not about the awful things that were said to these women. Rather, it is about the awful things that were done to them.”
Employees at Google’s parent company are urging the search engine to suppress results for pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, according to a petition sent Monday by the company union to Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, more than 650 employees at Alphabet Inc. signed the petition, which demands that Google remove “results for fake abortion providers” and what the union considers “misleading information” about reproductive health care services. The petition also demands that Google stop collecting users’ data on abortion-related searches, saying that users’ data would be “used against them” in states that have banned or restricted abortion.
Abortion providers often vilify pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, which provide counseling, resources, and often medical services to pregnant women. Planned Parenthood calls such centers “fake clinics” that have the “shady, harmful agenda” of talking women out of getting abortions.
The petition, circulated by the Alphabet Workers Union, urges Google to institute data privacy controls for “health-related activity,” such as searches for “reproductive justice, gender-affirming care, and abortion access information.” These data, according to the petition, “must never be saved, handed over to law enforcement, or treated as a crime.”
Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Google have faced political challenges on data disclosure since a draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was leaked in May. Twenty-one congressional Democrats in June urged Google in a letter to “limit the appearance” or add “user-friendly disclaimers” to search results for pro-life pregnancy centers.
Google states in its Privacy Policy that it must respond to a government subpoena, court order, or search warrant but pushes back on requests for information it deems too broad.
A Nebraska police department this month used legally acquired information from Facebook to prosecute 17-year-old Celeste Burgess for violating Nebraska’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks, the Nebraska Examinerreported.
Google stated in July it will automatically erase visits to abortion facilities from a user’s location history, the Wall Street Journalreported.
Alphabet executives have not yet responded to the petition.
A student claimed that the Ivy League school obtained her therapy notes without her consent and shared them with a professor who’d assaulted her. That’s not what happened.
On February 8, Lilia Kilburn, a graduate student at Harvard University, made an explosive claim: In the course of a Title IX investigation, the university had obtained notes from her private therapy sessions without her consent—then shared them with a professor who she alleged had sexually assaulted her. The professor, John Comaroff, in turn used the notes to “gaslight” Kilburn and undermine her credibility, she said in a lawsuit against the Ivy League school. Harvard, the lawsuit alleged, “opted to protect its star professor over vulnerable students.”
Six months later, it appears Kilburn’s allegation was bunk.
Between May and July, Harvard filed dozens of documents in court telling its side of the story, including several email exchanges between Kilburn and university investigators. They show that Kilburn urged Harvard to get in touch with her therapist, gave the therapist permission to release the notes, and received repeated warnings that anything disclosed would be shared with Comaroff, per Harvard’s Title IX procedures.
None of the national media outlets that amplified Kilburn’s explosive claims have reported on these revelations. Though her story has quietly collapsed in court, it remains the official narrative in the press.
“This is an important case that we continue to follow closely,” the Chronicle of Higher Education told the Washington Free Beacon. “However, we don’t comment on our future coverage plans.” The Daily Beast said that its original story was “accurate and fair” and that it planned to “follow up when there is a significant judicial decision in the case.” Gawker—which all but assumed Harvard’s guilt—did not respond to a request for comment.
Harvard is now asking a Massachusetts district court to dismiss Kilburn’s allegation without a trial. Such a request, known as a motion for summary judgment, is “very unusual this early in a case,” said Ruth O’Meara-Costello, one of Comaroff’s attorneys, who is not a party to the lawsuit. “Harvard is plainly very confident about the facts here and its ability to document them.” Kilburn’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
The lack of media follow-up means that students will be hesitant to report misconduct, Harvard argued in its filings, out of a mistaken belief that the university will raid their medical records. It also means the original narrative—that Comaroff is a sexual predator protected by powerful men—still hangs in the air.
In fact, the university found no evidence that the 77-year-old anthropologist had committed sexual assault. His critics have nonetheless painted Harvard as a hotbed of misogyny, one hell-bent on silencing women by any means necessary.
Such portrayals pervade stories about campus sexual misconduct, even when the allegations underlying them are weak. The New York Times in 2018 published a 2,600-word article about another Harvard professor, Roland Fryer, whom the university was investigating for sexual harassment. The report—”Star Economist at Harvard Faces Sexual Harassment Complaints”—omitted numerous findings from the investigation that cast doubt on the allegations, including that the complainant “broadly mischaracterized” Fryer’s conduct.
Comaroff is an example of the damage that this sort of reporting can inflict. In May 2020, Kilburn and two other graduate students, Amulya Mandava and Margaret Czerwienski, filed Title IX complaints against the elderly anthropologist, which the Harvard Crimson framed as referenda on “decades-old power structures.” At every turn, coverage of the case has raced ahead of the facts, maligning a professor whom Harvard’s own Title IX process cleared of sexual assault.
That coverage didn’t just besmirch Comaroff but also put tremendous pressure on Harvard to figure out a way to punish him. The school’s initial investigation, completed in August 2021, found only a minor violation of Title IX—an allegedly off-color comment Comaroff made during office hours. But amid continued coverage of the case, Harvard began investigating some of Comaroff’s other comments—which the school determined did not violate Title IX—as potential breaches of its “professional conduct” policy.
“I think it’s clear that Harvard didn’t like the results of the first investigation, which mostly exonerated Professor Comaroff, and was determined to punish him as harshly as possible,” O’Meara-Costello said. The university placed Comaroff on a semester of unpaid leave in January for allegedly violating both its sexual harassment and professional conduct policies and barred him from teaching required courses for at least a year. Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.
The sanctions are part of a broader pattern, O’Meara-Costello told the Free Beacon, of universities punishing professors who are exonerated in Title IX investigations but crucified by the media—or by their own students and colleagues. “Once a faculty member is accused of sexual misconduct, even a finding of non-responsibility in the Title IX process is no guarantee that a university will not impose career-ending consequences,” O’Meara-Costello said, adding that she was aware of “multiple cases” like Comaroff’s.
Such cases reflect an ongoing clash between Title IX regulations and the schools that are subject to them. In 2020, the Trump administration put in place rules that strengthened due process protections in campus sexual assault proceedings. Though the Biden administration is trying to claw back those rules—with the support of many universities, including Harvard—there are still limits on how Kafkaesque Title IX offices can be. That’s created an incentive for schools to refer harassment allegations to other bureaucracies, where there is often more wiggle room to mete out punishment.
In May, for example, Princeton University fired a tenured classics professor, Joshua Katz, whom the university’s Title IX office had cleared of sexual misconduct. Rather than accept the results of that investigation, Princeton punted the case to another office—one with fewer due process protections for the accused—which found that Katz had violated a vague “honesty and cooperation” policy. Like Comaroff, Katz had been portrayed in his university’s student newspaper as a serial predator protected by powerful faculty.
These sorts of portrayals were a recurring headache for Harvard. The university made several unflattering appearances in the 2015 documentary Hunting Ground, which claimed to unmask coverups of sexual assault on college campuses. In February 2018, the Chronicle of Higher Educationreported that Harvard had turned a blind eye to decades of harassment by a prominent government professor, Jorge Domínguez. Later that year, the New York Times came out with its exposé about Roland Fryer, who has since been barred from supervising graduate students.
Then in May 2020, the Harvard Crimsonreported that three anthropology professors, not just Comaroff, had weathered sexual misconduct allegations over the past decade. Comaroff, the Crimson suggested, was but one node in an “old boys’ network” that preyed on vulnerable women. Though the article noted that three students were “in communication with Harvard’s Title IX office,” it did not name Comaroff’s accusers or detail the allegations against him, which only became public in an August 2020 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
That story, like the Crimson‘s, framed Harvard as a bastion of regressive power structures that protect “powerful men.” With the bad press mounting, Harvard placed Comaroff on paid leave in August 2020 pending a “full review” of the “allegations that have been reported.”
The most serious allegations came from Kilburn, who claimed that Comaroff had fantasized aloud about her being raped and touched her without her consent. Notes from her therapist, she told university investigators, could corroborate those allegations.
“I think [the therapist] should have a bunch of notes or memories for you,” Kilburn said in an August 2020 interview with the university’s Office of Dispute Resolution, a transcript of which Harvard filed in court.
Though media reports have suggested that Kilburn was blindsided by the university’s decision to get in touch with her therapist, the court filings show that she explicitly listed the therapist as a witness Harvard should contact. In a September 2020 email to investigators, she provided the therapist’s contact information, writing that it would “make sense” for “you to speak to” her.
By this point, the court filings suggest, Harvard had warned Kilburn seven times that any material shared with investigators would also be shared with Comaroff, a disclaimer Kilburn acknowledged in writing.
“Both parties have the right to review and respond to all information” that the university “may rely on in the investigation,” one email from investigators said, including “any written information provided by a witness.” On July 6, 2020, Kilburn replied: “Thank you for this information—it is helpful.”
Later in July, Kilburn had two Zoom meetings with the Office of Dispute Resolution, which reiterated that each party would have access to everything the other submitted. Those meetings are recounted in an affidavit from a senior Title IX investigator and in transcripts of the meetings taken by a second Title IX official.
In October, per Kilburn’s written request, the university contacted her therapist, who turned over two sets of notes from her sessions with Kilburn, the court filings show. As the investigation progressed, Harvard continued to remind Kilburn that it was sharing all of the evidence it gathered, including the therapy notes, with Comaroff. There is no record of any objections to those disclosures until after the investigation concluded—and after it became clear that the university hadn’t bought her most lurid claims.
Harvard determined in August 2021 that Comaroff, a scholar of African society, had violated Title IX by warning Kilburn not to travel with her same-sex partner to Cameroon, where lesbians are frequently the target of rape. He conveyed that warning in an inappropriate tone, the investigation found, but not with a sexual intention.
The school dismissed all of Kilburn’s other allegations, including the allegation of sexual assault. It also dismissed the allegations of the other two graduate students, Amulya Mandava and Margaret Czerwienski, who claimed that Comaroff had retaliated against them when they sought to expose his harassment of Kilburn.
But the pressure on Harvard was mounting. All three students were active in Harvard’s Graduate Student Union, which for years had waged a highly publicized campaign for stronger sexual harassment protections. That campaign escalated in fall 2021, energized by the allegations against Comaroff, and received glowing coverage in both the Harvard Crimson and the Boston Globe.
Amid the firestorm, Harvard notified Comaroff in October 2021 that it was hiring an outside lawyer, Alexandra Thaler, to determine whether some of his comments to Mandava had violated the school’s “professional conduct policy,” according to a detailed statement O’Meara-Costello provided to the Free Beacon.
Like at Princeton in the case of Joshua Katz, the second investigation had fewer due process protections than the first one. Harvard did not let Thaler interview any witnesses or consider additional evidence from either party, O’Meara-Costello’s statement said; the university required that she make her determinations based on a truncated excerpt of the evidence that Title IX investigators had gathered, which did not include several findings favorable to Comaroff.
Having reviewed this curated set of findings, Thaler concluded that Comaroff had violated the professional conduct policy by making remarks that Mandava perceived as threatening. The perception was what mattered: Thaler’s report said that Comaroff’s intent was irrelevant to whether he’d violated the policy, according to O’Meara-Costello’s statement.
Thaler did not respond to a request for comment. On January 20, Comaroff was placed on unpaid leave for the spring semester.
The sanctions—and the procedural hijinks that produced them—shocked 38 professors at the Ivy League school who on February 4 issued an open letter defending Comaroff. The signatories questioned how Comaroff could have violated Title IX by “informing students of the risks of gender-based violence.” And they attacked the university for subjecting their “excellent colleague” to double jeopardy, saying it set an ominous precedent for faculty.
Then came the lawsuit.
The complaint against Harvard, filed on February 8 by Kilburn, Mandava, and Czerwienski, didn’t just accuse the school of mishandling Kilburn’s therapy records. It also attacked Harvard’s “deliberate indifference” to Comaroff’s “decades-long pattern of harassment,” and lodged a number of allegations—many of them based on secondhand information—that were not included in the original Title IX complaints.
Those allegations were everywhere in a matter of hours. The New York Timespublished a piece on the lawsuit the same day it was filed—one of the few that acknowledged Harvard had cleared Comaroff of the worst charges against him. Other outlets were more one-sided. Some, like Gawker and the Daily Beast, seemed to take everything the plaintiffs said at face value.
Within 36 hours, 35 of the 38 professors who’d defended Comaroff withdrew their support, writing in a retraction letter that “we were lacking full information about the case.”
The only ones who did not sign the retraction letter were law professors, who argued that the new allegations—none of which had been investigated—didn’t negate the due process concerns.
But the damage was done. On February 20, more than three-quarters of Harvard’s tenured anthropology professors called on Comaroff to resign. And on July 26, over 250 students and professors signed a petition demanding that Comaroff be barred from teaching, even after his semester-long suspension was up. The petition repeated the allegations that Harvard’s Title IX investigators had dismissed, as well as the others that were breathlessly reported in the press.
It wasn’t just Comaroff’s reputation that was in tatters. It was the Title IX bureaucrats’. Throughout February, students inundated the university with concerns about their own medical records, which Harvard’s Title IX coordinator, Nicole Merhill, tried in vain to quell. On February 10, Merhill issued a statement disputing the media coverage and assuring students of her office’s commitment to confidentiality. A week later, she issued an apology, saying that her initial statement had “contributed to further concerns around trust.”
Those concerns, she added, “included some indicating their hesitancy to seek out resources, including counseling resources,” from the university.
The about-face reflected the lesson of the Comaroff saga: Once a media narrative sets in, it can be very difficult to dispel.
“When Harvard filed its motion for summary judgment, I thought—naïvely, in retrospect—that we would see reporting about whether Ms. Kilburn’s story was actually true,” O’Meara-Costello said. “That completely did not happen.”
Why? Because one of the above headlines is unlike the others. The first two stories reveal the nature of the Iranian regime—a gang of criminal theocrats that since 1979 has spread chaos and murder throughout the world. The third headline reveals the gullibility of Western politicians and diplomats who, despite never-ending reminders of the Islamic Republic’s aims and capacities, persist in trying to appease it.
Negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal have been taking place in Vienna since April 2021. They have gone nowhere. Yet the Biden administration insists on playing a starring role in this diplomatic farce. Nothing that happens in the outside world penetrates the bubble where the diplomats reside.
Some history:
• Iran refused to speak to the United States directly. We obliged. The talks are indirect—a sign of American weakness.
• Ali Khamenei ensured that his potential successor, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric sanctioned by the United States, was “elected” president last summer. Not only did we continue negotiations. We are also now debating whether to provide Raisi an entry visa so he can spout regime propaganda at the U.N. General Assembly next month.
• America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, one year old this week, seriously undermined our credibility and our security. It weakened our influence in the Greater Middle East. Yet Biden didn’t change his foreign policy. He doubled down on his Iran gambit.
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February was a hinge of history—a moment when, we have been told, “everything” changed. Everything but the Iran negotiations. Russia, despite its outlaw status on the international stage, continues to serve as Iran’s intermediary. Maybe we should take the hint?
All this happened in the months before the Bolton assassination plot and the attack on Rushdie. And those violations of U.S. sovereignty and rule of law are related to Iranian malfeasance. The Justice Department charged a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for attempting to hire a hit man who would target the former U.S. national security adviser. Rushdie’s assailant may have been in contact with the IRGC, as well, and was unquestionably inspired by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s first Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah Khomenei, who called for the British-American novelist’s death in 1989.
And what, you ask, does Iran continue to demand of the United States as a condition for reentry into the nuclear deal? In a piece for CNBC headlined, “A renewed Iran nuclear deal appears closer than ever. Here are the final sticking points,” Natasha Turak writes, “Iran wants the Biden administration to remove its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its [i.e., America’s] designated terrorist list, which so far Washington seems unwilling to do.”
Imagine that.
Biden would be committing political seppuku if he removes the IRGC from the terror list. Even he can see the danger there. He’d be handing the beleaguered Republicans an issue in the final months before the midterms. It has the potential to taint media coverage of his supposed diplomatic triumph.
The IRGC “sticking point” is politically troubling. Another sticking point is impossible. Iran wants the United States to guarantee that future presidents will abide by the deal. However, the only constitutional way to do this would be to submit the nuclear agreement to the Senate for treaty confirmation. Of course, Biden can’t do that, because the treaty would fail. Leaving Biden at an impasse.
One he refuses to acknowledge. Perhaps the Biden team is now so full of themselves after a string of legislative victories at home that they are ready to make additional concessions to get what they mistakenly believe will be a victory abroad. The press will love this narrative, of Biden going from strength to strength and win to win, no matter the costs to U.S. security and stability in the Persian Gulf and Shiite Crescent.
Another scenario is that, while neither Iran nor America agrees to this latest proposal, the talks continue intermittently because they serve each party’s goals. Iran is using this time to build its nuclear infrastructure. America doesn’t want to face the hard choices that follow from a recognition that diplomacy has failed.
That is why all peace processes or arms control negotiations continue despite the evidence that they achieve nothing. The process itself becomes an end for the West. Meanwhile, the process serves as cover for the West’s enemies.
“We have a miserable, bipartisan track record of not responding to Iranian aggression and terrorism,” Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies observed the other day. Biden has an opportunity to correct the record by demonstrating American strength in response to Iranian outrages. It’s an opportunity he won’t take.
The page, titled “Understanding mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines,” says it was last updated on July 15. But archived versions of the page show that key portions were removed on July 22 or July 23.
The version captured on July 22 includes the claim, “The mRNA and the spike protein do not last long in the body.”
“Our cells break down mRNA from these vaccines and get rid of it within a few days after vaccination,” it says. “Scientists estimate that the spike protein, like other proteins our bodies create, may stay in the body up to a few weeks.”
A CDC spokesperson acknowledged to The Epoch Times that the removal happened, despite the page still saying it has not been updated since July 15.
“CDC routinely reviews our webpage information to ensure we have consistent and up-to-date recommendations. In an effort to make all COVID-19 vaccine webpages consistent, information on the Understanding mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines webpage was adjusted and a portion was removed,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The removal drew criticism from some, including scientist Ray Armat, who first noticed the stealth edit.
In a social media post, he described the alteration as done “in a tacit/underhanded way.”
“The CDC is quietly deleting misleading information from their website,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) added.
The Claims
Messenger RNA is the technology utilized by both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, the most administered vaccines in the United States and a number of other countries.
The vaccines deliver the mRNA into muscle cells, where the mRNA triggers the production of the spike protein. The spike protein is a component of the virus that causes COVID-19. The spike protein remains on the cell’s surface, which trains the immune system to produce antibodies against the virus.
After that process is finished, the cells break down the mRNA and it leaves the body as waste, according to the CDC.
The agency makes several challenged claims about mRNA vaccines, including alleging the mRNA does not affect or interact with a person’s DNA.
For one, the CDC could not provide any documents supporting that claim, nor several related claims. And some studies have indicated that the mRNA does interact with DNA, including one from Swedish researchers, while others have found the mRNA lingers for weeks after vaccination.
Pfizer has maintained that its vaccine “does not alter the DNA sequence of a human cell” and the CDC spokesperson said the alteration to the webpage “was not a change to the science of how the mRNA vaccines work.”
“The mRNA from these vaccines are broken down by the cells that interpret this coding, and the process takes a few days after vaccination,” the spokesperson said.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reacting to the recording-breaking number of illegal immigrants walking through the southern border.
The world’s richest person was replying to reporting from Fox News’s Bill Melugin, who posted on Twitter drone footage of a group of hundreds of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border at Eagle Pass, Texas, into the United States.
In his post, Melugin cited Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics showing border agents to have encountered 400,000 illegal immigrants so far in the Del Rio sector in fiscal year 2022 (since October 2021), a number that’s already more than double the total number of encounters in fiscal year 2021. This number doesn’t include “gotaways”—illegal crossers who evaded apprehension.
Strange that this receives very little attention in the media
“Strange that this receives very little attention in the media,” Musk wrote in response to Melugin on Aug. 14.
Musk, a self-portrayed political moderate and a design engineer by trade, has shared his perspective with his 100 million-plus followers on a wide range of issues beyond cars and rockets.
The billionaire’s comments on the border crisis, for example, were the latest in his series of criticism of the current administration and the Democratic Party in general; others include his comments on the influence of labor unions on the Democratic party, the Spygate collusion scandal involving Clinton-affiliated Democrats, and the Biden White House’s alleged sidelining of Tesla’s role in the electric vehicle market.
The Bigger Picture
The backstory to the exchange between Musk and Melugin features an ever-increasing surge in illegal immigration, overextended Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) resources, and an administration that actively strives to undo Trump-era “America First” immigration policies.
Eagle Pass is only one of the regions along the southwest border where hundreds of illegal immigrants pour into the United States. From the beginning of fiscal year 2022 on Oct. 1, 2021, to early August this year, border patrol agents apprehended 1.8 million illegal crossers. That’s more than the population of Phoenix, Arizona, the fifth-most populous city in the country, and about 40 percent higher than the total number of apprehensions in the previous fiscal year.
BORDER: Border Patrol agents organize hundreds of illegal immigrants who have streamed across the border from Mexico near Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 20. pic.twitter.com/ftZyyhfTc0
— Charlotte Cuthbertson (@charlottecuthbo) May 21, 2022
The head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), meanwhile, insists that the border is secure, while the Biden administration is kept busy by legal disputes with border states about key Trump migration policies.
One of the policies that the Biden administration began pulling back—following a Supreme Court decision that ruled in its favor—was the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required non-Mexican migrants seeking asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico for processing.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration will continue to enforce the Trump-era immigration and public health policy known as Title 42, a policy instated as a COVID-19 countermeasure that allowed the United States to quickly expel migrants who unlawfully entered the United States and bypassed health screening in the process. A judge blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to lift Title 42 in May.
A Border Patrol agent organizes a large group of illegal immigrants near Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 20, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Another legal battle that will be consequential to border security will play out in the Supreme Court in the fourth quarter of this year, when the highest court will hear a case on whether Biden’s immigration enforcement guidelines constitute executive agency overreach. In July, the Supreme Court allowed a federal judge in Texas to block the Biden administration’s immigration guidelines that, according to the border states’ prosecutors, limit the ability of border agents to detain and deport illegal aliens.
“The Biden Admin’s border record is an absolute failure,” Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary in the Trump administration, wrote on Twitter on Aug. 17, following reports of anonymous CBP sources saying that a record-setting 2 million illegal crossers were apprehended since the beginning of fiscal year 2022.
“I encourage Republicans next year to enact strong oversight in this area – specifically how DHS leadership executed an intentional plan to endanger migrants and American communities by refusing to enforce the law,” Wolf wrote.
State CFO proposes 4-pillar protection plan to fight back
The IRS has already been tracking annual sales of $600 or more on eBay and other selling platforms. eBay sent me a letter regarding this change (AKA a warning notice). What person making over $400,000 is going to bother selling items on eBay? [US Patriot]
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.–On Aug. 16, small business owners and independent contractors across Florida became fearful of their futures as Gov. Ron DeSantis questioned the sanity of Washington.
On that day, Joe Biden signed into law the “Inflation Reduction Act,” giving the IRS nearly $80 billion, with $45.6 billion going towards “enforcement,” which requires hiring more agents.
But what stood out the most among Florida’s small business owners was who the expanded agency would target for auditing.
At a press event on Aug. 17, DeSantis expressed frustration.
“What have they done? … 87,000 new IRS agents and they are going after you.”
They will be unleashed on American taxpayers, he said. ” … they are gonna go after independent contractors.”
Uber drivers, handymen “and others” are identified as independent contractors and all are “contenders” for audits, DeSantis said. “They’re going to crush a lot of people by doing that.”
Not only will small businesses be targeted, but also “people that the government doesn’t like,” the governor said.
“Let’s just be honest,” he said. “We’ve seen how this operates–you have these enforcement agencies that basically represent one faction of the country and they are going after the other.”
Even though IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said in an Aug. 4 letter to Congress that the billions in funding won’t increase “audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” others beg to differ.
Bobby Gross Jr. is part owner of his family’s 50-year-old paving company located in Port Charlotte and believes that the IRS is coming after small businesses like his.
“They’re (IRS) there to hunt, and we’re the prey,” Gross told The Epoch Times on Aug. 17. “The government is going to pay for the Inflation Reduction Act on the backs of small businesses.”
Gross believes small businesses are the key to raising the $750 billion price tag for the new law because “there aren’t that many billionaires in the country,” that can “generate enough money to pay for it.”
Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, Jimmy Patronis in April 2022. (Courtesy, CFO Jimmy Patronis)
Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis agreed and will propose in the upcoming legislative session what he calls the “Four Pillars of IRS Protection.” He is doing this to “get in front of” whatever the IRS has planned. But make no mistake, he says, “Florida is a target,” especially conservatives.
“Even though the Free State of Florida cannot control the insanity of Washington we must do what we can to protect our small businesses,” Patronis told The Epoch Times on Aug. 18. “This massive super expansion of the IRS is concerning to me. I think Washington is totally disconnected from what real Americans and Main Street is feeling.”
The four pillars of protection Patronis is suggesting involve requiring state-chartered banks to generate a regular report on IRS engagement in order to identify if patterns of “targeting the middle class and small businesses are ongoing. Second, establishing a Civil Liability Trust Fund to help small businesses defend themselves–or sue the IRS–in cases of politically motivated audits or any federal overreach. Third, requiring new IRS agents coming into the state to have a Florida license. And last, establishing criminal penalties by enforcing laws based on viewpoint or political discrimination.
Political discrimination, as Patronis called it, is a concern for Carl Mottler, who owns a land-clearing company in Southwest Florida.
“I think every conservative, every conservative business, every conservative-run state and city will be targeted because that’s exactly what we have seen in the past,” Mottler told The Epoch Times on Aug. 17. “We saw it with the IRS targeting the Tea Party when Obama was president.”
In 2013 Lois Lerner “retired” from her position as the director of Exempt Organizations of the IRS. She was found guilty of “neglect of duties” after she testified in a Congressional oversight committee hearing that the IRS had “wrongly scrutinized conservative groups” and that it “had been going on for years.”
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the IRS projects to bring in almost $204 billion in revenue from 2022 to 2031. In the fiscal years 2015 and 2019 IRS audits declined by 44 percent, according to a 2021 Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report.
Mottler said the process in any IRS audit is “unfair” and that the IRS has an “unfair advantage.”
“The problem with the IRS is that they are judge, jury, and executioner of all things financial,” he said. “There’s no due process, they can take and seize everything you have, and you have to try and show that you’re in the right; and you have to because they’re the ones who judge whether you’re right or wrong, and then they’re the ones who impose the sentence.”
Mottler said the IRS needs an “overhaul” not hiring more agents–especially ones that carry firearms.
Nurse practitioner Lisa Ransom said she has the same fears and doesn’t understand why IRS agents would carry a firearm and be asked to possess the “fortitude to pull the trigger.”
“These political people who held office … being arrested and strip-searched. Well, look at Trump—if they can do that to him and other people what will they do to us? “she asked. “This is still America. Are they really going to force their way onto your private property?”
Ransom who began her private medical practice three months ago said she is bothered and upset at the prospect of losing everything she has worked for because of the new law.
“Without any notice, they can just seize your assets and bank accounts before you have had a chance to defend yourself,’ she said. “They can put you out of business.”
Above all, Ransom said she worries about what IRS scrutiny could do to the economy.
“People will just stop using their bank accounts and go straight to operating on a cash basis,” she predicted. “I guarantee that’s what’s going to happen because you can’t track cash.”
Patronis said Ransom’s concerns are justified.
“Lisa is right, it’s gonna have a chilling effect on commerce,” Patronis said. “You will have people hoarding cash, out of just a simple fear.”
Gross said he wonders if cash apps like PayPal will be affected by the new legislation.
“What if you want to sell your couch on Craigslist to pay bills,” he said. “Will the IRS track that and wonder what you did with the money?”
“What strikes me as odd is the way the government is going about this … like World War II stuff where they are tracking our every move and we will be labeled and targeted based on our political views and affiliations,” he said. “What happens after the audit—financial concentration camps?”
Thanks to the Inflamatory Reinforcement Act, the poor and conservative will be attacked by the weaponized IRS. This regime sucks so much Chinese wienerschnitzel their eyes are fully white. [US Patriot]
The IRS audited 197 low-income families for every high-wealth family in 2019, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a number that some experts expected to climb under an IRS turbocharged with more money and manpower.
Over the next decade, the Democrat’s new “Inflation Reduction Act” will provide the IRS with 87,000 new agents and $80 billion in funding, with nearly $46 billion earmarked for enforcement.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the tax and spend bill is projected to bring in $203.7 billion in revenue from 2022 to 2031.
Joe Biden’s administration has promised no new taxes or audits on households making less than $400,000 per year.
But experts say that promise may be hard to keep.
A previous CBO analysis using a similar funding plan featured in the Inflation Reduction Act found audit rates would be restored to levels around 10 years ago. The analysis showed the audit rates would rise for all taxpayers, but the ones with higher incomes would face the biggest increase.
The oldest data available in the 2022 GAO report released this year were from 2010. That’s when the IRS was better funded and staffed with some 95,000 full-time employees.
From 2010–2019, the IRS audited 0.9 percent across all income groups compared to 0.25 percent now.
Rachel Greszler, a budget and entitlements senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times that even returning to the 2010 audit levels for those making more than $400,000 per year, would still fall short of the IRS’s revenue goal.
“My rough estimate shows that returning to the 2010 audit levels for all income groups would only generate a little over 20 percent of the bills’ estimated enforcement revenues in 2031,” she said.
In her commentary on the Heritage Foundation’s website Aug. 12, Greszler wrote the numbers don’t add up using 2019 data either without the lower- and middle-class.
Even increasing recent audit rates 30-fold for taxpayers making over $400,000—including 100 percent audit rates on taxpayers with incomes over $10 million—still would fall more than 20 percent short of raising the estimated $35.3 billion in new revenues by 2031, she wrote.
So it stands to reason that taxpayers can expect audit rates more like those about a decade ago.
GAO statistics show a larger number of audits in 2010 for taxpayers in the $0–$24,999 tax bracket than the high wealth households. About 579,000 audits were performed on the lowest tax bracket in 2010, compared to 197,000 in 2019.
Yet for the wealthy, high wealth audits of $10 million or more stood at 2,800 in 2010, dipping to 1,000 in 2019.
While a higher percentage of high wealthy households is audited more than poor ones, the lower class sees more audits overall.
A better-funded IRS in 2010 audited the poor much more aggressively than the super wealthy—at a rate of 207 to 1.
In recent years, the IRS audited taxpayers with incomes below $25,000 and those with incomes of $500,000 or more at higher-than-average rates. But, audit rates have dropped for all income levels—with audit rates falling the most for taxpayers with incomes of $200,000 or more, according to the GAO report.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which is a scaled-down version of Build Back Better negotiated by Democrats Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), took Republicans by surprise. The measure passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and Congress last week through a reconciliation process.
Joe Biden (C) signs the Inflation Reduction Act with (L-R) Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington on Aug. 16, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Alarm bells sounded for Republicans after Democrats shot down an amendment to the bill proposed by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) to protect the working class from more audits. Crapo’s amendment stipulated that none of the funds from the Inflation Reduction Act could be used to audit taxpayers making under $400,000 a year. Still, all 50 Democrats in the Senate voted against it.
Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee said CBO calculated the monetary impact of Crapo’s amendment. Calculations confirmed that had lower- and middle-income taxpayers been protected by the amendment, revenue in the Democrats’ bill would have been reduced by at least $20 billion.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attempted to clear up “misinformation” about the bill in a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig. She wrote new resources allocated to the IRS “shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen testifies before the Senate Finance Committee in Washington, on June 7, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
However, her directive isn’t included in the bill, meaning it won’t have the power of law. Tax experts and analysis from the nonpartisan scorekeeper at the CBO indicate Yellen’s promise will likely be broken if the IRS sticks to its income expectations.
“Again, this has no teeth behind it,” said Preston Brashers, a senior tax policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation.
Brashers said it would take time for the audits to start rolling, increasing as the tax agency adds tens of thousands of new agents. Proponents of the bill say a large number of those 87,000 employees will fill jobs lost through attrition, but Brashers said it appears that the agency will almost double in size.
In a press release, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) estimated that the Democrats’ bill would amount to 1.2 million new audits of taxpayers per year. Over 710,000 of these audits would fall on Americans who earn $75,000 a year or less.
House Ways and Means Minority Leader Kevin Brady (R-Texas) speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on May 13, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“If you’re an American worker making $75,000 a year, you are 4x more likely to see a tax hike from this bill than any tax relief at all. You’re hitting middle class families directly and through higher energy prices as well,” Brady wrote on the Ways and Means GOP Twitter feed.
Audits of Least Resistance
Another taxpayer category likely to be audited more is rural, low-income households claiming an Earned Income Tax Credit, according to the IRS.
Those who claim the EITC credits often make mistakes or don’t understand the rules, which makes auditing these returns low-hanging fruit for the IRS because they don’t require many man hours. The opposite is true of audits of wealthy families who can afford accountants and lawyers.
A much larger number of returns claiming EITC credits are audited compared to the wealthiest households. In 2019, the number of audits of low-income families claiming the EITC credit compared to high wealth audits of $10 million or more was 205 to 1.
In 2010, that ratio was somewhat lower at 177 to 1. However, the number of EITC audits was much greater at 496,000 in 2010 compared to 205,000 audits in 2019.
These refundable credits can provide a sizable refund if the taxpayers are qualified.
Families with three or more children can receive a maximum of $6,242, and households making under $21,000 without children can receive a maximum of $503, according to a 2016 GAO report on refundable tax credits.
James R. McTigue, a director in the GAO’s strategic issues team, told The Epoch Times the IRS and members of Congress are concerned about fraud when it comes to EITC credits because of their value. Tax prep businesses may also give low-income taxpayers bad advice, triggering more audits.
“So the IRS does audit those claiming the EITC credit at a slightly higher rate than they do for people in those lower income categories,” he said.
The GAO report noted that audits of the lowest-income taxpayers, particularly those claiming the EITC, resulted in higher amounts of recommended additional tax per audit hour, compared to all income groups except for the highest-income taxpayers.
But the premise that the IRS isn’t performing well due to lack of funding seems false based on recent revenue numbers, Brashers said, adding that new technology should make the agency more efficient even with lower full time positions.
Tax revenue is on track to reach a whopping 19.6 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 2022, he said.
“The truth of the matter is we are on pace for the second highest year as a percentage of GDP for taxes,” Brashers added.
A new video that focuses on the gender-transition madness sweeping America has resonated with the Twittersphere with more than half a million views as of Wednesday.
The video, posted to Twitter on Sunday on the Libs of TikTok account, shows an unidentified man sitting in the front passenger’s seat of a car as he recounts an experience he said he had with a doctor.
The date the video was made isn’t clear.
“So we just took my 3-year-old son to the doctor for a checkup — my 3-year-old son,” the man begins. “And there’s a reason why I’m emphasizing that, and you’re about to know why.
“So my wife and I are waiting in the room with our son, and the doctor comes in, and he sees my son sitting there at the table, and the first question that he asks him is, ‘Are you a boy or are you a girl?’”
The man said he and his wife exchanged “what the f***” looks of concern and bafflement.
This is really scary. Dad claims doctor asked his 3-year-old if he’s a boy or a girl at a routine check-up pic.twitter.com/rwOVNJeDHU
“So luckily my son understands obvious tenets of biology at 3 years old and says that he’s a boy, just like his chart says,” the man said.
“The rest of the appointment I couldn’t even focus because I’m wondering why in the world this guy is asking the question. And then I remembered, ‘Oh, yeah, I live in California.’”
The man noted that his concern is not just based on his experience, but what is taking place around him.
“Call me paranoid, but this is where I think we’re heading based on other things that have happened,” he said.
This is sick & evil.
Boston Children’s “gender clinic” sees toddlers as young as 2 & 3 years old.
Claims babies in the womb know they’re transgender.
Warns parents if they don’t “support” gender identity & trans, it will lead kids to suicide.
The man referenced a 2018 story from The Washington Times headlined “Religious parents lose custody of transgender teen for refusing hormone treatment.”
In the clip, the man also referenced a 2019 BBC story with the headline, “Texas parents battle in court for custody of transgender child.”
The man also cites a 2019 Heritage Foundation article that said the Equality Act “could lead to more parents losing custody of kids who want ‘gender transition.’”
Reminds me of this video where this mom explained how her toddler came out as trans after the doctor asked if he’s a boy or a girl. https://t.co/8oq461Ntlc
“So again, call me paranoid, but I’m wondering if the doctor’s asking the question of my son to see if he can establish a pattern over time that shows that my son wants to be a girl,” the man said in the video.
“But here’s the thing: My son is 3. I’m not even going to let him choose what he wants for dinner. And some days, my son thinks he’s a dinosaur. But I’m not going to let him transition to a dinosaur. …
“I don’t think it’s going to be long before we start seeing parents lose custody of their young kids because they’re not letting them transition to the opposite gender. And I think pediatricians are going to be the ones who are going to start calling it out.”
Emails reveal how Hunter got Obama to officially recognize partnership
The Biden administration last month warned of a Chinese Communist Party front group that seeks to “co-opt” state leaders as part of Beijing’s sprawling foreign influence operation. Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show the first son and his business partners helped the organization gain a foothold in the United States while his father was vice president.
In 2015, Biden’s partners lobbied the State Department to publicly approve a partnership between the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and State Legislative Leaders Foundation, a nonprofit group that hosts forums for state legislators and corporate leaders. Hunter’s team portrayed the initiative as a boon for U.S.-Chinese relations.
But emails show they hoped the U.S. government’s recognition of the partnership would help the foundation establish an office in Beijing. It is not clear why the partnership—or the Obama administration’s blessing of it—would have helped Hunter Biden’s business prospects. What is clear is that he and his colleagues believed it would: Biden associate James Bulger wrote in a July 17, 2015, email that the Beijing office would be “a great business driver” for a joint venture they sought with Harvest Fund Management, a Chinese investment firm led by Henry Zhao, a businessman and reported member of the Chinese Communist Party.
The lobbying campaign proved wildly successful on all fronts. After a September 2015 meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, President Barack Obama endorsed the partnership between State Legislative Leaders Foundation and the Chinese group. Months later, Hunter Biden’s company finalized its multimillion-dollar deal with Harvest Management.
Biden’s emails, which have not been previously reported, show how the younger Biden helped a Chinese Communist Party influence outfit that his father’s administration now views as a national security threat. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said last month that the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries seeks “to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders to promote the PRC’s global agenda.”
On April 28, 2015, Bulger told Hunter Biden that State Legislative Leaders Foundation president Stephen Lakis wanted to meet to discuss a path forward to setting up a SLLF office in China and creating a partnership between his organization and the Chinese organization.
“Whatever you need on this just let me know and I’ll make it work,” Biden replied.
Between April and July 2015, Biden’s longtime friend and business partner Eric Schwerin arranged meetings between the State Legislative Leaders Foundation and State Department officials to help advance the partnership with the Chinese group. Schwerin, who had dozens of White House meetings with members of then-vice president Joe Biden’s office, was “instrumental” in arranging the State Department sessions, according to an email from Bulger.
The Biden group’s primary goal was to have Obama reference the collaboration between the State Legislative Leaders Foundation and the Chinese group in his upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping. On May 11, 2015, a foundation adviser wrote Evan Ryan, who then served as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, that a reference by Obama would help them gain “top level approval” from Chinese officials to set up a foundation office in Beijing.
Ryan, who now serves as White House cabinet secretary and is married to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appears to have played a major role in midwifing the partnership. Schwerin noted in an email to Biden that Ryan had “helped with” the effort to officially acknowledge the foundation’s work with the Chinese group. Other emails show Biden and Schwerin in frequent correspondence with Ryan on other matters.
The U.S. intelligence community has increasingly warned that Beijing uses American businessmen and nonprofit groups—often through “deceptive and coercive” means—to promote China’s political agenda in the West. Republicans have said Hunter Biden would have been a prime target for such an influence operation, given his extensive dealings in China and his access to policymakers in Washington. Biden, who is under federal investigation over his taxes and foreign business dealings, earned millions of dollars from a deal with CEFC China Energy, whose chairman was suspected of having ties to Chinese military intelligence. Biden also provided legal services to a CEFC executive whom he referred to as “the fucking spy chief of China” and who was convicted for trying to bribe African officials for oil rights.
The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and State Legislative Leaders Foundation have hosted five “Cooperation Forums” in Honolulu, Las Vegas, Wuhan, and Shijiazhuang since 2015, providing the Chinese influence group access to dozens of state legislative leaders and American business executives. While the U.S. government has not publicly scrutinized the forums, the State Department in 2020 pulled out of a forum between the Chinese group and the National Governors Association due to the former’s efforts to “spread Beijing’s malign influence in the United States.”
Biden’s associates began lobbying the U.S. government as a ploy to land a lucrative investment from Harvest Fund Management, one of China’s largest asset managers. Biden allegedly touted his family’s political connections in seeking a $5 million investment from Harvest founder Henry Zhao, the Washington Free Beaconreported. Zhao is believed to be a Chinese Communist Party official, according to the New York Post.
The Biden team had worked with the State Legislative Leaders Foundation before. The foundation helped Biden and his associates at the private equity firm BHR Partners in 2015, when Hunter’s team helped the Aviation Industry Corporation of China purchase Michigan auto parts maker Henniges Automotive, the Free Beaconreported earlier this year.
The Biden emails provide a detailed roadmap of how the State Legislative Leaders Foundation, the Biden team, and Zhao sought to use an official blessing from the U.S. government to advance their business interests. In a September 2014 email, Lakis, the foundation president, told Zhao he was a “shareholder” in Bulger’s company. He urged Zhao to consider an investment in the Biden joint venture, saying he had “every confidence that such a partnership will be beneficial to all parties.”
Back in China, Zhao was “working with the Chinese Governments [sic] counterparts in Beijing” to have the foundation’s efforts mentioned during the Obama-Xi summit in September 2015, Bulger told Biden in a July 17, 2015, email. Having the initiative mentioned in an official document for the summit “would be a huge boost to [Zhao’s] effort in China.” That in turn “would be a great business driver for Burnham/Harvest,” referring to their joint venture, said Bulger. Bulger, a relative of mobster Whitey Bulger, also wrote that Zhao wanted Biden’s “help with this matter.”
The emails do not detail what steps Biden took to help the initiative, but he cheered the partnership between the foundation and the Chinese group in a November 2015 email to Zhao. Biden wrote he was “very happy to hear that the State Legislative Leaders Foundation matter was worked out and was highlighted during President Xi’s State Visit in September.”
Burnham and Harvest finalized the joint venture in March 2016, according to emails Biden sent to Zhao.
“This is an exciting milestone and I look forward to helping building [sic] a cross border institution that helps investors in our respective countries across the globe,” Biden wrote Zhao on March 18, 2016.
While Biden had high hopes for the partnership with Zhao—he said his company had “no greater partner” than the Chinese businessman—the joint venture went south in May 2016 after another Biden partner, Devon Archer, was indicted on fraud charges.
It is unclear whether Biden was aware of his son’s activities, though Hunter has kept his father in the loop on several of his other business ventures. Joe Biden met in 2017 with Michael Lin, a longtime Hunter business partner who advised the State Legislative Leaders Foundation on its first foray into China, the Free Beaconreported in May 2021.
None of Biden’s associates—Schwerin, Lakis, or Bulger—have registered with Congress as lobbyists, despite their outreach to the State Department. None returned requests for comment. Biden’s attorney and the White House also did not respond to requests for comment.
Since we learned of the unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound last week, millions of Americans have questioned the political neutrality of the Department of Justice. Federal law enforcement is facing a legitimacy crisis—at least in the eyes of half the country—thanks to the fake and overhyped scandals it drummed up during the Trump years.
So MSNBC’s Morning Joe invited the former FBI official Peter Strzok to assure viewers the bureau was on the level. “Absolutely the American public should trust what the FBI is doing,” he said Monday.
You may remember Strzok from such FBI scandals as Russiagate, the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, or his affair with FBI lawyer Lisa Page. As the man in charge of investigations into the two candidates in the 2016 presidential election, he was constantly texting Page about his hatred for Trump. Asking this man to vouch for the integrity of the FBI is like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Strzok’s commentary is a microcosm of the mainstream media’s approach to coverage of the Mar-a-Lago raid, about which we still know precious little— except, we are told, that the integrity of our law enforcement officials shall not be questioned!
“The FBI is not the enemy,” was the headline of the Washington Post’s lead editorial. The New York Times over the weekend labored to link a nutjob who shot up an FBI office in Ohio with, you know, the “bellicose, dehumanizing, and apocalyptic” language of people like us. It’s extraordinary to hear that sort of tut-tutting from the same crowd that insisted for most of Trump’s presidency that he was a fascist and a Kremlin agent.
Strzok would know something about that—in fact, he’s free to run his mouth on television because the FBI canned him after the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded his anti-Trump texts cast a cloud over the bureau’s investigation into Trump. Strzok personally interfered with the agent overseeing the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn to stop him from closing the file after the evidence against him didn’t pan out.
And his team pushed to include opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign in an application for a secret surveillance warrant on former Trump adviser Carter Page. That debacle led to the nullification of two of the four warrants and a scathing inspector general’s report that “identified multiple instances” in which the factual assertions the bureau made in the application for the Page warrants “were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.”
Perhaps, when we know all the facts, we will find that the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home was justified. Until then, we reserve our right to question the integrity of the federal law enforcement officials who have demonstrated their willingness to behave like political hacks and abuse the power with which they are entrusted to punish their political opponents.
WORKING AMERICANS ARE SUFFERING TREMENDOUSLY AT THIS TIME OF “ZERO INFLATION.”
Biden claimed on Wednesday, August 10 that, “today we received news that our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July – zero percent,” despite the fact that the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the measure of inflation, was up 8.5 percent versus July 2021. While the CPI was down from its 9.1 percent June number, it is still extremely high, and certainly not zero.
The decrease in acceleration of the inflation rate was driven primarily by a decrease in gas prices. Per Bloomberg, “while a drop in gasoline prices is good news for Americans, their cost of living is still painfully high, forcing many to load up on credit cards and drain savings.” Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of gasoline dropped 7.7 percent in July, but is still up 44 percent for the twelve months ending July 2022, with all energy commodities up 44.9 percent.
On the day the CPI numbers were released (August 10), the national average for a gallon of gas was $4.03, down from record highs of $5.02 per gallon, but significantly higher than the August 2019 average of $2.70 per gallon. That is nearly $80 more a month to fill-up a 15-gallon tank on a weekly basis, nearly $1,000 more per year.
The Biden administration has taken credit for the decrease in the price of gas – even though the stated reason for the original increase in the price of gas was the “Putin Price Hike.” The decrease in the price of gas is actually due to a reduction in demand, as Americans put off summer driving vacations, something many can no longer afford. In addition, the futures markets are worried about the US economy and a further decline in demand as the recession continues to take hold of the economy. The strong dollar has also helped to drive down demand as well.
So, if the price of gas is down, what is driving 8.5 percent inflation? The two primary drivers are the cost of food and the cost of housing.
The “food at home category, which tracks the cost of groceries, surged 13.1% over the last year, the most significant increase since March 1979.” This food inflation is hitting basic staples, not just champagne and caviar. Staples such as eggs are up 38 percent, chicken is up 16.6 percent, milk 15.6 percent, potatoes 13.3 percent, rice 12.7 percent, and fresh fruits and vegetables 8.2 percent.
The cost of shelter also continues to rise. “Shelter costs – which account for roughly one-third of the CPI…have climbed 5.7%” over the past year, the fastest since February 1991.
The impact on working-class Americans has been devastating, and the headlines are misleading. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “nonfarm payroll employment rose by 528,000 in July and the unemployment rate edged down to 3.5%.” The corporate media tells us that this is a huge success for Biden. However, if you dig into the numbers, it is not all good news. There are two disturbing statistics contained in the BLS report:
“The labor force participation rate, at 62.1%, and the employment-population ratio, at 60.8%… remain below their February 2020 values.”
“The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons increased by 303,000 to 3.9 million in July. The rise reflected the increase in the number of persons whose hours were cut due to slack work or business conditions.”
This means that fewer people are participating in the workforce, which drives the unemployment rate down. And 3.9 million Americans are working at least two jobs just to make ends meet. This is unacceptable in the United States.
The impact of the poorly performing economy is starting to show in the data.
“Midyear 2022 U.S. foreclosure filings hit 164,581,” an increase of 153 percent from the same time period a year ago. In addition, car repossessions are exploding. According to Barron’s, vehicle repossessions have doubled among “prime” borrows, which includes “borrowers with good credit scores.” According to the same article, “most of the loans on recently repossessed cars originated in 2020 and 2021,” showing that much of the COVID stimulus money was spent on cars people could not afford.
Sadly, it doesn’t stop there. “An estimated 34 million US consumers, or roughly 13%, spent more than they earned in the past six months, underscoring how Americans are having difficulty managing their finances amid decades-high inflation.”
According to the same article, 55.6 percent of Americans have less than $5,000 in savings.This also helps to explain the rapid growth in US consumer borrowing.
“US consumer borrowing surged in June, reflecting a jump in credit card balances and a record increase in non-revolving lending that includes auto and school loans.” The same report showed that “revolving credit outstanding, which includes credit cards, increased $14.8 billion. Non-revolving credit increases $25.4 billion.”
To summarize, we are in a situation where Americans are working multiple jobs, spending more than they earn, losing their homes and cars, eroding their savings, and borrowing more than ever. All of this at a time when, according to Biden, “we have zero inflation.”
It is likely to get even worse. The Federal Reserve is expected to “stick with hawkish rate hikes until data show further slowing in inflation,” with an increase of 50 or 75 basis points likely in September. This will make the exploding credit card debt more expensive to pay as interest rates rise and adjustable-rate mortgages more expensive, which will cause more foreclosures.
Working Americans are suffering tremendously at this time of “zero inflation.”
Ignoring other causes of depression has left millions of Americans without truly effective treatment
“Lexapro appears to relieve the symptoms of depression and anxiety by increasing serotonin,” says an ad on the Bonkers Institute, a website that archives drug ads and also satirizes pharma claims and shaky science.
“Zoloft works to correct a chemical imbalance in the brain which may be related to symptoms of depression,” another ad says.
“Paxil CR blocks serotonin from being reabsorbed back into the sending nerve cell. This process increases the availability of serotonin to the receiving nerve cell and may help message [depression] transmission return to normal,” a third ad says.
As many Epoch Times readers may have heard, the serotonin “chemical imbalance” theory of depression was recently put to rest by a group of University College London (UCL) scientists in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. After reviewing decades of research, there’s no evidence that serotonin levels or serotonin activity are responsible for depression, they wrote.In other words, the theory that was the basis for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants and their tremendously profitable franchise was false.
While the theory has been questioned by scientists for decades, the Molecular Psychiatry research seems to be the final nail in the coffin for the theory—a technical knockout.
“The popularity of the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of depression has coincided with a huge increase in the use of antidepressants,” said the article’s lead author, Joanna Moncrieff, a professor of psychiatry at UCL. “Prescriptions for antidepressants have risen dramatically since the 1990s.
“Thousands of people suffer from side effects of antidepressants, including the severe withdrawal effects that can occur when people try to stop them, yet prescription rates continue to rise.
“We believe this situation has been driven partly by the false belief that depression is due to a chemical imbalance. It is high time to inform the public that this belief is not grounded in science.”
A Powerful Drug Franchise
It’s hard to overestimate the medical, financial, and sociological consequences of the chemical imbalance theory, which propelled the 1987 FDA approval of the SSRI antidepressant Prozac and which is still followed to this day. Several years ago, Harvard Health Publishing estimated that about 1 in 4 American women in their 40s and 50s were taking antidepressants.
Thanks to direct-to-consumer marketing (or “mongering,” as some say) about depression, people with life problems or occasional bad moods absorbed the chemical imbalance messaging, diagnosed themselves with depression, and presented themselves to doctors’ offices.
Family, job, health, money, or housing problems were no longer a reason for feeling down or defeated, suggested aggressive SSRI advertising campaigns; if you were depressed, you had a chemical imbalance—regardless of whatever else may have accounted for your depression (such as the loss of meaning and social connection often observed in modern society).
Whereas the antidepressants that preceded SSRIs, some called monoamine oxidase inhibitors, were connected to neurotransmitters in the brain such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, SSRIs reduced the chemistry to a simple problem-solution equation, which the public readily bought. Thanks to the new chemical imbalance of serotonin theory of depression, drugmakers had a formidable new franchise; doctors, a ready-made, patient-pleasing tool; the media, reliable new advertisers; and Wall Street, hot new stocks—all almost overnight. Worldwide sales of SSRIs have been estimated to soar as high as $18.29 billion by 2027.
Response From Mainstream Medicine
Psychiatrists and the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which is highly funded by drugmakers—70 percent of authors of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition were drugmaker funded, as reported by ABC news—were among the first to push back against the Molecular Psychiatry article. Chief among protestations were “we never promoted the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory”—no, you let drug makers do that, cynics might say—and “no one really understands why or how antidepressants work.”
The “third rail” for drugmaker-funded practitioners is the suggestion that mental illness may not be from physical conditions at all. As Mark Horowitz, co-author of the Molecular Psychiatry article, put it, “One interesting aspect in the studies we examined was how strong an effect adverse life events played in depression, suggesting low mood is a response to people’s lives and cannot be boiled down to a simple chemical equation.”
If depression comes from stress, trauma, grief, loneliness, and social conditions such as poverty, as Horowitz suggests, it wouldn’t be amenable to medication treatment. Worse, if it weren’t a permanent chemical imbalance as the serotonin theory of depression implies, it wouldn’t turn into lifelong medication prescriptions, which drugmakers seek and treasure the most.
“Although viewing depression as a biological disorder may seem like it would reduce stigma, in fact, research has shown the opposite, and also that people who believe their own depression is due to a chemical imbalance are more pessimistic about their chances of recovery,” Moncrieff said.
Psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has been called the Conscience of Psychiatry, elaborated on this idea to The Epoch Times:
“Since the ancient Greeks, physicians have wanted to believe the mental and emotional distress must have biological origins. That allowed them to include ‘mental diseases’ within their specialty.
“With the development of massive drug company involvement in routine psychiatric practice during the advent of the antipsychotic drugs in 1954, drug companies also began pushing the biochemical and biological basis of human experiences such as anxiety, depression, manic-depression (now bipolar-disorder), and schizophrenia.
“Then, in the late 1980s, in anticipation of the approval of Prozac for depression by the FDA, Eli Lilly and Company conducted an international advertising campaign claiming that depression is caused by a biochemical imbalance in serotonin. It was apparent from the start that this was pure fantasy.
“In my books and scientific articles as far back as 1983, I pointed out the continuing truth that there are no known biochemical imbalances in the brains of mental patients until they are put there by the neurotoxic effects of all psychiatric drugs.
“Now, a review article by British psychiatrist Johanna Moncrieff has reconfirmed that research fails to show any connection between depression and abnormalities in serotonin metabolism in the brain. No so-called ‘mental illnesses’ are known to be genetic or biochemical in origin—it’s all medical and pharmaceutical company hype.”
Breggin and his wife, Ginger, wrote the new book “COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey.”
Don’t Stop SSRIs Abruptly, Warn Both Sides
Whether they believe SSRIs are specious and over-prescribed or valuable treatments, clinicians warn patients not to stop the drugs abruptly.
In 2018, The New York Times exposed that SSRI antidepressants can be difficult to quit and downright addictive (though drugmakers prefer to call the addiction effects a “discontinuation syndrome”). Some patients say they weren’t warned by their doctors that they may be indefinitely parked on the drugs because of the side effects such as dizziness, nausea, headache, and brain zaps that they experience when trying to stop the drugs, the newspaper reported.
Brian, a 29-year-old Chicagoan who asked not to give his last name, said that he has remained on an SSRI antidepressant for years despite his wish to quit.
“Every time I try to stop, I get something that feels like an electrical current in my head, and I can’t do it,” he said.
The NY Times article drew a huge backlash from psychiatrists. “By amplifying the social media echo chamber, the article creates the unfortunate impression that most patients are forced to continue antidepressants out of fear of withdrawal rather than out of prevention of recurrence,” read a letter to the editor signed by a group of 39 psychiatrists, who termed depression as “chronic” and “undertreated.” At least 35 of the letter signers were affiliated with Columbia Universityʼs College of Physicians and Surgeons, an institution that received a $250 million gift from former Merck CEO Roy Vagelos and his wife, Diana, in 2017.
Since their original marketing, SSRI antidepressants are also now known to increase bone loss and fracture risk, as well as the risk of the dreaded intestinal condition of Clostridium difficile.
Then, Why Do SSRIs Work?
It’s generally agreed that SSRI antidepressants sometimes work, though not impressively, and not for all patients. But why? According to a follow-up paper by Moncrieff and Horowitz, “Any drug that changes normal brain activity is likely to have some impact on mood, and … by virtue of changing brain chemistry, antidepressants also produce changes to normal mental activity and experiences.”
Antidepressants also cause numbing of the moods, the researchers say—“including not just sadness and anxiety but welcome emotions like happiness and joy”—which can reduce depression scores, making the drugs appear to be effective.
A paper in the Springer journal Inflammopharmacology suggests a possible SSRI mechanism could be decreasing “neuroinflammation [in the brain] through multiple mechanisms including the reduction of blood or tissue cytokines or regulating complex inflammatory pathways.”
Whatever the explanation, it remains true that other methods to treat depression, including exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy, have proven efficacy with additional benefits and no side effects.
A Final Irony
Even as the premise through which millions of Americans were put on psychoactive drugs has been demolished, raising questions about the interface between medical care and misleading drug marketing, some news outlets have sought to politicize the contretemps.
Many media outlets went on the attack after Fox News host Tucker Carlson said: “First, we were told that SSRIs would save lives. Now, we learn they don’t actually work as intended. In fact, the whole idea behind the drug was completely wrong. And yet—and here is the best part—people are ignoring this news, and the drugs are still being prescribed.”
Rolling Stone magazine published a hit piece portraying Moncrieff as a conspiracy nut with a history of criticizing the over-medication of mental conditions and attributing some mass shootings to psychoactive drugs. The article, “Who Is the Psychiatrist Behind the Antidepressant Study Taking Over Right-Wing Media?”, reveals the 180-degree turn that progressive outlets have taken toward drugmakers since COVID-19—forgiving and forgetting original distrust of corporatism, capitalism, monopolies, and the drugmaker-caused opioid scourge—in order to be able to demonize rivals.
Meanwhile, millions on SSRI antidepressants now face the prospect of quitting.
White HouseCOVID-19 czar Ashish Jha on Tuesday admitted that the six-foot social distancing rule that was implemented in early 2020 isn’t actually effective.
Over the past several years, “a lot of time” was spent “talking about six feet of distance, 15 minutes of being together. We realize that’s actually not the right way to think about this,” he said during a White House briefing on COVID-19.
“That’s not the most accurate way to think about this,” Jha said, adding that it is about “the quality of air you’re breathing around you.”
In a crowded indoor area with poor ventilation, people can “get infected” with COVID-19 “in minutes,” Jha said, adding that being outdoors you can be “outside for long periods of time” and not get infected.
Jha made those comments in regards to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) having relaxed guidelines around COVID-19. That included dropping the six-foot social distancing rule.
The agency last week rescinded a number of rules and made key updates to its recommendations, now stating that unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals should essentially be treated the same, while explicitly saying that those with a prior infection have protection against severe illness.
Starting in early 2020, federal health agencies issued a recommendation that people keep at least six feet of distance away from one another. Health departments, businesses, corporations, and schools across the United States then adopted the rule, leading to restrictions such as capacity limits and lockdowns.
‘Nobody Knows’
A former administration for the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, revealed in late 2021 that the six-foot rule was made up.
“Nobody knows where it came from,” Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member, told CBS News. “Most people assume that the six feet of distance, the recommendation for keeping six feet apart, comes out of some old studies related to flu, where droplets don’t travel more than six feet.”
Rectangles are painted on the ground to encourage homeless people to keep social distancing at a city-sanctioned homeless encampment across from City Hall in San Francisco, California, on May 22, 2020, amid the COVID pandemic. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
The CDC, he said, initially recommended a 10-foot rule, and the six-foot rule was a compromise between the federal health agency and Trump administration officials.
“So the compromise was around six feet. Now imagine if that detail had leaked out. Everyone would have said, ‘This is the White House politically interfering with the CDC’s judgment.’ The CDC said 10 feet, it should be 10 feet, but 10 feet was no more right than six feet and ultimately became three feet,” Gottlieb remarked.
The CDC also said in its update that it’s no longer recommending unvaccinated people to quarantine after exposure. Unvaccinated people who have been in close contact with an infected person aren’t advised to go through a five-day quarantine period if they haven’t tested positive or shown symptoms, according to the revised guidelines.
Regardless of vaccination status, according to the CDC, “you should isolate from others when you have COVID-19” or are “sick and suspect that you have COVID-19 but do not yet have test results.” Previously, the CDC said fully vaccinated people who were exposed could skip the quarantine period.
Former President Donald Trump suggested that the Jan. 6 committee should be dissolved, following the defeat of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) in a GOP primary on Aug. 16, calling the vote a “referendum” and that “the people have spoken.”
“Congratulations to Harriet Hageman on her great and very decisive WIN in Wyoming. This is a wonderful result for America, and a complete rebuke of the Unselect Committee of political Hacks and Thugs,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Aug. 16.
“Liz Cheney should be ashamed of herself, the way she acted, and her spiteful, sanctimonious words and actions towards others,” Trump continued. “Now she can finally disappear into the depths of political oblivion where, I am sure, she will be much happier than she is right now.”
“Thank you WYOMING!” Trump added.
Wyoming Republican congressional candidate Harriet Hageman waves as she takes a picture with children during a primary election night party in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on Aug. 16, 2022. (Michael Smith/Getty Images)
Cheney was defeated by Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman, a natural resources attorney from Fort Laramie. As of early Wednesday morning, the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office reported (pdf) that Hageman garnered 113,025 votes, compared to Cheney’s 49,316.
The result was not unexpected, considering that nearly 70 percent of Wyoming residents voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Cheney is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump and serves as the co-chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
“I assume that with the very big Liz Cheney loss, far bigger than had ever been anticipated, the January 6th Committee of political Hacks and Thugs will quickly begin the beautiful process of DISSOLUTION?” Trump wrote in another Truth Social post on Tuesday.
“This was a referendum on the never ending Witch Hunt. The people have spoken!” Trump added.
During her concession speech on Tuesday, Cheney called out Trump directly.
“I will do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is never anywhere near the Oval Office and I mean it. I love my country more,” she said. “This primary election is over. But now the real work begins.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) speaks to supporters at a primary night event in Jackson, Wyoming, on Aug. 16, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said Cheney’s speech was “uninspiring.”
“Liz Cheney’s uninspiring concession speech, in front of a ‘tiny’ crowd in the Great State of Wyoming, focused on her belief that the 2020 Presidential Election was not, despite massive and conclusive evidence to the contrary, Rigged & Stolen,” Trump wrote. “It was, and that’s not even counting the fact that many election changes, in numerous States, were not approved by State Legislatures, an absolute must.”
Hageman will now face Democratic nominee Lynnette Grey Bull in the Nov. 8 general election, in the fight for Wyoming’s lone seat in the House of Representatives.
Several GOP lawmakers have welcomed Hageman’s victory on Tuesday.
“Congratulations to Harriet Hageman on her massive Republican primary victory in Wyoming over Nancy Pelosi’s puppet Liz Cheney. I was proud to join President Trump and Leader Kevin McCarthy in endorsing Harriet,” House GOP Conference Chairwoman Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said in a statement.
“Harriet is a true America First patriot who will restore the people of Wyoming’s voice, which Liz Cheney had long forgotten,” Stefanik continued. “I cannot wait for Harriet to join Republicans in Congress so that we can stay laser-focused on our work to save America. ”
Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, echoed Trump’s comment about the Jan. 6 committee.
“Tonight was not just a defeat for Liz Cheney, but a massive rejection of the sham ‘Jan 6’ witch hunt Committee and the authoritarian politics of the DC establishment,” Miller wrote on Twitter. “Congrats to my friend Harriet Hageman, President Trump & the MAGA movement!”
Elon Musk has eked out a legal victory in his battle with Twitter, as a judge has ordered information about fake accounts to be handed over to Musk.
Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick handed Musk a defeat as well in ruling that 21 other people from whom Musk wanted data do not have to provide him with information, according to TechSpot.
Information from Twitter’s former head of consumer product, Kayvon Beykpour, must be released.
According to Reuters, Musk’s team of lawyers had identified Beykpour as “a key figure in calculating the amount of fake accounts on the platform.”
Beykpour was fired by current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in May.
“We look forward to reviewing Beykpour’s communications and will continue to seek information and witnesses until the full truth comes out,” said Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, according to Bloomberg.
The issue of fake accounts emerged as a major bone of contention in Musk’s proposed purchase of the social media platform. Twitter estimates that about 5 percent of its accounts are bots. Musk has said the figure is closer to 20 percent.
Musk said he decided not to go through with the $44 billion deal because he could not verify the number of fake accounts. Twitter then took Musk to court to force him to buy the company.
Dan Brahmy, CEO of the Israeli tech company Cyabra, agrees that Twitter has lowballed its number of fake accounts, according to Reuters.
“They have underestimated that number,” he said, putting the share of fake accounts at 13.7 percent.
In a countersuit filed against Twitter, Musk argued that “misrepresentations or omissions” by the company have inflated Twitter’s actual value, The Washington Post reported.
The countersuit said Twitter has 65 million fewer monetizable daily active users — people who can be seeing ads — than the 238 million that Twitter says it has.
Twitter undercounted bots as part of a “scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects,” Musk’s countersuit alleged, according to The Guardian.
Lawyers for Musk and Twitter will meet in court in October to debate whether the deal must be completed, the Washington Examiner reported.
John Bridgeland worked on Obama White House council, cheered Biden victory
On the campaign trail, Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) touts the endorsement of a man named John Bridgeland as evidence of his cross-party appeal.
There are just a few details the congressman leaves out, at least when he’s trying to win over voters in his increasingly red state: Bridgeland worked in the Obama administration, celebrated Joe Biden’s election, and cofounded a nonprofit dedicated to remaking policing.
The founder of “Republicans for Tim Ryan,” Bridgeland has worked on left-wing policy initiatives for years. Former president Barack Obama in 2010 appointed Bridgeland to the White House Council for Community Solutions. Bridgeland also cofounded a firm, COVID Collaborative, that works with the Biden administration on vaccine messaging. In December 2020, Bridgeland wrote an op-ed for the website of Maria Shriver, a Democratic activist and member of the Kennedy family, about how he was “so encouraged” by Biden’s win.
Democrats touting endorsements from nominal Republicans who routinely attack the Republican Party is a familiar strategy. Lawmakers who have been rubber stamps for Biden’s agenda, such as Ryan, are hoping that voters forget their records. Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), who is running in a competitive race this cycle, recently released a list of endorsements from Republicans, several of whom work for the the Lincoln Project, an activist group dedicated to electing Democrats but helmed by individuals who once considered themselves Republicans.
Bridgeland’s endorsement comes as Ryan seeks to separate himself from the president. Biden’s approval rating is 23 points underwater in Ohio—a state that former president Donald Trump won twice. When Biden traveled to Ohio for a speech last month, Ryan scheduled campaign stops hundreds of miles away.
Ryan shared Bridgeland’s endorsement on Twitter and wrote he was “proud” to have Bridgeland on his “team.”
“Republicans for Ryan is a platform for Republicans to sign up to help Tim Ryan. I am a registered Republican and vote in Republican primaries and in general elections,” Bridgeland told the Free Beacon. “I believe in limited, effective government, … civil society and the nonprofit and private sectors, and respecting both individual rights and responsibilities.”
Bridgeland worked from the mid-1990s to 2003 as a senior official in then-representative Rob Portman’s (R., Ohio) office and in former president George W. Bush’s administration. In an op-ed for a local Ohio newspaper, Bridgeland wrote that he supports Ryan’s “love of our democracy” and “many of his policies.”
Bridgeland attacked Ryan’s Republican Senate challenger, J.D. Vance, as “lacking the energy of the U.S. senator he is trying to replace—Rob Portman.” Portman endorsed Vance immediately after Vance in May won the Republican nomination.
Bridgeland’s endorsement of Ryan was leaked to Politico days prior as part of a story about the Ryan campaign’s strategy of appealing to Republican voters. That story also featured Bridgeland speaking favorably about Ryan and how Ryan could make inroads with Republican voters in Ohio. Missing from Politico‘s story was any mention of Bridgeland’s work since he left the Bush administration in 2003.
Ryan did not respond to a request for comment.
Other than Bridgeland, no appointees with experience in Republican politics were appointed to Obama’s White House community solutions council. There, Bridgeland worked alongside the likes of Laurene Powell Jobs and Jon Bon Jovi to provide advice to the president on “innovative community solutions and civic participation by all Americans.”
Bridgeland later cofounded ACT NOW, a nonprofit that works “to reimagine ‘public safety’ … and eliminate the root causes of systemic racism.” ACT NOW’s staff includes Ray C. Kelly, who in 2018 received an award from George Soros’s Open Society Institute-Baltimore.
According to internal voter data obtained by the Free Beacon, Bridgeland voted in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. A June column he wrote for the Cincinnati Enquirer called for new gun control measures. The column also touted his work with a group called the People’s Filibuster for Gun Safety. That group, according to its website, partners with left-wing nonprofits such as the Anti-Defamation League and March for Our Lives to pass gun-control legislation.
Bridgeland’s cheerleading for Biden appears out of step with Republican voters. Following Biden’s State of the Union address in March, Bridgeland celebrated the speech as passionate and “articulating values and ideas that transcend our divisions.” A Reuters poll released Aug. 9 found 86 percent of self-identified Republicans disapprove of Biden.
Ryan will face Vance in November. There is little high-quality polling of the race available, although most political analysts believe Vance is the favorite. Portman’s seat has been held by a Republican since 1999.
The Oregon Democrat warned that wealthy business owners could abuse the loan program. Financial disclosures suggest his wife did just that.
Oregon Democratic senator Ron Wyden warned early in the pandemic that wealthy business owners could abuse the Paycheck Protection Program. Financial disclosures suggest his wife did just that.
Nancy Bass Wyden, the multimillionaire owner of New York’s Strand bookstore, received $2.7 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans between 2020 and 2021 and nonetheless went on to lay off 180 employees. Small businesses were eligible for the federally forgiven loans on the condition that they used a majority of the funds to keep employees on the payroll. In October 2020, Bass Wyden told CBS News that the Strand would not rehire many of those employees and that the store would “have to give back part of the loan due to the forgiveness rules.”
But as of September of last year, the federal government had forgiven both loans, ProPublicareported. The Small Business Administration declined to comment and the Strand did not respond to the Washington Free Beacon’s requests for comments on the loans.
The Paycheck Protection Program came under fire in 2020 for shelling out millions to billionaire real estate investors. Other family members of Democrats also got in line for handouts, including the multimillionaire father of then-Senate candidate Jon Ossoff (D.) who scored as much as $1 million from the program. Businesses like the Strand were able to line their pockets and lay off dozens of workers without rehiring them as long as 60 percent of the money went to payroll expenses.
Wyden and a group of senators pushed then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Small Business Administrator Jovita Carranza in April 2020 “to develop strong supervisory mechanisms to identify instances of unjust enrichment” for the program.
“Every loan that provides a windfall for an applicant who does not truly need it results in one fewer loan made to a struggling small business owner whose employees could be truly helped by this funding,” the senators wrote in a letter.
Wyden’s wife refused to rehire many of the employees she fired even after the Strand received its PPP loans, leaving the bookstore “woefully understaffed,” according to the union that represents the workers. She pleaded with the public to purchase more books in late 2020, saying the store’s revenue had plummeted 70 percent and that loans and cash reserves were “depleted.” The Strand said it was “impossible” to rehire all staff even with the paycheck loan boost.
“The limited sales we make now plus the PPP loan are the only things keeping our staff paid,” a Strand spokesman toldVulture in March 2021. “So until in-store sales bounce back, this is the best we can do.”
Bass Wyden earned as much as $3 million in book sales during the layoffs, according to her husband’s annual financial disclosures. The Oregonianreported in 2011 the couple’s net worth is between $12 million and $56 million.
The couple purchased millions of dollars’ worth of stock in 2020 that appreciated substantially following lockdowns, including as much as $600,000 in shares of Amazon, a prime competitor with independent bookstores.
An inspector general’s report in May found many Americans took advantage of the PPP loans as the Small Business Administration had no plan to counter fraud. One former U.S. attorney dubbed the program “the biggest fraud in a generation.”
Bass Wyden inherited the Strand from her father Ben Bass. Her children are next in line to take control of the 90-year-old bookstore next, according to the Strand’s website.
Sarah Muscroft condemned Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli citizens
The United Nations disciplined and removed a top official from her post after she publicly admonished Palestinian terror groups for a spate of rocket attacks on Israeli citizens, a U.N. official confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday.
Sarah Muscroft, who served as the head of the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), was forced to apologize after an Aug. 8 tweet in which she condemned the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror organization for its “indiscriminate rocket fire” into Israel. Following pushback from pro-Palestinian activists who accused her of being overly deferential to Israel, Muscroft called her original missive “ill informed” and then deleted her Twitter account altogether. A U.N. official confirmed that Muscroft was removed from her post as a result of the tweets and will be reassigned elsewhere in the agency.
Israeli officials and U.N. watchdog groups say the situation is proof of the international organization’s systemic bias against Israel, revealing how the United Nations silences critics of Palestinian terrorism. While U.N. officials routinely criticize Israel and characterize it as an “apartheid state,” they have done little to hold the Palestinians accountable for deadly terror attacks, including one earlier this week in Jerusalem that injured eight people, including Americans.
Muscroft originally took to Twitter last week to praise a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad following days of violent terror strikes that injured Israelis and Americans. “Such indiscriminate rocket fire of Islamic jihad provoking Israeli retaliation is condemned,” Muscroft wrote, according to archived copies of her original tweets.
Her message prompted a flurry of angry responses from pro-Palestinian advocates and even U.N. officials who said that Muscroft wrongly blamed Palestinian Islamic Jihad for initiating the violent conflict. Following this pressure, Muscroft apologized and deleted her Twitter account. A U.N. spokesman confirmed to the Free Beacon that Muscroft will “be assigned a new role” as punishment.
“The staff member in question will be assigned to a new role,” OCHA spokesman in Geneva Jens Laerke told the Free Beacon. “OCHA has been present in the occupied Palestinian territory for the past 20 years, working to help meet humanitarian needs, guided by the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, and humanity. Over two million people in the occupied Palestinian territory need assistance—they remain our only focus and priority.”
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, in an Aug. 14 letter to Secretary-General António Guterres lodged a formal complaint over the matter, according to a copy of that letter obtained by the Free Beacon.
“Israel is disturbed to see that Palestinian outrage over tweets would so quickly devolve into ending the ability of a senior U.N. staffer to keep her job, and to express herself,” Erdan wrote, noting that Israel has not always agreed with Muscroft’s views about the conflict. “This represents a clear surrender of the U.N. to threats and intimidation, and poses a very problematic norm.”
By punishing Muscroft, the United Nations is giving the Palestinians an “unwritten veto” over the international organization’s statements, which “stands in clear contradiction with the basic principles of objectivity and neutrality that the U.N. claims to hold,” Erdan wrote. “In the best case, this is a recipe for misguided self-censorship by U.N. officials. In the worst case, it is a prescription for U.N. officials to exclusively emphasize the Palestinian narrative, even if this falls in contradiction with facts on the ground.”
A similar situation unfolded last year when U.N. official Matthew Schmale said in an interview that Israel undertook serious efforts to avoid civilian casualties during its May 2021 operation in the Gaza Strip that targeted Hamas. Palestinian activists attacked Schmale for his comments, and the United Nations recalled him from his post.
“Somehow,” Erdan wrote in his letter, “it’s always open season to criticize Israel, with no repercussions; but if a U.N. staffer dares to speak against Palestinian terrorism, there is immediate backlash in fear of reprisal.”
The situation with Muscroft comes just weeks after a U.N. official who leads what critics say is a one-sided probe into alleged Israeli war crimes said that social media platforms are controlled by a “Jewish lobby”—comments that were widely condemned as anti-Semitic. That official, Miloon Kothari, did not face disciplinary repercussions for the comment and was defended by his superiors, who said pro-Israel forces were trying to discredit the investigation into Israel.
Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights attorney and the CEO of the International Legal Forum, said the episode with Muscroft is “a shameful act of cowardice and hypocrisy from the U.N.”
“Instead of supporting Muscroft, the U.N. effectively threw her under the bus, by capitulating to the terrorists and the anti-Israel activists, by forcing her to make an apology and then reassigning her to a new role,” Ostrovsky told the Free Beacon. “The U.N., who are supposed to be impartial, never call out or reprimand their people when they criticize and attack Israel, yet they only do so when an official has the basic courage and decency to speak the truth and challenge the lies of Islamic Jihad and Hamas.”
A former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower has said that the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will see the government target middle-income Americans with increased scrutiny and audits.
William Henck previously worked as a lawyer for the IRS for 20 years until 2017, when he was terminated for allegedly revealing sensitive information to the media about how the IRS had reportedly failed to identify a multi-billion-dollar corporate tax credit scheme involving a source of energy known as burning pulp byproducts, or black liquor.
Speaking to Fox Business, Henck disputed claims by the IRS and other officials who have said that increased funding for the agency under the IRA, which is set to be signed into law by Joe Biden this week, would only lead to more audits for wealthy millionaires and billionaires and large corporations.
“The idea that they’re going to open things up and go after these big billionaires and large corporations is quite frankly [expletive],” Henck said in the interview on Aug. 15. “It’s not going to happen. They’re going to give themselves bonuses and promotions and really nice conferences.”
“The big corporations and the billionaires are probably sitting back laughing right now,” he said, adding that it was “insane” to double the IRS budget.
Henck also said he believes that the agency will go after businesses that don’t have enough money to hire Washington lobbyists.
(L-R) Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leave the Senate Chamber after final passage of the Inflation Reduction Act at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Aug. 7, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
‘Absolutely Not’ Being Used to Target Middle-Income Americans
The Democrat-controlled House passed the IRA in a strictly party-line vote on Aug. 12. It includes nearly $80 billion in IRS funding, including $45.6 billion for “enforcement.”
A Treasury Department report from May 2021 (pdf) estimated that such an investment would enable the agency to hire roughly 87,000 employees by 2031.
Amid mounting fears, the IRS has said it will “absolutely not” be using the extra money to increase audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans.
IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig stated in a letter to members of the Senate on Aug. 4 that the extra resources will instead serve to help the agency in “challenging” areas such as audits of large corporate and global high-net-worth taxpayers.
“These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” Rettig wrote in the letter. “As we’ve been planning, our investment of these enforcement resources is designed around the Department of the Treasury’s directive that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre have also doubled down on their rhetoric regarding reports about the extra funding being utilized to target middle-income Americans, stating that there would be no new audits for individuals earning less than $400,000 per year.
Henck disagrees.
‘Unlimited Resources And No Accountability’
“There will be considerable incentive to basically to shake down taxpayers, and the advantage the IRS has is they have basically unlimited resources and no accountability, whereas a taxpayer has to weigh the cost of accountants, tax lawyers—fighting something in tax court,” he told Fox Business.
“If you own a roofing company, you better count on getting audited because that’s what they’re going to be doing,” he continued. “They’re going to be going after your car dealerships, roofing companies.”
Henck’s comments come after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that working-class Americans will end up paying billions of dollars in new taxes thanks to the IRA.
Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee said on Aug. 12 that they had received the information from the CBO confirming that under the new legislation, lower- and middle-income Americans will pay an estimated $20 billion more in taxes over the next decade.
This confirms that “at least $20 billion of the $124 billion in new revenue expected by a supercharged IRS will be coming from higher audits on low- and middle-income Americans” and that this would be “in addition to existing audits on these income levels,” GOP lawmakers said in a statement.
The Epoch Times has not received a response for comment from the CBO.
Moderna documents regarding their COVID vaccine trial on animals, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, showed that some of the offspring of rats that were injected with Moderna’s mRNA shot developed rib malformations.
The 700 pages contain a portion of the formal Biologics Licensing Application (BLA) package that a manufacturer is required to submit to the FDA for approval.
The documents have not yet been made public, but were analyzed by former pharma executive Alexandra Latypova and reviewed by The Epoch Times.
Included in the documents are test results that show that Moderna mRNA shots caused statistically significant skeletal malformations in the offspring of the rats that took the mRNA-1273 (Spikevax mRNA) doses.
“mRNA-1273-related variations in skeletal examination included statistically significant increases in the number of F1 rats with 1 or more wavy ribs and 1 or more rib nodules. Wavy ribs appeared in 6 fetuses and 4 litters with a fetal prevalence of 4.03% and a litter prevalence of 18.2%. Rib nodules appeared in 5 of those 6 fetuses,” according to Moderna’s internal documents.
F1 refers to the rat offspring and litter indicates a group-birth of rats.
“Maternal toxicity in the form of clinical observations was observed for 5 days following the last dose (Gestation Day 13), correlating with the most sensitive period for rib development in rats (Gestation Days 14 to 17)” the documents state.
A document package on biodistribution studies obtained by Judicial Watch. (Courtesy of Alexandra Latypova)
“Wavy ribs” refers to ribs not properly shaped.
In other words, 6 out of about 149 baby rats had wavy ribs and 5 of those also had rib nodules.
According to Latypova’s analysis, only female rats were studied (male rats were not treated with the Moderna vaccine).
The females got a human dose of 100mcg Spikevax mRNA, 28 and 14 days prior to mating and gestation days 1 and 13.
“1/2 rats euthanized before delivery to examine fetuses, the rest followed to 21 days after delivery,” Latypova stated, “No numbers are provided for the study size.”
In addition, there is no study report, but only Moderna’s own interpretation of the outcomes.
The results were part of reproductive toxicology tests done by Moderna, which is the only reproductive toxicology test for the product, according to Latypova.
It is not known how the dose translates from humans to rats.
“Neither Moderna nor Pfizer provided any dose calculations or justification information for dose selection in animal studies,” Latypova told The Epoch Times.
“Doses of drugs, or especially biologics do not necessarily have linear relationships with toxicity or efficacy. It is likely a much more complex relationship and unfortunately not known at all.”
“Reproductive toxicology is the study of adverse effects of medicinal products on reproduction. The FDA requires reproductive toxicity testing for any NME to be used in women of childbearing potential,” added Latypova, who has worked in more than 60 pharmaceutical companies, mainly focusing on creating and reviewing clinical trials, many of which were submitted to the FDA.
Despite the abovementioned lab results, the FDA issued a statement on Jan. 30 saying that there were no adverse effects on postnatal developments.
“No vaccine-related fetal malformations or variations and no adverse effect on postnatal development were observed in the study,” the FDA stated on the label for Moderna’s Spikevax vaccine.
“In a developmental toxicity study, 0.2 mL of a vaccine formulation containing nucleoside-modified mRNA (100 mcg) and other ingredients that are included in a 0.5-mL single human dose of SPIKEVAX was administered IM to female rats on four occasions: 28 and 14 days prior to mating, and on gestation days 1 and 13,” reads the FDA publication.
Pfizer Vaccine Also Caused Abnormal Ribs in Rats
In August of 2021, Elsevier published a peer-reviewed study (pdf) titled “Lack of effects on female fertility and prenatal and postnatal offspring development in rats with BNT162b2, a mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine.”
BNT162b2 is the Pfizer jab.
All the authors of the publication were employed by Pfizer, BioNTech, or Charles River, a Pfizer contractor.
This publication suggests that there was a “lack of effects” in postnatal offspring development, but the study shows that there was a 295 percent increase (8.3 percent compared to 2.1 percent in the control group) in abnormal ribs in vaccinated rat offspring. A huge increase in what is described as the “supernumerary lumbar.”
‘This Was an Extremely Dangerous Warning’
“Skeletal abnormalities in the bony rib cages are absolutely important and were statistically increased in the rat offspring of the experimental group compared with the placebo group,” James Thorp, an MD board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology, as well as maternal-fetal medicine, told The Epoch Times after reviewing Latypova’s analysis of Moderna’s BLA package.
“In clinical obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine we see similar findings in skeletal abnormalities prior to birth that are extremely serious and often lethal. This was an extremely dangerous warning signal in reproductive toxicology studies and was never brought to the light of day to protect our global citizens. The CDC, Pfizer, Moderna, and the flagship medical journals of the medical industrial complex lied to the American public and should be held accountable,” Thorp said.
Thorp recently analyzed and verified the most recent Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data related to COVID-19 vaccines and compared them to the influenza vaccines, finding numerous abnormalities.
The CDC website recommends the COVID vaccines during pregnancy in order to “prevent severe illness and death in pregnant women.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also “strongly recommends that pregnant individuals be vaccinated against COVID-19,” adding that pregnant women’s complete vaccination should be a “priority.”
Moderna and the FDA did not respond to a request for comment.
The Epoch Times reached out to Pfizer and CDC for comment.
A NEW STUDY REVEALS JUST HOW DAMAGING THE POLICY WAS.
COVID-19 lockdowns could be responsible for claiming 20 times more lives than they were advertised to save, according to a new analysis published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
The paper, which bases its conclusions on a comprehensive review of other relevant, lockdown-focused literature, was authored by researchers at the Jerusalem College of Technology.
“In this work, we performed a narrative review of the works studying the above effectiveness, as well as the historic experience of previous pandemics and risk-benefit analysis based on the connection of health and wealth,” summarized the article, titled “Are Lockdowns Effective in Managing Pandemics?”
“The comparative analysis of different countries showed that the assumption of lockdowns’ effectiveness cannot be supported by evidence—neither regarding the present COVID-19 pandemic, nor regarding the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu and other less-severe pandemics in the past,” argue the researchers.
The team proceeds to quantify the estimated number of lives lost due to the COVID-19 mitigation measure, which drew strong support from Democrats and public health officials including Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Mike Pence:
The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save.
The paper also exposes how governments and international health organizations’ embrace of lockdowns was at odds with their stance on the public health policy prior to COVID-19.
“It should be mentioned that the same conclusions—no clear benefit of lockdowns in case of pandemic—were made by national and international bodies before COVID-19 emerged. Namely, several governments prepared detailed plans of response to influenza- like pandemics years ago—see the programs of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (2007) and the Israeli Ministry of Health (2007),”
Researchers singled out the World Health Organization (WHO), which published a comprehensive 91-page preparedness plan in October of 2019 that explicitly mentioned that:
• social distancing measures “can be highly disruptive” and should be carefully weighted; • travel-related measures are “unlikely to be successful”; “border closures may be considered only by small island nations in severe pandemics”; • and contact tracing and quarantine of exposed individuals are not recommended in any circumstances.
The paper doesn’t argue that lockdowns were merely ineffective; however, adding that they actually claimed the lives of the people public health officials claimed to be protecting.
“The lockdown policies had a direct side effect of increasing mortality. Hospitals in Europe and USA were prepared to manage pretty small groups of highly contagious patients, while unprepared for a much more probable challenge—large-scale contagion. As a result, public health care facilities and nursing homes often became vehicles of contamination themselves—to a large extent because of the lockdown-based emergency policy implementation,” explained the paper, citing New York as an example.
“While our understanding of viral transmission mechanisms leads to the assumption that lockdowns may be an effective pandemic management tool, this assumption cannot be supported by the evidence-based analysis of the present COVID-19 pandemic, as well as of the 1918–1920 H1N1 influenza type-A pandemic (the Spanish Flu) and numerous less-severe pandemics in the past,” concludes the paper.
The findings follow the publication of other studies finding sizable drawbacks to lockdowns and other popular COVID-19 mitigation measures such as mask mandates.
John Fetterman linked to creepy anime demon best known for enslaving a child
Republicans and other anti-grooming activists are seething after a photo resurfaced of Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman’s family posing with a controversial anime character best known for enslaving a child.
The photo, which Fetterman posted on Twitter in April 2019, shows the candidate’s wife and three children posing with an exceedingly large man in a creepy demon mask and long black cloak. Experts familiar with the anime genre tell the Washington Free Beacon the masked individual was portraying the character Elias Ainsworth from the Japanese manga series The Ancient Magus’ Bride.
tbc this is NOT me in the mask. I swear, I was in Blair County. You can be sure because, quite frankly, the head isn’t cut off. 🙄🙄 pic.twitter.com/nVHJk1YlMr
Fetterman claims to have been in Blair County, Pa., at the time the photo was taken at the Tekko anime convention in Pittsburgh. Nevertheless, the fact that he would even allow his children to be exposed to a character as creepy and problematic as Elias Ainsworth raised serious questions about his parenting.
Blog posts reviewed by the Free Beacon suggest the series is incredibly problematic due to how it depicts the relationship between Ainsworth, “a seven-foot-tall humanoid with an animal skull for a head,” and Chise Hatori, the 15-year-old orphan he buys at a slave action in London for five million pounds. According to a listicle published on the Comic Book Resources website, this is one of five reasons why “Chise and Eilas are [not] the perfect couple.”
A scathing review posted on tumblr.com awarded the show a score of 3/10 despite acknowledging there was “so much to love” about the anime series. “Chise and Elias could have been terrific characters in their own right but their relationship is marred by their creepy creators’ bad writing,” wrote tumblr user juneboba. “So many things Elias says reeked of things predators actually say to their victims and romanticizing it is gross. He even admits outright that he’s grooming Chise and ‘raising’ her to be perfect for his use.”
The reviewer was especially put off by the fact that Elias kept “invading [Chise’s] privacy and trying to touch and bathe her without her permission,” noting that Elias’s character “understood that what he was doing to a child was morally reprehensible” yet was portrayed as having “saved” Chise by purchasing her at auction and making her his child bride. “That’s not how human trafficking works and glorifying it is despicable,” juneboba wrote.
Fetterman’s decision to glorify the despicable character, months after taking office as lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, is the latest in a series of scandals plaguing the state’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. He was widely criticized, for example, for holding an innocent black jogger at gunpoint in 2013. Fetterman has refused to apologize for his racially charged vigilantism. The candidate suffered a nearly fatal stroke in May after repeatedly ignoring his doctor’s advice and has rarely ventured out on the campaign trail since then. Video evidence suggests Fetterman is nearly as incapable as Joe Biden when it comes to speaking in coherent sentences.
Ayanna Pressley purchased new rental property months after she proposed creating a ‘landlord relief fund’
Massachusetts Democratic congresswoman and “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley quietly expanded her rental property portfolio just two months after she introduced a bill that would provide taxpayer-funded relief for landlords.
Pressley purchased her second rental property, a two-unit home in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood, for $340,000 in May 2021, according to property records and financial disclosures reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Just two months before the purchase, the Democrat—along with fellow Squad members Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.)—introduced a bill that would have created a “landlord relief fund” to reimburse landlords who lost rent payments from March 1, 2020 to April 1, 2022.
Pressley owned and operated at least four rental units during that time period, the Democrat’s financial disclosures show. In addition to her Mattapan property, Pressley in 2019 purchased a $658,000 Boston home that she converted into a two-family building. That property brought Pressley up to $15,000 in rental income in 2020 and up to $100,000 in rental income in 2021, suggesting that the Democrat may have lost revenue during the pandemic, thus making her eligible for taxpayer-funded relief through her bill. The legislation specifically prioritizes landlords with “the fewest available amount of assets,” making minor lessors such as Pressley more likely to receive funds.
Pressley, who did not return a request for comment, is not the only Democrat who pushed for federal landlord relief without acknowledging her status as a landlord. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), who also cosponsored the Pressley-backed landlord relief bill, collected up to $50,000 in rent payments in 2020, her financial disclosures show. Pennsylvania Reps. Matt Cartwright (D.) and Susan Wild (D.), meanwhile, collected up to $130,000 in combined rental income in 2020 as they called for taxpayer-funded assistance for landlords.
Both Tlaib and Pressley publicly criticized landlords even as they raked in rental income. Tlaib in December 2020 stressed the need to protect Americans from “landlords and bill collectors in the midst of a pandemic,” while Pressley has called rent cancellation legislation “literally a matter of life and death” and argued that rental payments force families to “choose between putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their head.” Between her two properties, Pressley collected up to $132,500 in rental income in 2020 and 2021, according to her financial disclosures.
Beyond the Pressley-backed bill’s “landlord relief fund,” the legislation also would have suspended rent and mortgage payments through April 2022. That provision did not include limits on income or payment size, meaning the bill would have effectively forced taxpayers to foot the bill for every American’s rent or mortgage.
While Pressley has largely ceased her calls to cancel rent and subsidize landlords, the Democrat is now using the burden of rent payments to argue that Joe Biden should cancel student debt. Some of her top allies in Congress who support such a move hold student debt of their own—Omar, for example, acknowledged during an April rally that she still has outstanding loans. The fellow “Squad” member has repeatedly called on Biden to cancel all student debt.
As Democrats take a victory lap after passing a bill that spends nearly $400 billion on green energy initiatives, Americans say they are less concerned about climate change than they were three years ago.
Only 35 percent of adults are “extremely or very concerned” about the effects of climate change on them personally, according to a poll from the Associated Press. In 2019, 44 percent of respondents said the same.
Fewer than half of respondents, 45 percent, said individual people have a large responsibility to fight climate change. Thirty-two percent of respondents said they were not concerned about the impact of climate change, and 33 percent said they were only “moderately concerned.”
The results come as Democrats celebrate Joe Biden’s upcoming signing of the Inflation Reduction Act. Although severalstudies show the bill will do nothing to lower inflation, which is at a 40-year high, the bill does provide the largest ever single investment in green energy and climate change mitigation. Because reports show the bill will do little to curb inflation, mediaoutlets have begun referring to the Inflation Reduction Act as a climate and health bill. Yet that framing may not help Democrats sell its provisions to voters. Fewer Americans believe they have a direct impact on climate change than three years ago, the AP poll found. Roughly half said their actions have an effect on climate change, compared with the two-thirds who said the same in 2019.
The Inflation Reduction Act earlier this month passed both chambers of Congress, with every Democrat voting in favor. Biden is expected to sign the bill on Tuesday.
Many Democrats running in competitive races this November touted the bill’s provisions as evidence that the party is addressing voters’ concerns. But the AP poll found that Americans are far more concerned about rising consumer costs and economic issues than the environment. Fewer Americans cite the environment as a pressing issue than they did three years ago, the AP found.
In total, the Inflation Reduction Act earmarks $386 billion for green energy and climate change-related initiatives. One-hundred-sixty-one billion dollars of that money goes to clean electricity tax credits, while $36 billion goes to tax credits for electric cars.
Just 10 percent of respondents said they live in a household with solar panels or drive an electric car. Although nearly 75 percent of respondents said they are using energy-efficient appliances or reducing driving and air-conditioning use, the main reason was saving money rather than stopping climate change.
“I ran for president promising to make government work for working families again, and that is what this bill does—period,” Biden said this month.
Other than climate-change-related spending, the Inflation Reduction Act allocates $80 billion to double the size of the IRS’s workforce. Should the IRS find enough staffers to join the agency, it will employ more bureaucrats than the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and the Border Patrol combined.
Rep. Danny K. Davis rents his Chicago office from a convicted drug pusher
Rep. Danny K. Davis (D., Ill.) rents his district office from a convicted cocaine dealer who was once affiliated with a Chicago drug ring, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Since January 2017, Davis’s campaign account has cut regular $600 checks for “office rent” to Mario’s Butcher Shop, FEC records show. The shop, which is registered as a corporation with the state, lists Mariano “Mario” Lettieri and his wife as the sole members of its board of directors and was at the center of Lettieri’s 1990 conviction for drug trafficking.
Lettieri, whom the Chicago Tribune described as “reputedly tied” to a “crime syndicate,” was sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison after authorities identified him as the primary supplier of cocaine to a major Chicago drug ring led by an ex-cop. The Drug Enforcement Administration reported that Lettieri trafficked as much as 80 pounds of cocaine over a six-month period. Lettieri also allowed heroin to be packaged in his butcher shop’s boiler room and used “rib-eye steaks” as a code word when discussing drug prices.
Lettieri is an odd landlord for Davis, who has long championed efforts to fight drug abuse. Davis in 2006 called for $4 million in emergency aid funds to be allocated to Cook County to address the growing heroin problem in the area. Last year, Davis announced that he had formed a coalition of drug prevention organizations in Chicago to help address the growing opioid crisis. He told the local press that “there is no part of Chicago that is worse hit than the West Side.” The West Side of Chicago is where Lettieri ran his drug operation in the 1980s.
Tumia Romero, Davis’s chief of staff, would not directly address the congressman’s payments to Lettieri but told the Free Beacon that Davis believes in giving people “second chances.”
Davis is no stranger to controversy. In 2005, he took a trip to Sri Lanka funded by the Tamil Tigers, an ethnic terrorist group from that country. He is a close ally of noted anti-Semite and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and once participated in a religious ceremony with Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the controversial Unification Church. Moon, who died in 2012, was a convicted felon who said Jews deserved the Holocaust.
The congressman also attended the 2012 dedication of the Church of Scientology’s Washington, D.C., lobbying office.
Davis, who faced a tough primary challenge this cycle, was boosted by an endorsement from Joe Biden. The longtime congressman won his primary by single digits and is now expected to coast to reelection in November.
Reached for comment, a Mario’s Butcher Shop employee said he would relay the Free Beacon‘s inquiry to the establishment’s owner.
Joe Biden’s administration on Aug. 15 urged a federal court to keep the affidavit that led to the approval of a search warrant on former President Donald Trump’s resort shielded from the public.
U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers said unsealing the affidavit would “irreparably harm the government’s ongoing criminal investigation.”
“Even when the public is already aware of the general nature of the investigation, revealing the specific contents of a search warrant affidavit could alter the investigation’s trajectory, reveal ongoing and future investigative efforts, and undermine agents’ ability to collect evidence or obtain truthful testimony,” they wrote in a 13-page filing to U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who is overseeing the case.
“In addition to the implications for the investigation, the release of this type of investigative material could have ‘devastating consequences’ for the reputations and rights of individuals whose actions and statements are described,” they added, citing a previous decision in a different case.
A slew of parties, including Judicial Watch, media outlets, and the Florida Center for Governmental Accountability, have lodged motions after the Aug. 8 raid of Mar-a-Lago, arguing it is in the public interest to unseal the affidavit and other related documents.
The government and Trump’s lawyers agreed on some of the documents, and Reinhart unsealed the search warrant and several attachments on Aug. 12, revealing that the government believes Trump violated multiple laws.
‘Different Set of Considerations’
“The department filed the motion to make public the warrant and receipt in light of the former president’s public confirmation of the search, the surrounding circumstances, and the substantial public interest in this matter,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in prepared remarks three days after the raid.
Those documents were made public with few redactions.
“The affidavit supporting the search warrant presents a very different set of considerations. There remain compelling reasons, including to protect the integrity of an ongoing law enforcement investigation that implicates national security, that support keeping the affidavit sealed,” DOJ lawyers said in the new filing.
Affidavits are documents filed in court that outline why certain actions are needed. In this case, a law enforcement official filed an affidavit attempting to convince Reinhart to approve the warrant. The affidavit was successful.
The government has considered whether the affidavit could be released with redactions but “the redactions necessary to mitigate harms to the integrity of the investigation would be so extensive as to render the remaining unsealed text devoid of meaningful content, and the release of such a redacted version would not serve any public interest,” government lawyers said in a footnote in an Aug. 15 brief.
“Nevertheless, should the Court order partial unsealing of the affidavit, the government respectfully requests an opportunity to provide the Court with proposed redactions,” they said.
The filing was part of a flurry of activity in the case on Aug. 15, which included several other entries being sealed until further notice.
Epps admitted to trespassing, directing protesters to go into the Capitol. ‘I wish I could take that back,’ he told agents.
When James Ray Epps Sr. first called the FBI regarding his January 2021 activities in Washington D.C., he didn’t mention how he implored protesters in several locations to go inside the Capitol, but he later told an agent that he expected a bomb would detonate on a side street near the Capitol.
Those are just two of the revelations in a collection of Epps-related material obtained by The Epoch Times, including FBI interview summaries, FBI audio recordings, transcripts, videos, and photographs.
In two interviews with the FBI in 2021, Epps explained his actions on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. He admitted he was guilty of trespassing on restricted Capitol grounds and confessed to urging protesters to go to—and into—the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Despite the admissions, the FBI never arrested Epps and he was not charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with any Jan. 6 crimes. The non-action has fueled a crop of theories that he might have been working for the FBI or another agency.
Epps, 61, has repeatedly denied those suggestions through his attorney.
Epps recently sold his house and land in Queen Creek, Arizona, because of threats and harassment and moved to Colorado, he told the New York Times in July. According to online records, the Arizona property sold for $2.2 million on April 28, 2022.
Epps at one time was No. 16 on the FBI’s Jan. 6 most-wanted page. His entry was later scrubbed from the list without explanation. He is among a handful of persons of interest to have their photos deleted from the FBI site.
‘Like a Terrorist Act’
In an interview with FBI agents on March 3, 2021, Epps said he brought a first-aid kit in his backpack to Washington because he expected a terror attack.
“Yeah, I thought there might be a problem. That’s why I was there,” Epps told an FBI agent and an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer in a meeting at the Phoenix office of Epps’s attorney, John Blischak.
Blischak told The Epoch Times he would comment after reviewing the FBI interview summary, but had not done so by press time.
“I was afraid they were going to set off an explosion on one of the side streets,” Epps said, according to a recording of the interview obtained by The Epoch Times. “So we tried to stay in the middle, tried to get there early, tried to stay away from the sides. And if something like that happened, I had a first-aid kit. I could help out.”
Epps told the agents the possibility of violence weighed heavily on his mind and he originally did not plan to travel to Washington. It was only when learning that his son, James Epps Jr., was going to the Trump rally that the senior Epps decided to go and keep an eye on his son, he said.
Ray Epps is shown at the lower left on an early FBI “wanted” poster. His photo has since been scrubbed from the FBI website. (FBI.gov/Wayback Machine)
“As time went on, I started getting a bad feeling like something’s gonna happen,” said Epps, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former Oath Keepers leader in Arizona. “There’s a lot of wackies out there. I thought something would happen in D.C. I thought there might be, what do they call them, EOD, something like that?”
Epps might have been referring to an improvised explosive device (IED), which is a homemade bomb that was a favorite weapon of insurgents in Afghanistan during the United States’ long war there. In military parlance, an EOD refers to an explosive ordnance disposal specialist—someone who defuses and destroys explosives.
An agent asked for clarification: “Oh, you mean like a terrorist act?”
“Right, like a terrorist act,” Epps said.
The agents did not press Epps on what led him to believe there would be an explosion, nor did they ask about the two alleged pipe bombs found outside the Republican and Democrat party headquarters, each just blocks from the Capitol. The RNC pipe bomb was placed near the corner of the Capitol Hill Club facing a side street, similar to the description Epps offered.
The devices did not detonate and the FBI has not arrested anyone in those cases.
Epps told the FBI he regretted the things he said in downtown Washington the night of Jan. 5, 2021. He spoke to internet personality Baked Alaska and video podcaster Villain Report, both of whom recorded their exchanges.
“In fact tomorrow, I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested. …I’ll say it. We need to go into the Capitol,” Epps told Baked Alaska, whose legal name is Anthime Gionet.
Epps shouted a similar theme to the crowd at large: “Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Into the Capitol. Peacefully,” he said. The crowd then started chanting, “Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed!”
The FBI agents told Epps that his statements on Jan. 5 were problematic. They said they found him often on video and in photographs from Jan. 5 and 6.
Epps replied: “I’m the tallest guy in the crowd, and I stick out, man. They followed me.” Then he joked, “I could never be a bank robber.”
“We said that the same way,” one of the agents said. “We said, ‘It’s a big guy and every photo we find, he’s in it.’ The night before, that video didn’t help.
“…And the video the night before, what you said basically predicted what happened,” the agent said.
“I wish I could take that back,” Epps replied. He called the statements “really stupid.”
On Jan. 6, Epps was filmed near the Washington Monument imploring the crowd, “We are going to the Capitol, where our problems are. It’s that direction. Please spread the word.”
When speaking to a young man in a red and black mackinaw jacket, Epps said, “When we go in, leave this here [pointing to something]. You don’t need to get shot,” according to a video of the exchange.
First Call to FBI on Jan. 8
Epps first called the FBI on Jan. 8, 2021, after his brother-in-law notified Epps’s wife that a photograph of Epps was on the FBI website. That call to the National Threat Operations Center (NTOC) lasted about 27 minutes, according to an audio file of the call obtained by The Epoch Times.
In describing his activities, Epps never mentioned that he urged the crowds on Jan. 5 to go into the Capitol the next day. He said he went down to Black Lives Matter plaza to try to calm things down after people he suspected were Antifa activists were harassing police.
“I tried to calm them down,” Epps told the FBI operator. “I tried to let them know that, you know, that this is not what we’re here for. We’re here because of the Constitution, not the police. Police are on our side.”
Nor did Epps mention getting on a bullhorn on Jan. 6 and encouraging people to go to the Capitol as soon as President Donald Trump was finished speaking. He would comment on those topics nearly two months later when interviewed by FBI agents.
On the January call, Epps insisted his presence on Capitol grounds was to de-escalate when things got violent.
“I am guilty of being there and probably trespassing,” he said. “But I had a reason. I was trying to calm ’em down. I wanted to be there, but I’m trying to calm ’em down. Anything I can do to help. There’s no call for that kind of behavior. I will be your witness.”
Ray Epps at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before pepper gas is shot into the crowd. “Been a long time,” he said. “Aah, I love it!” (Screen Capture/Rumble)
Epps told the agents he came to Washington to express his concerns about the 2020 presidential election. He said he received five ballots at his Queen Creek address: one each for him and his wife, and three with names he did not recognize.
“We’ve owned the property for 11 years now. I’ve never heard of those three people that came there. I didn’t recognize the names,” he said. “And then when the election went the way it did, I was a little concerned. I mean, how many apartments are there in Arizona, 3 million? And if they’re sending all these ballots to these different apartments. I mean, you know, that’s a concern.”
Epps said he also went to support Trump, although he did not stay at the Ellipse for all of Trump’s speech. He said he followed crowds that left the speech early and walked toward the Capitol.
“People started leaving early after President Trump started speaking. So they were running and it was the same people that was, ‘F Antifa,’ and this and that and the other,” Epps said.
“I believe, just my belief, they were Antifa, the ones that were saying that stuff,” he said. “And they were like running that way and I’m like, ‘Maybe I can calm this down.’ So I went with them.”
Epps said it was his original intention to stay for all of the speeches at the Ellipse.
“I planned on being and word was being passed around that right after he gets done speaking, we’re gonna go to the Capitol. And it was a given,” Epps said. “So spread the word spread the word. So I started spreading the word and I said that to a lot of people there: ‘We’re going to the Capitol right after the president speaks.’”
Perhaps the scene that drew the most attention and speculation about Epps on January 6 was when he appeared at the first breach point of police lines. Some 20 minutes before Trump finished speaking at the Ellipse, an aggressive crowd gathered at a lightly defended barrier on a sidewalk not far from the Peace Monument.
As rioters began yanking at the bicycle-rack barriers, Epps pulled Ryan Samsel back from the front line and spoke in his ear. Seconds after that exchange, Samsel and others knocked down the barrier, causing one officer to fall back and hit her head on the concrete.
“I walked up to him, and I put my arm on him and said, ‘Hey, that’s not why we’re here. Don’t be doing that,’ you know.
“I don’t know who he was. No clue,” Epps said. “I just tried to talk him out of doing what he was doing. And then all of a sudden, it blew up.”
When interviewed by an FBI special agent and a detective on Jan. 30, 2021, Samsel corroborated Epps’s description of their brief verbal exchange, according to a transcript of the session obtained by The Epoch Times. Samsel faces nearly a dozen January 6-related charges in U.S. District Court in Washington.
“Now that guy I talked to,” Samsel said, pointing to a photograph of Epps. “He came up to me and he says, ‘Dude,’ his exact words were, ‘Relax,’ he says, ‘The cops are doing their job.’ That’s exactly what he says to me right there in that picture.”
Inconsistencies in Interviews
Epps’s two interviews with the FBI included some inconsistencies and changed details, according to the recordings and FBI summary documents.
Epps told the FBI on Jan. 8 that his brother-in-law called him to notify him his picture was on the FBI’s January 6 website. During his March 3 interview with FBI agents, Epps said, “Someone contacted me and said, ‘Hey, your picture’s up.’”
When asked about his brother-in-law later in the interview, Epps said, “He didn’t call me, he called my sister.” Then his wife interjected, “That was me. And I can tell you exactly because he sent me a text, actually.”
When asked about who was with him on Jan. 5 and 6, Epps replied, “My son.” A short while later he said, “I think he had a friend there. He did have a friend there. I don’t know his name.”
One of the agents said he recalled that on the Jan. 8 phone call with the FBI, Epps said he went sightseeing on Jan. 7. “No, we did that the day before,” he told the agent. A few minutes later, however, this detail changed. “Oh, you know what? The next day we did, no, we got up that morning and we went to the Vietnam Memorial.”
In both contacts with the FBI, Epps asked if his photo could be removed from the FBI’s Jan. 6 page. In the Jan. 8 call, the FBI operator said she had nothing to do with FBI web content. In the March 3 interview, he was given a more discouraging take.
“That picture is probably still out there, will probably be there forever now,” one of the agents told him.
Epps said the notoriety of being publicly listed as a person of interest had caused problems.
“Well, we’ve felt the repercussions. I mean, we’ve had people come on our business site and try to destroy us,” he said. “I’m an insurrectionist, I’m a traitor. I’ve been called everything in the book, but it’s dying down now—I hope.”
The agents asked Epps if his views had changed since Jan. 6.
“I still have concerns about the election. I do. I mean, I think everybody does,” Epps said. “I think our politicians, some of them need to be in jail. I think you guys need to investigate them. I don’t know. How much of what we get is the truth? I don’t know. Not even worth watching the news anymore. Because they just make it up as they go.”
Epps met twice with the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 Select Committee, including a transcribed interview in January 2022. Committee members seemed satisfied with what Epps told them. No transcript of the session has been released.
“Mr. Epps informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency,” a spokesman said in January.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) grilled top FBI officials about Epps in a January hearing, but received a repeated refrain: “I can’t answer that.”
In a recent interview with The Epoch Times, Mark Sherwood, a naturopathic doctor and former 2022 candidate for governor of Oklahoma, said Americans need to focus more on the self-sovereignty of their health and free themselves from the corporate, government-influenced health sector.
“Sovereignty is the ability to self-govern,” said Sherwood, founder of the Functional Medical Institute in Oklahoma.
When people are self-governing, they don’t depend on the government, the pharmaceutical industry, or powerful churches to guide their lives, Sherwood said. They make their own money, take care of their own health and wellness, and care for their families.
“I want to see people begin to own that once again, because I think it’s probably the epitome of the American dream, but I also think it’s the epitome of humanity,” he said. “If we lose the ability to take care of ourselves … we’ve lost the ability to even self-govern, and therefore, we become governed and we lose our rights, and rights become privileges.”
Doctors in the mainstream medical system are trained to do the “bidding” of corporations to supply patients with drugs, Sherwood said, and when the U.S. government got involved and promoted the idea of a food pyramid, Sherwood said things became even worse.
“So Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Medicine got together,” he said. “I call it a marriage made in hell. ‘Food and Drug Administration.’ It doesn’t work.”
Rates of disease keep rising, and every year, 600,000 people die of heart disease and another 600,000 die from cancer, Sherwood said. Obesity has become the fastest-growing noncommunicable disease in history.
As of March 2020, 41.9 percent of American adults over the age of 20 were considered obese, according to the most recently available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These problems stem from a Western lifestyle based on Western medicine, which pushes the idea that if you get sick, a pill is the solution, Sherwood said.
“That’s not the way the body works,” he said.
Today, there are people who have no trust in the health care system anymore. Some people are scared to go to a hospital because of the distrust they have about doctors and hospitals, Sherwood said. This is due to the fact that the health system is “no longer about people.” Instead, it is all about profits, and a for-profit system is designed to do whatever it needs to make money, Sherwood said.
The media does not talk about diet, exercise, stress management, sleep, or other factors important to health. Instead of avoidance or reversal of disease processes, the media mostly talks about management of disease processes, Sherwood explained.
Correcting the Problem
To alter people’s reliance on the current health care system and improve their self-governance and health, Sherwood wants them to first understand that human beings “are not born with medication deficiencies.” People should not be dependent on medication to be their primary solution for health care.
Instead, people must realize how the body operates. Getting essential nutrients like minerals, vitamins, fatty acids, and amino acids from their diets and adding physical activity to their lives is crucial to maintaining their bodies, he explained.
Going to the doctor when someone gets sick should be a last resort, not the first resort, he said.
“When people understand that everything in earth, here, is for us to not only exist but to thrive—not survive, but to thrive—it’s here, right here,” he said. “If we can shift our thinking into that way, that’s the initial part of it.”
Heritage Foundation Oversight Project Director Mike Howell is demanding copies of all communications between the White House, Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI, and former President Donald Trump’s staff about the Aug. 8 FBI raid on the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
To that end, Howell—who is a veteran of major congressional oversight projects and a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which is the federal government’s central custodian of official documents, and each of the relevant agencies.
“The Biden Department of Justice has crossed the Rubicon. This raid showed that the administration is unafraid to weaponize the power of the deep state against its political enemies—even a former sitting president,” Howell said in a statement issued shortly after Attorney General Merrick Garland declined to answer any questions about the raid during a brief appearance in the DOJ media conference room on Aug. 11.
“We are filing this request because the American people deserve the answers Joe Biden and Merrick Garland will not give them. There is no reason NARA cannot fulfill our request for these documents, as they should have nothing to do with any ongoing investigation,” Howell continued.
Mike Howell, Senior Adviser for Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation. (Courtesy of Mike Howell)
“Ultimately, it looks like the Biden administration raided President Trump’s home over a document dispute—let’s see if they comply with our legal document demand, or if they’re complete hypocrites. Rest assured, we will fight to get the truth about this unprecedented act,” he added.
The Heritage Oversight Project requested that federal officials process the FOIAs on an expedited basis, which would allow 10 days before the agencies must either affirm or deny the requests, or face litigation.
The request to NARA was signed by Heritage’s Senior Investigative Counsel, Roman Jankowski, who is also a contributing writer for the conservative nonprofit’s Daily Signal.
“This raid, and what transpired before and after it, has affected American public confidence. As per the Trafalgar Group poll conducted after the Trump raid, 53.9 percent of likely general election voters believe Trump’s political enemies are behind the FBI raid on President Trump’s private home, and only 35.3 percent of likely general election voters believe it is due to an impartial justice system,” Jankowski said in the request.
Howell signed the lengthy, eight-page request to DOJ, which seeks all of the communications mentioning Trump since Jan. 20, 2021, between and among DOJ’s Office of the Attorney General, Office of the Deputy Attorney General, Office of the Associate Attorney General, Office of the Solicitor General, Office of Legal Counsel, Office of Legal Policy, Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and U.S. Marshals Service.
Heritage President Kevin Roberts issued a separate statement regarding the Mar-a-Lago raid in which he observed that it “represents yet another example of the federal government weaponizing law enforcement to punish political enemies, silence critics, and send a message to those whom it views as enemies. The Biden administration and the D.C. swamp are making it very clear that they will use all the power of the state to intimidate anyone who stands in their way.”
Roberts added that “the timing is suspect at best, given the upcoming elections and the Senate’s passage of a bill that would authorize the hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents, who will be unleashed to target working and middle-class Americans in order to fund the left’s radical agenda.”
Roberts’ comment may have been a product of the fact the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks were subjected to multiple time-consuming and costly IRS audits during the Clinton administration, none of which ever turned up any wrongdoing.
In a related development, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, similarly demanded in an Aug. 10 letter that NARA turn over all communications and documents concerning the raid. Comer was joined on the letter by the panel’s other 19 Republican members.
“Law enforcement raiding a former president’s residence is unprecedented. Committee Republicans are concerned that NARA would utilize the FBI to gather documents that the president, by the very nature of his constitutional role, could declassify himself, if this was indeed the case as media has reported. The Biden administration is continuing to weaponize the FBI against political rivals,” the Comer letter told NARA.
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said in an interview with CNN on Aug. 11 that he never witnessed “intentional destruction of important papers” during his time in office.
Mulvaney, who served the Trump administration for 15 months and has been a critic of former President Donald Trump since, told CNN’s “New Day” host Brianna Keilar, “I never saw the intentional destruction of documents for the purpose of keeping anything from the National Archives or the public in the future.”
According to Mulvaney, all White House staff were well aware of how to comply with paper destruction regulations.
“We knew the rules, we taped them back together, and we made copies. As long as copies are preserved, you can pretty much do whatever you want to with the other documents,” he said.
Grilled by Keilar if he had ever seen Trump rip documents, Mulvaney said he had, but asserted that documents were all handled “in the ordinary course of business.”
“The flushing,” the host said, referring to claims made by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. “You never heard about him flushing documents?”
“Not a single time,” he said.
Denied Report
Mulvaney’s account contradicts Haberman’s report claiming, “White House staffers regularly found ripped-up printing paper in the toilet of the presidential residence during Trump’s term in office.”
The statement came with a pair of photos from an anonymous source purporting to show notes written by Trump in a toilet allegedly at the White House.
Trump swiftly denied her account, calling it “another fake story” when it first emerged back in February.
“Also, another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” Trump said in an emailed statement to the New York Post.
Haberman doubled down on her claim in an interview with CNN on Aug. 8, the same day that the FBI conducted a search at Trump Mar a Lago residence and just ahead of the October publication of her book on Trump, “Confidence Man.”
Her account this time was again dismissed by a spokesman for the former president.
“You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan,” Taylor Budowich told Axios, referring to Haberman, adding that there are “enough people willing to fabricate stories like this in order to impress the media class—a media class who is willing to run with anything, as long as it’s anti-Trump.”
If you are white and believe in CRT, shouldn’t you kill yourself? [US Patriot]
Faculty at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law have created a database to identify and record efforts to block critical race theory (CRT) being taught in schools across the country.
The database, called the CRT Forward Tracking Project, allows users to “track attacks on critical race theory” and filter the information as part of an effort to “support anti-racist education, training and research,” according to the school.
The project was created by UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program, founded in 2000 as the first law school program in the nation dedicated to critical race theory.
CRT, according to the school, is “the study of systemic racism in law, policy and society,” and suggests efforts need to be made to fix these alleged injustices.
Parents concerned about Critical Race Theory took home these buttons from a school board activist training Jan. 19, 2022 in Sarasota, Florida. (Alexis Spiegelman)
Meanwhile, critics say CRT pushes a controversial worldview related to Marxism that analyzes all aspects of life through a racial lens instead of through the concept of class struggle.
UCLA Law announced earlier this month it would track anti-CRT activity through the database at all levels of government across the nation.
“The project was created to help people understand the breadth of the attacks on the ability to speak truthfully about race and racism through the campaigns against CRT,” said Taifha Natalee Alexander, project director of CRT Forward, in a statement.
The database analyzes these efforts to determine where the activity is happening and how opponents are taking action, such as protesting curriculum at the school board level.
It also includes the type of CRT content being restricted, such as a course being taught at a public school, as well as the institution or group being targeted and enforcement mechanisms being used to regulate the content.
For example, the Placentia-Yorba Linda School Board voted to ban the teaching of CRT in classrooms this past April, ending months of debate in the Orange County district.
Prior to the narrow 3-2 vote, supporters for the ban asserted CRT is a divisive ideology that pushes a political narrative. Other trustees at the April 5 school board meeting, however, claimed such efforts amounted to censorship, according to public comments.
The UCLA program claims that many of those who are against these concepts being taught in K-12 schools are using the term CRT “incorrectly,” and have “affected plans to include ethnic studies more broadly for students before they get to college.”
Chinese-American parents in California rally against Assembly Bill 101, which was later signed into law to make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement, in Los Angeles on April 26, 2020. (Linda Jiang/The Epoch Times)
In 2021, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation making ethnic studies a statewide requirement for high school graduation starting in the 2029–30 school year, amid debate among parents and teachers about whether ethnic studies curriculum includes elements of CRT.
Tracking Results
As of Aug. 2, the UCLA database has screened nearly 24,000 media articles and identified 479 instances of anti-CRT activity since August 2021.
The database team found this activity is “much more pervasive and extensive than generally reported,” according to the school, with such policies either proposed or enacted in 49 states.
The project also found that most anti-CRT proposals have occurred in Florida, Virginia, Missouri, and the U.S. Congress, while local school board measures make up more than 20 percent of the activity in the database.
Signs against critical race theory in front of the Loudoun County School Administration building in Virginia on Nov. 9, 2021. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
Most such measures at the school board level have been introduced in California, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, with Californians enacting five out of the eight proposed measures.
The study also found the most common anti-CRT enforcement measures include withholding funding or issuing fines against individual teachers, administrators, schools, and districts for engaging in “prohibited conduct,” the school says.
CRT Controversy
Noah Zatz, faculty director of the UCLA Law’s Critical Race Studies Program, is helping to spearhead the tracking project. CRT Forward staff also include law librarians and undergraduate and law school research assistants.
“We need critical race theory to understand this assault on racial justice, where even naming structural racism gets portrayed as unfair to white people. And we need CRT to develop legal theories of education and free speech that not only blunt these attacks but place anti-racism at the center of a democratic society,” said Zatz in a statement.
However, opponents contend that CRT is not needed and does not teach hard history, but is instead an approach to analyzing that history with the intent to dismantle modern systems that proponents claim are white supremacist.
A man holds up a sign against Critical Race Theory during a protest outside a Washoe County School District board meeting in Reno, Nev., on May 25, 2021. (Andy Barron/Reno Gazette-Journal via AP)
“Those that are upset about proposed bans on CRT in our schools have been misled to think that states that have banned CRT from being taught will no longer teach about Jim Crow Laws, the displacement of Native Americans, or even slavery in America. This is simply not true,” according to a CRT guide written by former California teacher Kali Fontanilla. “On the contrary, banning CRT will remove a dangerous twisting and rewriting of American history.”
The UCLA project is funded by a $400,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation, a private, Indianapolis-based foundation with about $1.4 billion in assets, according to the nonprofit’s website.
NO ONE IN THE BIG PHARMA-SPONSORED MEDIA SEEMS TO HAVE PICKED UP ON THIS. STRANGE, HUH?
Former White House coronavirus task force spokesman Ambassador Deborah Birx has effectively laid blame for thousands of deaths at the door of big pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna, claiming their refusal to pursue a “compassionate use authorization” for the COVID-19 vaccines led to a delay which directly impacted nursing home residents, The National Pulse can reveal.
The details come in the final parts of Birx’s little read book – Silent Invasion – wherein she details how she used “subterfuge” to get around the will of the Trump administration, as well as naming Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence as her “go to” people in the government.
In Chapter 19, entitled “Winter Is Here,” Birx turns her guns on the same pharmaceutical companies she and her colleague Anthony Fauci promoted and protected during the COVID-19 outbreak. Specifically, she points out the corporates who were shielded by government from liability failed to get vital doses of their vaccines into the arms of those who needed it earliest: the elderly:
“Getting as many people inoculated as quickly and equitably as possible remained one of my priorities. In addition to “emergency use authorization,” or EUA, the FDA also has the authority to allow the use of therapeutics and vaccines (and the use of experimental drugs to people outside clinical trials) under what’s called “compassionate use authorization,” or CUA. Lacking the holy grail of emergency use authorization (which was pending), I continued to try to find a way to get the highest-risk group immunized as quickly as possible. In early November, I asked Tony and Steve to approach Moderna and Pfizer and urge them to apply for CUA while their vaccines’ efficacy was still being determined but safety was fairly clear. With a CUA in hand, we could inoculate any nursing home residents who wished to be. Whether they volunteered for the jabs or not, at least they’d have the option.”
But as many continued to die, her wishes were not carried through, she explains:
“We had a narrow window, and it was closing. Fifteen hundred nursing home residents died in the first week of October. The vaccine manufacturers, I learned, had already stockpiled three million doses. If we could draw from that supply through CUA, thousands of lives could be saved.
“This didn’t happen. Pfizer and Moderna declined to pursue compassionate use authorization. They believed the process would be a distraction. Their eyes were fixed on the EUA, another complicated process; taking on both simply wasn’t possible.
“I believed it was—it just wasn’t part of the plan these manufacturers had envisioned.”
Birx then goes on to detail the number of people that were affected by the major corporations’ refusal to pursue a faster route to market. At the time, many suspected they were refusing to do so because such speed would give President Trump an ostensible boost right before the U.S. presidential election.
“Take a moment to imagine that they did apply for compassionate use. And imagine that 1.5 million of the 3 million stockpiled doses went to nursing homes in November, and another 1.5 million at the end of November, for a second dose. If this had happened, the nursing home residents would have been fully protected in December, at the start of the surge, and not, as it turned out, as late as February, after the surge. An additional six-thousand-plus nursing home residents died in mid-December. They all could have been fully immunized and protected before this happened and we could have saved thousands of lives. If this had been done, literally thousands of lives could have been saved. Great good could have been done, and at low risk to these vulnerable people. In a pandemic, you need to innovate on the fly in response to the reality of the moment and not be locked into a rigid plan.”
Birx’s theory rests on the efficacy of the vaccines, however. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines were altered this past week to remove the distinctions between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Regardless of the “science” today, the United States continues to restrict foreign travelers into the country who are not vaccinated, unless they come in illegally through America’s porous southern border.
The protocols require ‘mind-blowing cognitive dissonance’
Nurses who witnessed “brutal” hospital COVID-19 treatment protocols kill patients paint a bleak picture of what is taking place in state and federally funded health care systems.
“They’re horrific, and they’re all in lockstep,” Staci Kay, a nurse practitioner with the North Carolina Physicians for Freedom who left the hospital system to start her own early treatment private practice, told The Epoch Times. “They will not consider protocols outside of what’s given to them by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the NIH (National Institute of Health). And nobody is asking why.”
Fueled by cognitive dissonance amid an array of red flags, Kay said hospital staff is ignoring blatantly problematic treatments that performed poorly in clinical trials, such as remdesivir, and protocols such as keeping the patient isolated, just to adhere to the federal canon.
“I’ve seen people die with their family watching via iPad on Facetime,” Kay said. “It was brutal.”
As a former nurse in intensive care, Kay said she had seen her share of tragedy, but how she saw COVID patients being treated “had me waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with chest pains.”
“I hated my job,” Kay said. “I hated going to work. I was stressed in a way I’ve never been before in my entire life.”
Keeping families isolated was especially difficult, she said, because people couldn’t come to say goodbye to their loved ones.
‘We Can Do Better’
Kay was looking for other options when she found an inpatient protocol designed Dr. Paul Marik, founding member of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which purported to have a 94 percent success rate.
However, after Kay pitched it to the head of the pulmonary critical care department, she was dismissed, and the physician boasted that the hospital had a 66 percent survival rate at the time.
“I told him, ‘I feel like we can do better,’ but I was very quickly shut down,” Kay said. “I became very angry because I’m watching people die and I knew we could have been doing better.”
It was as if formerly smart people had become brainwashed, “and then just dumb,” Kay said, lacking the mental wherewithal to discern true from false.
This led Kay to begin treating patients in the outpatient setting to prevent their admission into the hospital system, which is now her full-time job after being fired for not submitting to what she described as illogical testing requirements for those who weren’t vaccinated.
At her telemedicine business, Kay said she’s seeing multiple cases of people suffering from COVID-19 vaccine injuries.
“I saw things on the inpatient side, too, that I suspected were vaccine injuries that went unacknowledged by our physicians,” Kay said. “I saw brain bleeds, seizures out of nowhere, cancer that just spread like wildfire, ischemic strokes, and I saw one person die horrifically from myocarditis.”
On the outpatient side, she said she’s seen conditions resulting from the COVID-19 vaccine such as brain fog, cognitive decline, joint pain, gastrointestinal dysfunctions, and neuropathy, which is numbness and tingling in hands, feet, and extremities.
‘The Old School Becomes The New School’
Kay’s business, Sophelina Counseling, provides telemedicine, mobile urgent care, and mobile IV therapies. It’s independent of corporate, federal, and state control, which she said is a solution to a health care system paralyzed with oppressive requirements.
“As long as there’s corporate control over medicine, whether it’s Medicare or private insurance companies, you’re always going to have providers who are forced, pressured, and coerced to do things that they wouldn’t normally do,” she said. “Physicians don’t have the treatment they used to have.”
Because of this corporate control, Kay said the list of boxes they must check takes time away from the actual patient.
“Getting away from this corporate structure is going to be a game changer,” she said.
Kay advocated for returning to the “old school” way, which is the direct, primary care model, in which the patient pays a monthly or annual fee to have access to the provider without the interference of a traditional insurance company that requires “too many hoops to jump through, headaches, and checkboxes.”
Kay points to a health care model called GoldCare, designed by Dr. Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors.
Gold, who was sentenced to two months in prison for her alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol, created GoldCare as a private membership association (PMA).
Because much of what insurance companies do revolves around potential lawsuits, to be a member of the PMA, one must sign a clause, agreeing that they won’t sue.
“What that does for us is we don’t have to order unnecessary testing or consults just to cover our back end because that’s most of what corporate medicine does,” she said.
As a result, Kay said, both the patient and the physician are happier because the treatment process hasn’t been weighted down with bloated insurance requirements.
For Kay, this model—an evocation of a simpler time in medical care when doctors were more connected with their patients—is key.
“The old school is going to have to become the new school,” Kay said.
NIH and the CDC did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment on COVID-19 treatment protocols.
Boycotting the System
Having taken salmon, eggs, and honey for payment, a nurse in Washington state who wished to remain anonymous shares Kay’s more traditional vision for the future of health care.
She told The Epoch Times that people “need to boycott their health insurance.”
“I think people who don’t need surgery to save their life should not go to the hospital,” the nurse said. “I think people need to find doctors who are private pay and pay for only what they need to be done.”
The federal government must be removed from the health care equation, she added.
“I especially don’t think any children should be going to these practitioners who are accepting state funding or Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements,” the nurse said
The nurse requested anonymity because—in addition to being unvaccinated—in Washington and Oregon state, she said the government has made it possible for the public to submit anonymous complaints, “devoid of evidence,” against health care workers who promote treatments that deviate from the official protocols.
After the nurse was fired for not complying with the vaccine mandate, she started her own private care business that offers monoclonal antibodies, L-lysine and vitamin C infusions, infrared red light therapy, and nebulizer machines as treatments as needed and when indicated.
‘Widespread Data Suppression’
With her newly launched business, she performed the early interventions that she said hospitals should be doing, “but refuse to do because they say there’s no evidence for it.”
The nurse works with a growing network of physicians and providers that function as a “total parallel society” existing in the shadows beside the “crooked” health care system, she said.
In the aftermath of the public vaccine campaign in her community, the nurse said she saw an increase in strokes and embolization procedures as doctors engaged in “widespread data suppression,” such as not reporting to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System what she saw as vaccine injuries and deaths and recording non-COVID deaths to be caused by COVID.
Even before the CDC had modified its definition of the unvaccinated, the hospital system was reclassifying patients who had only received one vaccine as unvaccinated, she said.
“The worst part of it was when the pulmonologists decided that unvaccinated patients would get seven days on the ventilator, then they would tell the families that nothing more could be done,” she said. “They would then terminally extubate these patients even when more could have been done.”
The nurse personally witnessed this, she said, with a 33-year-old mother of two children.
“She had been on ivermectin at home and was viewed as an anti-vax conspiracy theorist,” the nurse said.
Before the mother was terminally extubated and her status changed to “comfort care,” the nurse said she argued with hospital administrators for 12 hours.
She had asked the pulmonologist to consider running more tests, she said.
“It had been over a week since the last D-dimer, and this would have indicated whether fibrin in the bloodstream was increasing or decreasing,” the nurse explained. “The usual process with a known pulmonary embolism was to check every three days. There were more anticoagulant drugs and routes of administration that could have been utilized. Intravenous heparin is reversible. If they were willing to withdraw life support, why were they not willing to try something that could clear a circulatory impairment?”
In the end, the hospital won, she said.
“The mother died gasping for air while my hand was on her back,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. I went to my manager and asked for an audit to be done on our coagulation times and pulmonary embolism treatment protocols. That got me booted from the ICU until I was fired.”
The nurse said she observed administrators repeatedly promoting the safety of the vaccine, though these claims weren’t reflecting what they were seeing with the growing cases of vaccine injuries.
Though there was some staff who saw the truth but ignored it to keep their jobs, there were many whom she observed—just as Kay reported—who exhibited “mind-blowing cognitive dissonance.”
“They received the vaccines themselves, and if they were to ever confront the possibility that they willingly became the hands of a truly evil agenda, I don’t think they could live with themselves,” the nurse said. “I used to consider my co-workers as people with whom I’d trust my life, but after they got that second dose of the vaccine, it was like they had a hive mind bent on hatred. It’s very eerie to say that out loud.”
A former director of national intelligence said Aug. 12 that it is “virtually impossible” to prosecute people for mishandling classified documents, and asserted that former President Donald Trump has the “ultimately declassification authority” in terms of such documents.
“The president does have ultimate declassification authority. He can literally declassify—and President Trump had that authority, and could declassify anything you want while he was president,” John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman before Trump appointed him to be director of national intelligence, said on Fox News.
According to documents unsealed earlier Friday, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was raided by FBI agents on Aug. 8 because of potential violations of several laws, including the Espionage Act, which some legal experts say relates to possessing classified defense information.
An inventory showed that agents seized what they listed as classified, secret, and top secret documents.
Ratcliffe said on Fox that before the search warrant materials were made public, he didn’t believe the raid was about classified materials.
“It has to be more than that because the Department of Justice and the FBI have already set a standard that makes it virtually impossible to prosecute a case like that,” he said, pointing to how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s possession of classified documents was handled by the FBI, including then-Director James Comey.
“As people talk about Espionage Act and classified documents and all of that, the standard was set in 2016. Remember the Department of Justice and the FBI took the official position that Hillary Clinton, who was in possession of classified documents … that [being] in possession of that, that wasn’t enough, and that being grossly negligent and being careless, Jim Comey told us, that’s not enough under the Espionage Act. You have to know you’re violating the law,” Ratcliffe said.
“Even if you assume the worst case scenario for President Trump, that there were classified documents in his possession at Mar-a-Lago, that only puts him where Hillary Clinton was. And what the FBI and the Department of Justice would have to show is that he knew the documents were there and he didn’t think they were declassified,” he added.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that all the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were declassified.
“He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken into the residence were deemed to be declassified,” a Trump spokesperson told Just the News. “The power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the President of the United States. The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat, with classification authority delegated BY THE PRESIDENT, needs to approve of declassification is absurd.”
Others weren’t sure.
“He can’t just wave a wand and say it’s declassified,” Immerman said. “There has to be a formal process. That’s the only way the system can work,” Richard Immerman, an assistant deputy director of national intelligence during the Obama administration, told NBC News. “I’ve seen thousands of declassified documents. They’re all marked ‘declassified’ with the date they were declassified.”
Retired Major General Paul Vallely reacted to the recent FBI raid on former president Donald Trump’s residence, claiming that there is a socialist-communist coalition involved with the act.
He believes that there is a “socialist coalition” that aspires to “overthrow” the U.S. constitutional republic and transform it into a totalitarian communist state.
“The American Republic founded in 1776 is under attack by a Socialist-Communist Coalition and an out-of-control Federal Government,” Vallely said in a statement he sent to The Epoch Times.
The retired major general thinks the raid violates the Fourth Amendment, a right given to the U.S. citizenry granting protection from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
“This cabal has illegitimately exercised their power in attacking the private residence of President Donald J. Trump and his personal residence in Mar a Lago, Florida,” Vallely said.
Secret Service personnel are seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. on Aug. 8, 2022. The FBI raided the home reportedly to retrieve classified White House documents. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland vocalized the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) first public statement about the FBI raid that targeted Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this week.
“I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter … the Department does not take such a decision lightly,” Garland said.
Garland further said that his agency filed a motion to unseal the court-approved search warrant.
“The weaponization of government power has become clear,” Vallely noted. “The abuse of such powers to interfere with future elections cannot be ruled out as this action suggests there are no limits to their abuse of authority to retain power.”
U.S. Army Major General Paul E. Vallely (Ret.) (Courtesy of Paul E. Vallely)
On Wednesday, Trump suggested that the FBI could have planted evidence during the raid at his residence since members of his team were blocked from watching the agents’ actions.
“History is repeating itself as we see the tactics of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) used by a few dystopian tyrants who have methodically and comprehensively infiltrated and assumed leadership of the Democratic Party,” Vallely said.
In addition, Vallely, who has been calling out “wokeism” in the military academies, thinks that Trump’s political rivals are trying to take him out with “selective enforcement of provisions that are normally overseen in a civil, not criminal manner.”
“Where have we seen that before? None of this is a coincidence, and none of it is justified. Even if Trump was in possession of some documents that needed to be archived, that is the kind of thing that has historically been dealt with in court, not with an FBI raid, and the former president was fully cooperating to this point,” Vallely stated.
Upon request for comment, the FBI referred to The Epoch Times to the following statement by the bureau’s director Christopher Wray: “Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others. Violence and threats against law enforcement, including the FBI, are dangerous and should be deeply concerning to all Americans. Every day I see the men and women of the FBI doing their jobs professionally and with rigor, objectivity, and a fierce commitment to our mission of protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution. I am proud to serve alongside them.”
The new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 guidance is the agency acknowledging it was wrong in the past to downplay natural immunity and promote unprecedented policies like asymptomatic testing, a California epidemiologist says.
The new guidance, released on Aug. 11, rescinds and alters a number of key recommendations, including treating unvaccinated and vaccinated people differently for many purposes, explicitly stating that people with previous infection have protection against severe illness, and removing six-foot social distancing advice.
“The CDC is admitting it was wrong here, although they won’t put it in those words,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, told The Epoch Times.
“What they’ll say is that, well, ‘the population is more immunized now, has more natural immunity now, and now is the time—the science has changed.’”
But a large percentage of the U.S. population has had natural immunity, or protection from prior infection, Bhattacharya noted, while over 80 percent of the elderly population had protection from severe disease from COVID-19 vaccines, previous infection, or both, since 2021.
“This is two years too late, but it’s a good step,” Bhattacharya added.
CDC Statement
The CDC, which did not respond to a request for comment, portrayed the change as streamlining previous guidance, with the adjustments stemming from more people being vaccinated and more COVID-19 treatments available.
“We’re in a stronger place today as a nation, with more tools—like vaccination, boosters, and treatments—to protect ourselves, and our communities, from severe illness from COVID-19,” Greta Massetti, the CDC author of the new guidance, said in a statement. “We also have a better understanding of how to protect people from being exposed to the virus, like wearing high-quality masks, testing, and improved ventilation. This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives.”
Dr. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general during the Trump administration, echoed the line of thinking.
“The fact that @CDCgov is changing guidance shouldn’t be taken as proof that they were necessarily ‘wrong,’ on a particular issue. The virus has changed, our tools and immunity have changed, and our knowledge has changed. So too must our guidance. That’s how science works,” Adams wrote on Twitter.
Vaccination numbers have fallen off in recent months, with little change among adults and little update among children, even after the vaccines were authorized and recommended for kids as young as 6 months old.
No new treatments have been authorized since December 2021, and a number of the treatments have been shown as less effective against newer strains of the virus that causes COVID-19, as have the vaccines and, in some cases, natural immunity.
Nearly half of the 20 papers and briefs cited by the CDC in support of the adjusted guidance were published in 2020 or 2021, while a number of others were released in early 2022.
No Mandates Rescinded Yet
Among the most significant changes in the guidance: a rollback of recommendations for asymptomatic testing for individuals exposed to COVID-19, loosening guidance related to tracing contacts of COVID-19 cases, and ending quarantine recommendations for people exposed to a positive case.
Some rules are stricter for high-risk settings such as nursing homes.
Masking is also recommended for 10 days for people who were exposed to COVID-19, including when a person is at home around others.
Bhattacharya, who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, a document that called for focused protection on the elderly and fewer restrictions on others, said that the guidance is closely aligned with the principles outlined in the declaration.
Based on the new guidance, the CDC should immediately rescind the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for foreign travelers entering The United States, a policy imposed in November 2021, the professor added.
The CDC’s webpage describing the mandate says that the agency “is reviewing this page to align with updated guidance.” The U.S. government has not adjusted or rescinded any of its vaccine mandates since the guidance was changed.
Trump lawyer refutes claims of an informant, says ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’
Former White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said that someone close to President Donald Trump may have tipped off the FBI before its raid Monday.
When asked by a CNN reporter Thursday about whether a person in “Trump’s orbit” tipped off the FBI and knew where documents at Mar-a-Lago were, Mulvaney said that person would have been “really close” to the former president.
“I didn’t even know there was a safe at Mar-a-Lago, and I was the chief of staff for 15 months. This would be someone who was handling things on day to day, who knew where documents were, so it would be somebody very close to the president,” he claimed.
“My guess is there is probably six or eight people who had that kind of information. I don’t know the people on the inside circle these days, so I can’t give any names of folks who come to mind, but your instinct, I think, is a good one. If you know where the safe is, and you know the documents are in 10 boxes in the basement, you’re pretty close to the president.”
No Confirmation of Informant
The Epoch Times has contacted several Trump spokespeople for comment. Neither Trump, his lawyers, nor members of his family have publicly commented on whether they believe an FBI informant tipped off the raid.
A lawyer for Trump, Christina Bobb, told Fox News on Thursday that left-wing legacy media outlets are trying to “sow division” with the former president’s camp about an informant. Bobb said that regarding an informant, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
After serving as Trump’s chief of staff, Mulvaney was appointed to a position as special envoy to Northern Ireland after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. Mulvaney resigned from that position on Jan. 6 and has often criticized Trump.
In early 2022, Mulvaney was hired by CBS News as a political pundit and has been increasingly critical of the former president. Mulvaney in late June told the outlet to “count me among one of the Republicans who hopes [Trump is] not the nominee at this point.”
The former president confirmed the FBI Mar-a-Lago raid on Monday evening, accusing the Biden administration and Department of Justice of being politically motivated.
Since then, the FBI and Justice Department have issued no public comments on the search until Attorney General Merrick Garland’s press conference on Thursday afternoon. The attorney general confirmed that he “personally approved” the FBI raid and said his agency is filing a motion to unseal a warrant that was used to search the former president’s property.
“I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter … the Department does not take such a decision lightly,” Garland said.
Salman Rushdie, the award-winning author whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses earned him a fatwa from Iran, was attacked on stage Friday just before beginning a lecture in New York.
Rushdie was apparently stabbed in the neck by a man who rushed the stage as the author took the podium at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, the Associated Press reports. The man stabbed Rushdie 10 to 15 times before he was detained. Rushdie fell to the ground and was airlifted to a hospital, where his condition is uknown.
The attack comes more than 30 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on “all brave Muslims of the world” to kill Rushdie, as well as his authors and publishers, “without delay.” Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, slammed The Satanic Verses as “against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qu’ran,” and noted that Rushdie’s assassination was necessary to ensure “no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth.”
Khomeini’s fatwa claims “whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.” Rushdie’s head also carries a $3 million bounty in Iran.
The Satanic Verses is a sprawling work that consists in part of a fictionalized narrative of the founding of Islam by the Prophet Mohammad. In the book, Rushdie refers to Mohammad as “Mahound,” reportedly a derogatory term for the prophet used by Medieval Christians. The book’s title comes from a scene in which Mahound rejects his earlier revelation permitting polytheistic worship as the work of the Devil.
Some Muslims objected to The Satanic Verses before Khomeini’s fatwa. Several countries banned the book, and critics held book burnings around the world.
Rushdie was defiant when asked about the backlash to The Satanic Verses in a 1989 television interview.
“Frankly I wish I had written a more critical book,” the author said, adding that “religious leaders who are able to behave like this, and then say this is a religion which must be above any kind of whisper of criticism, that doesn’t add up.”
Khomeini’s February 1989 fatwa led to a barrage of death threats and drove Rushdie into hiding under British government protection. The author reentered public life nine years later, and went on to marry model and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi.
Elizabeth Warren slams disgusting misogyny of Democratic voters
I could mine the finest minerals, Conferrin’ with my generals, A closet bolshevik; The rubes would all respect me In four years they’d reelect me If I only had a dick.
I’d be more than just a token Of misogyny unspoken, The carrot and the stick; I would dance and be merry I’d be scrappy, I’d be scary, If I only had a dick.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) would probably have won the 2020 Democratic primary—and presumably the general election as well—if Democratic voters weren’t a bunch of disgusting misogynists, the failed candidate told an NBC News correspondent following her third-place finish in the Iowa caucus.
“Everyone comes up to me and says, ‘I would vote for you, if you had a penis,'” Warren vented to Ali Vitali, who recounts the previously unreported conversation in her forthcoming book, Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet.
That is a rather stunning attack on the integrity of Democratic primary voters, but it’s not the first time a candidate has blamed sexist Democrats for their failure to win an election. Hillary Clinton argued that “misogyny and sexism” were “contributing factors” in her humiliating defeat to Donald Trump. She has also claimed (without evidence) that Russian hackers rigged the 2016 election.
Yet even Hillary, widely viewed as one of the most corrupt and dishonest politicians of her generation, would never claim that “everyone” wanted to vote for her but couldn’t because she was a woman. Warren also has a long history of distorting the truth for political gain. Most notably, she lied about being Native American. (That’s why many people still refer to her as “Pocahontas.”) Warren also claimed she was fired as a public school teacher for being pregnant, a story contradicted by county records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The excerpt from Vitali’s book, published by POLITICO, also included a quote that perfectly illustrated the mindset of Warren supporters. Vitali recounts a pre-caucus event in Cedar Rapids where “a white man with graying hair” walked up to the microphone and asked the following question: “How do you convince white men—who aren’t as smart as me—how do you convince those white men over 50 that Elizabeth Warren’s the candidate?”
As it turns out, the Democrats who voted for Warren were overwhelmingly white and members of the overeducated professional class who tend to view themselves as morally and intellectually superior compared with the unwashed masses. They loved Warren because she reminded them of themselves and were “somewhat baffled” that most Democrats did not share their affection for the former Harvard professor. She won just 5 percent of black voters in the South Carolina primary, where she performed best among “very liberal” voters aged 30-44 who never attend religious services.
Penis or not, Elizabeth Warren will never be president.
More than a third of Americans have drawn on their savings accounts to handle rising prices, taking out hundreds of dollars on average, according to a recent survey by New York Life Insurance Company.
Since January, 36 percent of Americans have drawn an average of $617 from their savings to pay their bills, the company found. Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed expressed anxiety that a recession is approaching, and roughly a third reported being “uncertain” or “anxious” about their personal finances. Respondents cited monthly bills, health care costs, grocery prices, and gas prices as their areas of greatest financial concern.
Voters overwhelmingly blame Joe Biden for the state of the economy. Sixty-four percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Democrats, believe the president’s policy decisions are to blame for soaring costs. While White House officials boasted this week about slowing inflation, prices are still up 8.5 percent from last year, with that number even higher in several key swing states.
Americans are not replenishing their savings accounts as they drain them. The personal savings rate, or the proportion of income people don’t spend or lose to taxes, more than halved between July 2021 and June 2022, falling from 10.5 percent to 5.1 percent.
To make up for tightening purse strings, Americans are increasingly turning to debt. Americans’ collective credit card debt jumped to $890 billion last quarter, marking the largest yearly increase in two decades. The number of credit cards also hit an all-time high in the second quarter, with more than 500 million in circulation.
Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman’s (D.) campaign for Senate is tapping a far-left activist who has called allowing children to undergo surgical gender transitions a matter of “human rights.”
The Fetterman campaign launched Real Doctors Against Oz Wednesday, an initiative meant to discredit Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate. Val Arkoosh is among the activists taking shots at Oz. Arkoosh, a failed Senate candidate, has a history of pushing gender theory. When she was still a candidate for Senate, Arkoosh sent out an email calling a parent’s right to refuse “gender affirming care” for their children a “gross violation of both human rights and the relationship between a patient and their doctor.” She also falsely claims that it’s legal to discriminate against transgender individuals in employment.
Sixty percent of Americans believe that a person cannot change their gender and a plurality of Americans oppose giving hormone blockers to children. Democratic opposition to parental rights has not worked out well for the party in past elections. Many pundits attribute Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s (R.) upset victory in November 2021 to his focus on expanding parental rights.
Real Doctors Against Oz are criticizing Oz for having ties to the pharmaceutical industry, being pro-life, and promoting supplements during his time as a television host. Oz, meanwhile, is attacking Fetterman for avoiding Pennsylvania voters by running a “John Fetterman Basement Tracker” cataloging the amount of time since his last public event.
Despite the implication of the name of Fetterman’s group, Oz is a real doctor. He graduated from an Ivy League medical school and was later a professor of surgery at Columbia University, where he won a research award.
Disgraced CNN journalist throws in the towel after 20 years
Jeffrey Toobin, the disgraced legal analyst who lost his job at the New Yorker (but kept his post at CNN) for masturbating in front of colleagues during a Zoom call, is leaving the network after 20 years. Toobin announced his departure on Twitter, noting that he would not return to CNN following his “vacation” and implying the decision was his alone.
“Was great to spend my last day on air with pals Wolf [Blitzer], Anderson [Cooper] and Don [Lemon],” Toobin wrote. “Love all my former colleagues. Watch for my next book, about the Oklahoma City bombing, coming in 2023 from @simonandschuster.”
The New Yorker gave Toobin the pink slip in November 2020 following the masturbation incident. The publication said its decision was based on a desire to foster “an environment where everyone feels respected and upholds our standards of conduct.” CNN felt otherwise, allowing the legal analyst to take “time off while he deals with a personal issue.” The network welcomed him back on the air in June 2021. “I didn’t think other people could see [the masturbating],” he explained.
Apart from the outrageous episode of indecent exposure, Toobin is best known for attempting to bribe his much younger mistress — who was also his co-worker’s daughter — to get an abortion in 2008. The journalist reportedly told the woman, Casey Greenfield, that he was “going leave his wife for her.” Upon learning she was pregnant, however, Toobin “questioned the paternity, balked at submitting to a test, and vowed to take no responsibility for a baby he wasn’t sure was his.”
A Congressional Budget Office report found that the Internal Revenue Service will collect billions of dollars from auditing low- and middle-income Americans under the White House-backed “Inflation Reduction Act,” contradicting Biden administration claims, according to Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee.
Fox News confirmed the report, finding the CBO informed congressional Republicans that, under the act, audits of taxpayers making under $400,000 will account for about $20 billion in additional revenue.
The news comes after high-ranking Biden administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, assured Americans that the IRS would not increase audits of people earning under $400,000. The Inflation Reduction Act, which on Sunday passed the Senate, allows the IRS to hire up to 87,000 new agents, making it larger than the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and the Border Control combined. Democrats shut down an amendment that would have prevented agents from increasing audits on middle- and low-income Americans.
The bill is expected to pass the House on Friday.
News of the CBO report also comes as the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business found the bill will have an “impact on inflation [that] is statistically indistinguishable from zero” even as it raises taxes on Americans and decreases GDP for the next decade.
Republican lawmakers have pushed back against the bill, with Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) saying that “only the Democrats would call a bill that doubles the size of the IRS, raises taxes, and spends billions on a green energy slush fund the ‘Inflation Reduction Act.'”
WARNING: Disturbing content. Viewer discretion is advised.
The Oxford English dictionary defines meme as “a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users.” Depending on how rotten your brain is from prolonged exposure to social media, you may or may not be aware that we are in the midst of a “meme war” that will ultimately determine the fate of American democracy.
One of the most significant new developments in this raging conflict is the emergence of the “Dark Brandon” meme, which portrays Joe Biden as a laser-eyed Machiavellian overlord skilled in the art of four-dimensional political chess. It also seeks to expropriate the “Brandon” moniker from Biden’s critics, who embraced the phrase “Let’s Go, Brandon!” in 2021 after a filthy NASCAR journalist falsely claimed that fans at Talladega were chanting in support of winning driver Brandon Brown. (Fact Check: They were chanting, “F— Joe Biden!”)
In any event, the Washington Free Beacon has exclusively obtained a number of avant-garde “Dark Brandon” memes created with the help of cutting edge artificial intelligence technology. Bear in mind: The mainstream media does not want you, the American people, to see these humorous images. Enjoy!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revised its COVID-19 guidance on Aug. 11, stating that the United States should move away from quarantines and social distancing and focus on treating severe disease caused by the virus.
New guidelines from the federal agency no longer recommend staying at least six feet away from other people to reduce exposure. The six-foot social distancing recommendation had been intact since early 2020, although some public health officials have raised questions about whether the measure is actually effective.
In another major change, the agency stated that it’s no longer recommending unvaccinated people to quarantine after exposure. Unvaccinated people who have been in close contact with an infected person aren’t advised to go through a five-day quarantine period if they haven’t tested positive or shown symptoms, according to the revised guidelines.
“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection,” the CDC stated.
Regardless of vaccination status, according to the CDC, “you should isolate from others when you have COVID-19” or are “sick and suspect that you have COVID-19 but do not yet have test results.” Previously, the CDC said fully vaccinated people who were exposed could skip the quarantine period.
“The current conditions of this pandemic are very different from those of the last two years,” Greta Massetti, a senior epidemiologist with the CDC, told media outlets on on Aug. 11. “High levels of population immunity due to vaccination and previous infection and the many available tools to protect the general population and protect people at higher risk allow us to focus on protecting people from serious illness from COVID.”
Testing to screen for COVID-19 won’t be recommended by the CDC in most places for individuals who don’t have COVID-19 symptoms, according to the new guidelines. Contact tracing should be relegated to hospitals and high-risk situations, such as nursing homes, the agency stated, while it placed less emphasis on screening for COVID-19 other than places such as prisons and nursing homes.
The CDC is now recommending that people “wear a high-quality mask for 10 days and get tested on day five” after exposure to the virus regardless of vaccination or prior infection. If one is sick, they should stay away from individuals such as elderly people or those who are also likely to develop severe symptoms from the virus
“When considering whether and where to implement screening testing of asymptomatic people with no known exposure, public health officials might consider prioritizing high-risk congregate settings, such as long-term care facilities, homeless shelters, and correctional facilities, and workplace settings that include congregate housing with limited access to medical care,” the CDC wrote in its report explaining the changes.
Judicial Watch is suing the U.S. Department of Justice in federal court to release records ordered declassified and released by President Trump the day before he left office.
Despite Trump’s order, Justice Department officials are not releasing the records.
The ordered-declassified records relate to “Crossfire Hurricane,” a Justice Department operation against President Trump, his 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates that falsely accused the Trump campaign of “colluding” with Russian government agents to influence the results of the 2016 presidential election. (RELATED: Leading Republicans Reveal What Durham’s Up Against)
“The Obama-Biden Administration and Deep State spying on Trump and his associates is the worst government corruption scandal in American history,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And to make matters worse, the Biden DOJ simply refuses to release smoking gun documents about this corruption that the American people have an absolute right to see!”
JW notes a “Just the News report details that the documents include ‘transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.’”
The lawsuit was filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a February 17, 2022, FOIA request for:
All records regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation that were provided to the White House by the Department of Justice on or about December 30, 2020. For purposes of clarification, the records sought are those described in a January 19, 2021 Presidential Memorandum (see https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/ ).
All records of communication between any official or employee of the Department of Justice and any official or employee of any other branch, department, agency, or office of the federal government regarding the declassification and release of the records described in part one of this request.
Trump’s memo authorized the declassification and release of the records:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:
Section 1. Declassification and Release. At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.
I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure. I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.
I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.
My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White House in accordance with applicable law.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Dr. Anthony Fauci this week urged people to vote out members of Congress who are spreading “total lies” about COVID-19, but made a false claim himself about COVID-19 vaccines.
Fauci, speaking at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle on Aug. 9, was asked how the scientific community can deal with congressional leaders “who promulgate unscientific ideas yet control funding for public institutions.”
“Vote,” Fauci responded, drawing applause from the room.
In commencement speeches he’s given this year, Fauci urged graduates, “Don’t accept the normalization of untruths.”
“Because there’s so much preposterous lying that goes on, and including, unfortunately it’s true … that members in our own Congress, in our own Senate, who just get up and say things that are total lies,” added Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “‘Vaccines kill people, that kind of thing.’ It’s so much untruths that people who have a lot of other things in their lives that they have to worry about, they kind of start accepting it and all of a sudden, lying becomes normal.”
Vaccines do kill people, according to U.S. health authorities.
Nine deaths from a combination of blood clotting and low blood platelet levels, for instance, have been determined to be “causally associated” with Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Causally associated means the vaccine caused or was related to the deaths.
Severe allergic reactions are also triggered on occasion by the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, as are cases of heart inflammation. People who have experienced the conditions have died.
NIAID didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Larry Corey, a Fred Hutch employee who asked Fauci the question, identified Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) by name but didn’t offer any evidence for Paul promulgating unscientific ideas.
Paul and Fauci have clashed during Senate hearings over Fauci’s agency funding the Wuhan, China, laboratory located near where COVID-19 cases were first detected, and Republicans have vowed to investigate Fauci if they gain control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. Paul’s office didn’t respond to an inquiry.
Fauci wasn’t questioned on his own prior statements, including his admission that he misled the U.S. public on the effectiveness of masks in order to prevent a shortage of masks for health care workers.
The cancer center awarded Fauci with the 2022 honorary Hutch Award, which he received during a baseball game at T-Mobile Park. The discussion took place hours before the game.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, throws a pitch before the game between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Wash., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Alika Jenner/Getty Images)
Gain of Function
At one point during the discussion, Corey started talking about how an early strain of the virus that causes COVID-19 was detected in Washington state, and Fauci joked, “I developed the ancestral modern strain.”
“I created it. I was in my kitchen,” Fauci said, drawing laughter.
“Gain of function, here we come,” Corey said, before moving on to another subject.
Gain of function is a term that describes research to make pathogens more transmissible or pathogenic.
“Families of the more than 1 million Americans who have perished from COVID-19 aren’t laughing,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), one of Fauci’s fiercest critics in Congress, wrote on Twitter in response to a clip of the new exchange.
Dozens of cases of Langya virus have been reported in China, according to new research from scientists who were previously linked to controversial bat coronavirus studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Langya henipavirus — referred to as LayV — belongs to a family of viruses that are “known to infect humans and cause fatal disease,” revealed a group of Chinese-led scientists in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Of the 35 confirmed LayV cases found in China’s Shandong and Henan provinces, however, none have proven deadly. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, cough, loss of appetite, and muscle aches.
The majority of the scientists behind the paper identifying the virus are affiliated with Chinese Communist Party-run scientific institutions, which are notorious for their ties to the regime’s military efforts and biological warfare programs. Researchers from labs including the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology and State Key Laboratory of Pathogens and Biosecurity are among the paper’s authors.
Lin-Fa Wang, a researcher at the Duke–National University of Singapore Medical School, is also an author of the peer-reviewed New England Journal of Medicine piece, whose work on the LayV virus follows his involvement with bat coronavirus research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology using funds from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency.
Led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman” Shi Zhengli, researchers used the samples to conduct risky “gain-of-function” research, as now-deleted webpages reveal the lab manipulating bat coronaviruses to “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
Wang, who is an Honorary Professor at the lab, appears as a co-author on many of these now highly controversial studies including “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor” in 2013 and “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus” in 2017.”
Though Wang told the Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times that the reported LayV cases had “not been fatal or very serious” so far and that there was “no need for panic,” officials from Taiwan’s health authority are currently monitoring the virus’ spread.
In the paper, scientists sequenced the LayV virus genome and alleged that “the shrew may be a natural reservoir of LayV.”
In the early days of COVID-19, Chinese Communist Party scientists and their American counterparts pushed a similar narrative.
A person close to the Trump family suggested the FBI may have planted “listening devices” during a raid targeting former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence earlier this week.
Lawyers for the former president previously said that FBI agents would not allow Trump’s team to observe or supervise their search of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. One lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, told Fox News on Thursday that agents are believed to have searched Trump’s bedroom, office, and a storage room.
Because the FBI allegedly “didn’t allow anybody to supervise what they were doing, and they specifically requested to turn off the security cameras,” Kimbery Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée and an advisor to the former president’s 2020 campaign, told Newsmax. “Why? Because they didn’t want to be caught with what they were doing. How do you know there weren’t listening devices planted or evidence planted there?
“It’s something that has to be investigated and checked out, and we want to see the affidavit and what was their probable cause to be able to go in there and break into the president’s home,” she added. For her claim, Guilfoyle did not provide evidence.
Trump’s son Eric Trump told the Daily Mail on Wednesday that security cameras remained on when the agents carried out their search, accusing the agents of refusing to hand over a warrant and kicking lawyers off the premises. Agents, he said, told Trump’s team to turn off the cameras but they remained on, and those agents went to places “they shouldn’t have been.”
No Response
The FBI and Department of Justice have not responded to requests for comment. The judge who approved the FBI warrant, Bruce Reinhart, ordered the Justice Department on Wednesday to respond to requests to unseal the warrant in the case.
The White House said Joe Biden was not aware of the FBI search before it was announced earlier this week. Top Republicans have called on the Department of Justice to release documents pertaining to the raid or to have Attorney General Merrick Garland speak about the matter.
Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray have remained silent on the Mar-a-Lago search. But on Wednesday, Wray complained to reporters in a press conference about alleged violent threats levied against federal law enforcement agents in the wake of the raid.
The former president on Wednesday took to his Truth Social app and speculated on whether the FBI planted evidence. Members of Trump’s team said he wasn’t there while the raid occurred.
“The FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting.’”
George Gascón recall up in the air after campaign reveals outdated signature-verification process
Los Angeles County officials are rejecting more than one out of every five petition signatures in the campaign to recall radical prosecutor George Gascón (D.), according to a random sample of signatures provided to the anti-Gascón campaign, which says the “shockingly” high rate is because officials are using outdated signature standards.
In July, the Los Angeles County registrar notified the Recall DA George Gascón campaign that a random sampling of signatures revealed a 22 percent rejection rate, 60 times more than the rejection rate for mail-in-ballots during the 2020 presidential election. In response, the recall campaign pushed the registrar to explain what they believed was a “shockingly large rejection rate.”
The campaign obtained public records that show the registrar’s office was training staff to review votes using outdated signature standards, which allow the disqualification of any signature for minor variations compared with the one provided on a person’s voter registration form. In a letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, lawyers for the campaign expressed concerns that these outdated standards were leading to an improperly high rejection rate.
Registrar Dean Logan on Monday said concerns over the signature rejections were “selective outrage” and “a fictitious narrative to misinform and cast doubt.” But Marian Thompson, the attorney who wrote the letter, told the Washington Free Beacon the county clerk has not been forthcoming about the reasons for the rejection rate and refuses to share the precise number of invalid signatures.
“If they didn’t follow the law and apply the same legal standards used for signature verification for vote-by-mail ballots, then we have a legal team assembled to resolve this matter in a court of law,” Thompson said.
Gascón has been mired in controversy since taking office in November 2020. Like many progressive prosecutors backed by the left-wing billionaire George Soros, Gascón moved immediately to end cash bail, lighten sentencing guidelines, and reduce incarceration. His deputy district attorneys sued him weeks later for the drastic changes, saying his prosecutorial approach would violate their oath of office. Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC contributed $4.7 million to Gascón’s campaign.
The movement to recall Gascón began gathering steam as crime spiked in the city. In Los Angeles last year, auto thefts, robberies, and homicides were all up, with the city’s murder rate nearing a 15-year high. In December, former Los Angeles prosecutors began circulating a petition to recall Gascón and gathered more than 715,000 signatures by July. If around 579,000 of those signatures are from registered voters in Los Angeles County, a recall election will be held in November. The signature count is due next week.
In March, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) codified pandemic-era changes to the state’s voting regulations, which reduced mail-in rejection rates by more than 80 percent in the 2020 presidential election. The current standards presume that a signature appearing on a ballot is legitimate. Prior to that change, votes could be rejected if signatures differed even slightly from a voter’s registration.
Los Angeles County is in the process of verifying signatures after a random sampling in July determined there were not enough valid signatures to trigger a recall. The Washington Examinerreported the county has denied the Gascón recall campaign observation rights for the election’s signature count, further obfuscating the verification process. A spokesman for the county registrar said the recall campaign is entitled to review the count when it is over, and that their office’s “focus is on completing the verification within the legal timelines with integrity and appropriate quality review.”
Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told the Free Beacon the registrar’s handling of the count “fuels skepticism.”
“Public officials should embrace transparency,” Snead said. “When they don’t it fuels doubt in the integrity of our electoral system.”
A coalition of 19 Republican attorneys general says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink prioritizes left-wing political initiatives over shareholder returns and is jeopardizing the retirement of middle class workers with pensions.
Fink’s embrace of environmental, social, and governance investment policies, known as ESG, potentially runs afoul of several laws, the AGs charge in a letter sent to Fink. Instead of managing state pension funds and finding the best returns on investment, the AGs write, BlackRock uses “citizens’ assets to pressure companies to comply with international agreements” such as various climate initiatives.
Republicans are increasingly targeting asset managers such as BlackRock over their pro-ESG policies. They allege that these asset managers are transforming into backdoor channels for liberals to implement policies outside of the legislative process and leaving aside their principle, legal duty: maximizing returns for shareholders.
Critics of ESG say the policies are often arbitrary and can hurt a company’s bottom line. Moreover, ESG metrics can be gamed. Many companies, such as Tesla, receive a high ESG score under one metric while they rank poorly on another.
“Rather than being a spectator betting on the game, BlackRock appears to have put on a quarterback jersey and actively taken the field,” the AGs write. “As a firm, Blackrock has committed to implementing an ESG engagement and voting strategy across all assets under management.”
BlackRock manages an estimated $10 trillion in assets, a number larger than many first-world economies. Billions of those dollars come from U.S. pension funds. That extraordinary amount of money also gives billionaire Fink, a large donor to Democratic Party candidates and causes, tremendous influence over companies BlackRock invests in. Should Blackrock pull investments from a company over its climate or racial policies, two categories often included in ESG metrics, the company’s stock price would plummet.
The AGs assert that when BlackRock engages with companies over climate practices, it violates the states’ law about maximizing financial returns. For example, if BlackRock representatives pressure a company CEO to adopt a more expensive way to source energy in order to meet climate goals, that company may post lower profits. That drop in profits may translate to a lower stock price and harm pension funds invested in that company.
BlackRock has emerged as an explicit leader in the push “to retire fossil fuels,” the AGs allege. Part of that may be purely ideological or because of a desire to “attract investment from European or left-wing pension funds,” the AGs add. Regardless of motivation, BlackRock is obligated per law to only seek the best financial return on their investments.
Pressure from asset managers such as BlackRock appears effective. Sixty percent of respondents to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey last year said “investor pressure” was the number one reason that oil companies such as Exxon are not expanding operations.
The Biden administration recently picked BlackRock Investment Institute chairman Thomas Donilon to co-chair the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. During his time at the BlackRock Investment Institute, Donilon called on Americans to triple their investments in China, the world’s largest polluter.
West Virginia announced last month that it would no longer do business with Wall Street firms that boycott the fossil fuel industry. One of those firms included BlackRock. The ban will cost the firms $18 billion a year, according to the state’s treasury office.
Andrea Mitchell says community is ‘historic’ because homes were built by slaves
Yet another NBC journalist is fighting to prevent the unwashed masses from befouling the sanctity of their ritzy Washington, D.C., neighborhood. Longtime host Andrea Mitchell is among the wealthy homeowners on Chain Bridge Road NW—described as “one of Washington’s most exclusive and prestigious streets”—who are aggressively opposing measures to allow greater access to unsavory drivers and pedestrians.
Washington City Paperreports that the “quintessentially D.C. dispute” dates back to at least 2009, when residents of the wealthy neighborhood successfully pushed back against city plans to build sidewalks for pedestrians in the interest of public safety. Opponents complained that doing so would make the posh neighborhood feel more “urban,” a racist euphemism for “not white.”
In recent weeks the D.C. Department of Transportation has taken steps to close the road to through traffic, a move some critics view as a blatant example of government officials protecting the interests of wealthy homeowners to the detriment of the greater public.
Mitchell got involved in 2021 when the local neighborhood commissioners once again raised the issue of building sidewalks. The journalist was horrified at the thought. “These are homes that were originally built during the Civil War. Mine was built in 1865, as was my next-door neighbor’s, as farm houses by freed slaves,” she said at a meeting last September. “This is a historic community.”
Wealthy liberals across the country frequently tout the “historic” character of their neighborhoods to scuttle plans that would make them more accessible and affordable for people of color. Robert Reich, a left-wing professor at the University of California-Berkeley, used similar language while attempting to block a proposal to build low-income housing units in his fancy neighborhood.
“If historic preservation means anything, it means maintaining enough of the character of an older neighborhood to remind people of its history and provide continuity with the present,” Reich wrote in 2020. “Development for the sake of development makes no sense when it imposes social costs like this.”
Mitchell is merely the most recent NBC journalist to publicly oppose efforts to make her neighborhood more accommodating to average folks. Former wunderkind host Luke Russert, who retired at age 30, made a fuss last year after a Georgetown science professor placed two large statues of iconic Transformers characters outside his home, which neighbors Russert’s $4 million pad. Children loved them, but Russert denounced them as a safety hazard that could attract unsavory visitors who might park illegally to take photos of their kids posing with the statues.
At one point during a neighborhood commission meeting, Russert suggested that failing to remove the statues was akin to endorsing Soviet communism in America. “What’s to stop someone from putting up a statue of Joseph Stalin and saying, ‘Well, this is provocative, it’s art, it speaks to me,'” Russert said. “They are a nuisance, they are an eyesore, and they detract from the spirit of the neighborhood.”
New DCCC ad pans to menu that lists prices in euros as narrator touts support for local entrepreneurs
A new Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ad aimed at wooing Latinos says Democrats “strengthened Arizona by investing in small businesses.” The business to which the ad subsequently cuts is almost certainly not in Arizona, or even America—its prices are listed in euros.
The DCCC released the ad Monday as part of a “six-figure digital advertising campaign to reach Latino voters,” the group said in a press release. During the spot, a narrator says Democrats supported Arizona entrepreneurs by investing in local businesses. But the restaurant to which the ad cuts is by no means local—its menu lists an array of overpriced options in euros. A goat cheese platter, for example, will set customers back 11 euros, while an avocado option costs 10.50 euros. Should an Arizonan want to visit the eatery, however, the cost would be much higher. The cheapest flight from Phoenix to the European Union is $750, according to online travel agency Kayak.
The DCCC’s intercontinental Arizona ad—which the group said would appeal to Latinos as they are uniquely concerned about “protecting small businesses” and “creating good-paying jobs”—marks Democrats’ latest botched attempt to appeal to Hispanics.
Just weeks ago, in July, first lady Jill Biden compared the Latino community to breakfast tacos. Days later, the DCCC released a radio ad targeting Texas Hispanics, which argued that even though Democrats “seem so out of touch,” they aren’t as bad as “these Republican extremists.” The ad was routinely mocked by liberal Latinos in the Lone Star State—Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha called it “the worst ad I’ve ever heard,” while a Texas Young Democrats member said the spot was “so cringe.”
The DCCC did not return a request for comment. Its ad comes as Democrats hemorrhage Hispanic voters, particularly in South Texas. In June, Republicans flipped a Rio Grande Valley House seat for the first time in more than a century, a result that made Mayra Flores the first Mexican-born woman elected to Congress. Flores even defeated her Democratic opponent in deep-blue Cameron County, which is 90 percent Hispanic and less than two years ago backed Joe Biden by double digits.
Democratic lawmakers and liberal media outlets alike have responded to the Republican Party’s gains with Latino voters by attacking Hispanic Republicans. Flores’s opponent in November, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D., Texas), argued in June that he is more qualified than Flores because he “wasn’t born in Mexico.” Weeks later, Arizona representative Rubén Gallego (D.) said a female Hispanic Republican running for Congress in the state was not sufficiently Latina because she took her husband’s last name.
The New York Times, meanwhile, said Flores’s win marked the “Rise of the Far-Right Latina,” citing the Republican’s support for religiosity, strong borders, and traditional values. A Texas political blog that has received campaign funds from Gonzalez also attacked Flores last month, referring to the congresswoman as “Miss Frijoles,” “Miss Enchiladas,” and a “cotton pickin’ liar.”
“Who does this Mayra Flores think she is? Somebody said she was crowned Miss Frijoles 2022 in San Benito,” Texas political blogger Jerry McHale, who has received $1,200 from Gonzalez’s campaign, wrote on July 2. “She isn’t in congressman Vicente Gonzalez’s league. She isn’t even in the bush leagues unless she doesn’t shave her p**sy.”
The DCCC is no stranger to bungled political ads. In addition to the European menu included in its Arizona spot, the group’s latest ad in New Mexico shows a person taking pills from a bottle labeled “FOR ANIMAL USE ONLY.” It’s unclear if the person in the ad is taking an animal version of the drug Ivermectin, which CNN labeled a “livestock drug” and a “horse dewormer” after popular podcaster Joe Rogan said he took it to treat COVID-19. Rogan was prescribed a human version of the drug.
Matt Cartwright, who has a history of tax delinquency, endorses bill that more than doubles agency’s size
Congressman Matt Cartwright has a history of tax delinquency. That isn’t stopping the Pennsylvania Democrat from backing a plan that would sic an army of nearly 90,000 new IRS agents on the American people.
Cartwright last year owed $436.63 in penalties and interest that stemmed from late property tax payments on his Washington, D.C., condo, the Washington Free Beaconreported last week. The incident was not his first tax-related mishap—from 2013 to 2018, the Democrat racked up thousands of dollars in penalties and interest related to his tax delinquencies. Still, Cartwright on Monday announced his support for the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ $430 billion spending bill that does little to fight inflation and gives the IRS $80 billion to hire up to 87,000 additional employees.
Cartwright’s history of tax delinquency and subsequent support for the bill could haunt the congressman as he faces a difficult reelection bid against GOP challenger Jim Bognet. Cartwright trails the Republican by 1 point with 9 percent of voters undecided, internal polling obtained by the Free Beacon shows.
Cartwright will also have to overcome Joe Biden’s historic unpopularity, which has even extended to the president’s hometown of Scranton. In Cartwright’s eighth district, which includes Scranton, just 38 percent of voters approve of Biden, compared with 60 percent who disapprove, the Free Beaconrevealed Wednesday. Despite Biden’s hometown woes, Cartwright is standing by the president—unlike some of his House Democratic colleagues, the congressman has publicly backed Biden to run for reelection in 2024. Cartwright was also a staunch Biden supporter during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, having said in 2019 that he was “honored” to endorse his “friend, northeastern PA hometown boy, Joe Biden for president.”
Cartwright did not return a request for comment. His Monday statement voicing support for Democrats’ latest spending bill did not include a comment on its IRS-related provisions. Should that bill pass the House, the IRS will receive $80 billion to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The hiring spree would more than double the size of the agency’s workforce, making the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined, the Free Beaconreported. Bognet has railed against the proposal, arguing that the Inflation Reduction Act should instead be called the “Audit America Act.”
“With that many new IRS agents, every small business can expect to be audited,” Bognet said Monday. “We must stop this spending spree, and we must stop this auditing spree.”
Beyond the Cartwright-backed bill’s proposed IRS expansion, even liberal economists don’t believe the $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, whom Biden himself routinely cites, said in a new report that the legislation will cause no change in inflation until the third quarter of 2023, when Americans can expect to enjoy a .01 percent decrease.
Cartwright is nevertheless touting the bill as a win for Democrats. In his Monday statement, he called the bill “landmark legislation” that “the American people have been waiting for.”
Cartwright’s race against Bognet is not his first. The Democrat narrowly defeated Bognet by roughly 3 points in 2020, a result that marked the tightest reelection bid of his career. Bognet has thus far raised $1.2 million to Cartwright’s $3.5 million.
SO WHEN ARE REPUBLICANS GOING TO GET OFF THEIR BUTTS AND CODIFY THIS TREND?
A majority of American voters support states requiring audits “immediately after elections” to protect election integrity, according to a new poll by Rasmussen Reports sponsored by The National Pulse.
Asked, “Should every state require that ballots be available immediately after elections for bipartisan voter reviews to enhance election confidence and transparency?” 56 percent of likely voters supported the idea while just 23 percent of likely voters opposed it.
The Rasmussen data showed that 68 percent of Republicans – considerably more than just 45 percent of their Democrat-voting counterparts – supported the push for election integrity. 57 percent of Independents were also in support.
When divided into the three ideologies of “Conservative,” “Moderate,” and “Liberal,” the data showed a similar trend: 73 percent of Conservatives responded “yes,” 52 percent of Moderates responded “yes,” and just 34 percent of Liberals responded “yes.”
The news follows Democrats attempting to universalize vote-by-mail in America’s forthcoming elections while Republican officials have sought to halt these efforts with election integrity measures. It also comes as the 2020 election results continue to be subject to scrutiny due to the nefarious influence of private foundations funding ballot harvesting efforts and unmanned ballot “drop boxes.”
The Rasmussen poll also inquires with voters “How important will the issue of election integrity be in this year’s congressional elections?”.
80 percent of likely voters felt the issue would be important, with 59 percent of individuals polled believing election integrity would be “very important.”
The feelings appeared to be nonpartisan, as 87 percent of Republicans, 78 percent of Democrats, and 76 percent of Independents believed election integrity would be important in the upcoming midterms.
The poll comes amidst ongoing investigations into several late-night ballot dumps during the 2020 election, all of which supported Joe Biden, and far-left activist groups linked to George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg using hundreds of millions of dollars to boost voter turnout rates for the Democratic Party.
Mainstream media outlets, social media platforms, and Democratic officials have set out to censor individuals discussing voter fraud, despite pushing similar claims about Russian election influence throughout 2016 and the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency. Under Biden, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has also targeted officials and activists fighting for election integrity by threatening criminal prosecution.
The Justice Department has to respond to motions to unseal a warrant that triggered the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to a magistrate judge who reportedly approved the search.
“On or before 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 15, 2022, the Government shall file a Response to the Motion to Unseal,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Wednesday afternoon, referring to the Department of Justice.
“The response may be filed ex parte and under seal as necessary to avoid disclosing matters already under seal. In that event, the Government shall file a redacted Response in the public record. If it chooses, the Government may file a consolidated Response to all Motions to Seal,” he wrote.
Neither the FBI nor Justice Department has issued public comments about the raid, which was first confirmed by Trump on Monday evening.
The FBI declined to comment when contacted by The Epoch Times, and the Justice Department has not responded to several requests for comment.
As for the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden was not aware of the raid before Trump’s announcement. Her claim was refuted by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.”
Requests
On Wednesday, the Times Union’s managing editor, Brendan J. Lyons, wrote to Reinhart to ask for the warrant to be unsealed.
“Given that the search warrant(s) have been executed, and the target of that search has full knowledge of what occurred, there is no impediment to any ongoing investigation from the disclosure of the search warrant order or the returns. As such, these records should be unsealed,” the letter to the Florida judge reads.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-A-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
Judicial Watch asked for the warrant as part of an investigation into “the potential politicization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice and whether the FBI and the Justice Department are abusing their law enforcement powers to harass a likely future political opponent of President [Joe] Biden.”
“If the Court were to unseal the materials, Judicial Watch would obtain the materials, analyze them, and make them available to the public,” the letter said. “Unsealing the records therefore would further Judicial Watch’s mission of educating the public.”
It comes as Eric Trump, a son of the former president, told the Daily Mail that a Trump attorney at Mar-a-Lago, Christina Bobb, asked FBI agents Monday about seeing a warrant.
“They would not give her the search warrant,” he told the outlet, referring to Bobb. “So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”
Top Republicans, meanwhile, demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the GOP ahead of the 2022 midterms. Some have said the Justice Department immediately needs to release documents pertaining to the raid.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said there needs be a “thorough and immediate explanation” of how the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was approved. Legal historians have said that such a raid against a former president is unprecedented.
“Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice should already have provided answers to the American people and must do so immediately,” McConnel added.
Trump on Monday said that federal agents entered Mar-a-Lago despite him having cooperated with federal officials for months to return documents that he allegedly took from the White House after leaving office last year.
Reinhart came under fire Tuesday amid reports from several news outlets that found he had a connection to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Reinhart left his job as an assistant United States in early 2008 before he began representing some of Epstein’s workers.
According to a 2018 Miami Herald report, two of Epstein’s accusers alleged Reinhart left his prosecutor job to give Epstein inside information. Reinhart denied those allegations.
As his connection to the Epstein case went viral on Tuesday, it appeared the U.S. Southern District of Florida removed the judge’s page from its website, according to archived versions of the website.
“Access denied,” Reinhart’s page reads. “You are not authorized to access this page.”
Former President Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump revealed that FBI agents wouldn’t hand over the search warrant during their Aug. 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago and removed an attorney from the property.
“There’s 30 agents there,” he told the Daily Mail on Aug. 10 of the FBI raid. ‘They told our lawyer … you have to leave the property right now. Turn off all security cameras.
“They would not give her the search warrant. So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”
Attorney Christina Bobb was confused as to why the FBI couldn’t present the search warrant, according to Eric Trump.
“It’s all a coordinated attack with the FBI,” he said. “Do you think that the FBI director is going to raid the former president’s house, especially a house as you know, kind of world-renowned as Mar-a-Lago … without getting the approval of President [Biden]?”
The younger Trump said security cameras weren’t turned off. FBI agents accessed areas of the property where they “shouldn’t have been,” he claimed.
The former president confirmed the FBI raid on his property on the evening of Aug. 8. Both the FBI and Department of Justice haven’t issued public comments about the matter; The Epoch Times has contacted both agencies for comment.
Unconfirmed reports and anonymous sources say the raid pertained to a Department of Justice probe into whether Donald Trump held onto government documents after he left the White House last year.
All presidential correspondence and documentation have to be handed over to the National Archives when a president leaves office, according to a 1978 law.
(L-R) Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner arrive for the funeral services of Ivana Trump in New York on July 20, 2022. (Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images)
“[The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)] had ongoing communications with the representatives of former President Trump throughout 2021, which resulted in the transfer of 15 boxes to NARA in January 2022,” David Ferriero, who served as NARA director from November 2009 until April 2022, wrote to House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) in February.
Ferriero said NARA requested that Trump representatives “continue to search for any additional Presidential records that have not been transferred to NARA, as required by the Presidential Records Act.”
But Bobb told Real America’s Voice that the raid over the documents is a “completely unnecessary power flex” and a “weird flex.”
“It’s quite honestly sad to see what they have done to our country,” she said.
Top Republicans demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the Republican Party ahead of the 2022 midterms.
“The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 10 statement. “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of their department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.”
Hiring practices driven by diversity are ‘a recipe for disaster’
Southwest Airlines Co. (AKA SouthWoke Air [US Patriot]) is basking in accolades for its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts, award-winning customer service, and record-breaking quarterly revenues.
Behind the scenes of that rosy picture, heartaches are afflicting Southwest, called “the airline with Heart” because of its heart-shaped logo and a corporate culture steeped in “The Golden Rule,” treating others the same way they’d like to be treated.
But eight current Southwest employees, including three minorities, told The Epoch Times that “woke, leftist” DEI policies, as implemented, have tarnished the cherished Golden Rule principle, fractured a once-cohesive workforce, and, ultimately, may put safety at risk.
Faced with pandemic-related staffing shortages and pressure to add minorities, the company has changed the way it hires, trains, and disciplines workers—mostly to benefit less-qualified new hires representing the diversity rainbow, the employees say.
One Southwest flight attendant, a Hispanic female, said: “They are compromising safety for the sake of race, gender identity, and sexual preference … They’re risking people’s lives because of agendas.”
Southwest, one of America’s largest air carriers, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
Similar issues have spread industry-wide, according to 10 airline employees who agreed to be interviewed. Four are pilots and six are flight attendants; most have 20 or more years of experience. All of them, including two American Airlines pilots, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.
While no one thinks the policies are causing an imminent threat of a plane falling out of the sky tomorrow, all of the interviewees agreed that each time a standard is lowered, or a less-qualified employee is hired, the risk that something can go horribly wrong inches forward a notch or two. In an industry that depends on a near-miracle integration of people, machinery, and computers, even a few deviations can culminate in catastrophe.
Still, some employees worry about what could happen if current trends continue to stress out and distract safety professionals. Said one flight attendant: “It’s a recipe for disaster. I just hope I’m not at work when it happens.”
Us-Versus-Them Mentality
While promoting diversity sounds like a great idea, the inclusionary policies have actually become exclusionary at Southwest, employees say. Disparate treatment has divided their ranks into two distinct camps: those with “desirable” or “approved” personal, social, or political characteristics—and those without.
Minorities or people with leftist political views, varying gender identities, and alternative sexual orientations appear to be given wide latitude. This “protected class” is allowed to bend or break rules, and new hires in these classifications may be given extra chances to pass required skills tests, the employees said.
At the same time, veteran workers—especially those who are white, heterosexual, and conservative—find themselves in the crosshairs for almost anything, including making a personal statement of religious or political beliefs, the Southwest workers said. Even minorities can be shifted into this targeted group if they espouse personal beliefs running counter to causes that the company supports.
“There are two sets of standards: One for us and one for them,” said an experienced flight attendant.
One of her colleagues said: “The company is trying to eliminate anybody who does not agree with their agenda. The last few years, anybody who speaks up against them, they want gone.” That flight attendant said she had no problems at work until she posted her Christian religious beliefs on her personal Facebook page, along with her support of President Donald Trump. A coworker reported the posts to Southwest, and the flight attendant said she has faced repercussions ever since.
She and others say the targeting of conservatives is common—and they point to the recently publicized case of fired Southwest flight attendant Charlene Carter as a prime example.
‘Targeted Assassinations’ of Conservatives
Last month, a federal jury in Texas awarded Carter more than $5 million after finding that Southwest wrongfully terminated her and that her union didn’t live up to its duty to represent her. The company fired Carter after she expressed her pro-life views to a union leader via social media and opposed the union’s pro-abortion activism.
The company supported the union’s political activism, Carter’s suit says, by accommodating work-shift changes for union members so they could participate in the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., in January 2017. Marchers were protesting Trump’s inauguration; one of the primary sponsors of the event was Planned Parenthood. Southwest also showed “solidarity” with the protesters by bathing its airplane cabins in pink lights on some D.C.-bound flights, Carter’s lawsuit says.
Charlene Carter, who was fired from her job at Southwest Airlines, has won a federal case alleging she was wrongfully terminated over expressing her personal religious views. (Courtesy of Charlene Carter)
Documents in the case revealed that some union officials and political activists were singling out dissenting Southwest employees for “targeted assassinations,” meaning that they would try to get the company to fire them, using the company’s social media policy as a bludgeon.
In an interview with The Epoch Times on Aug. 8, Carter, who lives near Denver, Colorado, said she can’t believe that some leaders of Transport Workers Union of America Local 556, who helped set her up to be fired, are still working for Southwest.
Carter also validated her coworkers’ concerns about the disparate treatment of employees who dare to oppose leftist agendas. “I think there are a ton of cases out there just like mine,” she said. Terminated employees from Southwest and other airlines have been continuously contacting Carter for help after learning about the July 14 verdict in her case.
Carter spent five years fighting in court; she thinks she was one of the first casualties of the erosion of Southwest’s unique corporate culture, which she witnessed during the latter part of her 20-plus years at the airline.
“We all loved our jobs; we all loved each other—our CoHearts, that’s what we called each other,” Carter said, pointing out that the airline’s stock ticker is LUV, a nod to its birthplace at Love Field, Texas.
Corporate Culture Shift
But corporate leadership and philosophy shifted. Carter said, her former coworkers tell her the culture is now one where people are fired on a whim, and they’re encouraged to file complaints against each other over perceived insults, such as failure to use the “preferred pronoun” of a person asserting an alternative gender identity.
Employees who face such accusations are presumed guilty, a current flight attendant said, and they risk suspension or termination. “That is how we are treated now,” she said.
“It’s gotten ridiculous,” Carter said. She was astounded to learn that lapel pins, designating preferred pronouns, are being offered to staff.
A fellow flight attendant says the company’s priorities are misplaced.
“We used to be focused on hiring ‘the best of the best,’” she said. “So why is it now that we feel at Southwest Airlines that we have to use the right pronouns and we have to acquiesce to someone’s gender-fluid mentality?”
The DEI Effect
The interviewed employees blame DEI policies for sowing the seeds of division. Ironically, before DEI was implemented, “people were never labeled,” a flight attendant said. “I find it very divisive,” she said, “because now everyone is labeled, divided by race, gender sexual orientation … whatever.”
“This is wrong—all the way wrong,” she said.
The company’s annual report, in its DEI section, says, “Southwest Airlines recognizes, respects, and values differences. … At Southwest, DEI is and always has been a part of our DNA.”
All four major airlines—and many other American companies—publicly disclose DEI-related information, such as data on minority recruitment and the racial makeup of their workforce.
“Every airline is trying to push forward with minority hiring because they want to ‘show that they care,’” aviation analyst Jay Ratliff said. “They’re being asked, ‘How many women are within your pilot ranks? … How many pilots of color?’”
If an airline’s diversity metrics seem low in comparison to their competitors’ numbers, the company’s reputation and bottom line can suffer, Ratliff said.
That’s not necessarily fair, he said, because few people have the ability, interest, and financial means to qualify as a commercial airline pilot. Amassing the FAA-required 1,500 hours of flight time with an instructor can cost $75,000 or more, pilots said.
Last year, United Airlines announced its goals: to train 5,000 new pilots by 2030 at its new flight school, with “at least half of those students to be women or people of color.” The first class of new recruits “exceeded that goal,” with 80 percent of the 30 students fitting that category, the airline said in a report.
Considering that white males make up about one-third of the American population, a Southwest pilot said that composing a class with 80 percent minorities and women looks like “DEI special-status hiring on steroids.”
Scoring Systems Push Diversity
DEI data play a significant role in corporate ESG scores—ratings of a company’s “environmental, social, and governance” performance. It’s a complex—and controversial—way to assess which companies are considered “good corporate citizens.”
Most of the interviewed airline employees believe that the pursuit of ESG scores is driving corporate personnel practices, including ignoring well-qualified male applicants while eagerly hiring less-experienced female and minority candidates.
Increasingly, ESG scores can help determine whether a company sinks or swims. A good ESG score can attract investors, government contracts, and favorable loan-interest rates—benefits that are especially important for the airline industry, in which lucrative U.S. Department of Defense contracts are at stake and profit margins are razor-thin because of astronomical costs for equipment and personnel.
ESG ratings have existed in some form for decades, yet they barely registered a blip on internet searches until a few months ago, amid the Biden administration’s continued push for businesses to address environmental concerns and to institute “green” policies, which weigh heavily in ESG scores and DEI metrics.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced his intent to push back against ESG, calling it “leveraging corporate power to impose an ideological agenda on society.”
Refinitiv, a company that produces ESG scores, says its process for calculating the ratings starts with collecting more than 630 ESG measures from each company’s public disclosures. Other ESG assessors have their own rating systems, which means results can vary depending on which assessment method is being used. ESG advocates are now working on standardizing how these scores are calculated.
Several airline employees said it would benefit their company, their industry, and society in general if ESG scores and DEI programs were abolished.
One Southwest pilot with decades of experience said such measures create unnecessary complications with no positive effect on the airline’s core mission.
“Why do we need DEI programs? Why do we need ESG? A lot of the public isn’t even aware these things exist,” he said. “The passengers just want people like me to get them, and their bags, to the same place at the same time, safely … DEI and ESG do nothing to support that—zero.”
“I need these DEI programs and ESG scores to go out the back of the airplane like the jet fuel that we burn.”
Non-Pilots Hiring Pilots
Southwest’s annual report says it has been “evolving hiring and development practices to support diversity goals.”
Those changes are troubling to the interviewed employees and to the pilots’ union. In a letter to members last month, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association pointed out that, for the first time in the company’s 51-year history, a non-pilot is in charge of hiring pilots. The “system chief pilot” used to have that responsibility. “We are just a single step away” from hiring pilots based upon mere reviews of their resumes, association president Casey Murray wrote to union members. Southwest has about 9,600 pilots, the letter said.
Putting a non-pilot in charge of hiring pilots most likely will affect the quality of the pilots who are being hired, Southwest interviewees said. People who lack specific knowledge of this specialized job would have a hard time telling the difference between a good hire and a bad one, pilots said. One of the interviewed pilots said that the chief pilot told him: “The diversity department has a very strong voice in who gets hired.”
Southwest wants to hire more than 2,000 pilots in the next year, the union’s letter said, questioning whether those new hires will be required to meet Southwest’s traditionally high standards. “Across the entire commercial aviation industry, employers are fighting for an ever-shrinking pool of qualified pilots,” yet Southwest may be at a disadvantage to compete for those pilots. Contract negotiations with Southwest’s pilots are lagging, compared to progress with other airlines’ pilot unions, Murray said.
“Pilots are the fuel that powers Southwest Airlines, and right now Southwest’s supply of fuel is running low. Time is growing critical, and options are becoming limited,” Murray wrote.
Seeking the Best (Non-White) Pilots?
Current pilots also say they have learned that hiring decisions are being driven by a job candidate scoring system; they’re unsure how long it has been in place, how it works, or whether it unfairly elevates minorities. The company controls all of that information.
Still, the employees feel confident in anecdotal evidence suggesting that the scoring system, coupled with other hiring practices, could be producing a pattern of discrimination against men, especially white men who come from military backgrounds—previously highly sought-after job candidates. “We could be wrong, but I don’t think we are,” said one pilot who has military experience.
That pilot said he thinks the vast majority of his colleagues have heard accounts of possible discrimination similar to the following:
When a well-qualified former military pilot applied for a job, Southwest never contacted him for an interview. But the applicant learned that a woman was hired as a pilot, despite having half as much experience in the airline industry.
Further, the man had experience as a captain while the woman had only been a first officer, who sits next to the captain in the cockpit. “It’s a completely different world” when a person shifts into the captain’s chair, said the pilot.
“We’re leaving a lot of people behind who are better-qualified, just because they’re the wrong color, or they’re identified the wrong way. That’s concerning. We’re not putting the best up-front,” he said. “We have people’s lives in our hands. It’s just like with doctors. If you go to a doctor, you want to go to the best doctor you can.”
An American Airlines pilot with decades of experience said he was less troubled than some of the Southwest interviewees who worried about the effects of reduced standards as a result of the increased emphasis on diversity hiring. However, that pilot said he would become very concerned if standards are lowered “to the point where people aren’t flying as confidently.”
A second American Airlines pilot said he has observed that “training is not nearly as comprehensive as it used to be,” he said. “But these people who are starting out are flying with people who are supremely qualified to be flying airplanes—so mistakes can be covered.”
He thinks the reduced standards could eventually cause problems if the hyperfocus on diversity continues: “If you’re looking for a diverse workforce and not a qualified workforce, you’ve got issues. … You haven’t seen any accidents because of ‘diversity,’ but the potential is there.”
All 11 people who were interviewed for this story, including Carter, the ex-flight attendant, said personal traits such as gender and race shouldn’t be part of the equation at all.
“From the cockpit door forward, guys and gals of all ethnicities are after the same thing—and that’s a safe flight,” said one of the American Airlines pilots. “They don’t care who sits next to them as long as they can do the job.”
More Than Snack Servers
Most air passengers think of flight attendants as hospitality ambassadors who make them comfortable with beverages, snacks, blankets, and pillows. But their main purpose is to assist in the rare event of an in-flight emergency.
Six Southwest flight attendants, along with Carter, say they feel less able to perform crucial duties because of the climate in which they’re now operating—and new hires appear to be less equipped to shoulder those responsibilities.
“They have just made it such a hostile work environment. Southwest has made it that way, and flight attendants are afraid to do their jobs,” a flight attendant said. “But you’re supposed to put a smile on your face and pretend that everything is grand.”
The flight attendants describe feeling as though a backstabber is always ready to pounce, to report any action or statement that doesn’t fit the corporate ideology. They’re being held to strict conduct and uniform standards while “accommodations” are extended to people in protected classes, such as a minority woman who was allowed to wear a nose ring—which got a white female in trouble—and a male flight attendant who described himself as “nonbinary”—neither totally male nor totally female—being allowed to wear a skirt that appeared to be shorter than regulations allowed.
The nonbinary employee seemed to be using his position at the airline as a platform for LGBTQ activism and self-promotion, rather than focusing on benefiting the company or its customers, fellow flight attendants said. They shared screenshots of the nonbinary employee’s social media posts. One is a selfie of the mustached man posing in his Southwest uniform, with the comment, “My dress looks better on me than most chicks.”
That employee no longer works for Southwest, flight attendants said. Yet they said they were aware that a couple of employees faced disciplinary action for referring to the nonbinary employee as “he” in a members-only Facebook group for flight attendants.
Antics Embarrass Fellow Flight Attendants
One flight attendant perceives that the company is making skewed, unfair hiring decisions, and creating a level of absurdity that’s hard to stomach. She knows of people who are related to Southwest employees and have college degrees—which go beyond the high-school education requirement for flight attendants—“and they don’t get hired, and yet we have this guy, with a mustache, in a skirt, distracting us all because the company wants to fight over his pronouns.”
Being a flight attendant used to be considered prestigious and classy; Southwest was viewed as “Mount Rushmore,” a pinnacle for flight attendants, who felt proud just to be hired.
“Now the pride is not about the brand of Southwest Airlines,” a flight attendant said. “It’s about how different I can be as an employee of Southwest Airlines—like, ‘Y’all need me more than I need you.’”
Public perception of the role has diminished, not just at Southwest, but across the industry. Airlines grant diversity-based exceptions to people who don’t want to look or act professional, the flight attendants said.
It used to be unusual to see flight attendants behave in ways that brought embarrassment to their coworkers. Now, quite a few of the new hires who were prized for their diversity “are rather risqué,” a flight attendant said. “They become very emboldened; they feel they can get away with this because they are in a protected class.”
Still, Southwest has had to fire employees who pushed the envelope too far, including one minority flight attendant who solicited sex in a social media video and another who videoed herself twerking. In both instances, the videos, provided to the Epoch Times, show the employees in Southwest uniforms.
Such conduct disgusts the flight attendants, and their concern is more than superficial. “If we relax the appearance standards and we’re letting people lower their professional standards, then they obviously are not equipped to handle any type of safety issue that can happen on that plane,” a flight attendant said.
“Where do you draw the line and say enough is enough?”
Commitment, Skills Insufficient
One of the flight attendants who has been targeted for religious and political views said her commitment to her job boils down to this: “I will give my life for my passengers and my crew, if that’s what I need to do. My last words will be, ‘Let’s roll,’” she said, referencing the famous words spoken by a passenger on one of the U.S. airplanes that were hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
She doesn’t see that same level of grit from the new hires. “They don’t have the same tough mentality,” she said. Nor do they have the same work ethic, which might be attributable to differences between the younger and older generations.
The older flight attendant described being busy from the beginning to the end of each flight while many of the new hires tend to just serve one round of drink orders, “then they go back to the back (of the airplane) and sit down for the rest of the flight.”
The new employees aren’t demonstrating mastery of the skills they were supposed to have been taught, or willingness to perform them. A passenger was having a medical emergency but the flight attendant in charge of that section “wouldn’t even come out of the galley to assist,” said one flight attendant. Instead, she and a second colleague had to take care of the ailing passenger.
Such an incident stokes her worst fear: “Somebody’s gonna die. With the lack of training that we’re seeing in the new hires that are coming out … there’s going to be somebody who’s not trained, facing an emergency.”
The irony is that, because of conduct problems and lack of devotion to the job, many of the “check-the-box” new hires either quit or are discharged, the employees said. That’s why it would make more sense for Southwest to be more selective in its hiring decisions—and to make those decisions based on the applicant’s qualifications and commitment to doing a good job, both of which now seem to be lacking.
Too Many Hires, Too Fast?
A flight attendant who is familiar with hiring practices said she is concerned about the speed with which large numbers of new employees were hired in recent months. She is hearing that up to 10,000 employees have been added to the roster, so the airline is now up to pre-pandemic staffing levels.
Her concern: It’s doubtful that the company had the capacity to properly vet and train such a large number of employees, including flight attendants, in such a short timeframe. In fact, she says it’s “mathematically impossible,” (That’s OK, because mathematics is racist anyway [US Patriot]) based on past observations of failure rates among new trainees.
For each class of about 50 flight attendants, about 15 trainees would “wash out,” or not make it through the rigorous testing process, which includes mastering emergency evacuation drills. Considering that, it’s most likely that “the standards would have to be relaxed” to allow large numbers of new hires to complete the process rapidly.
“There’s a mindset that’s changed…it seems like they’re accepting almost any applicant—here’s a body and here’s a checkmark” on the diversity list, she said.
She’s puzzled as to why Southwest pushed so hard to hire so many new flight attendants. “We don’t have all the airplanes that we were expecting to get,” she said. “Then why are we hiring all of these flight attendants?”
Less-Rigorous Training
Today’s training is “a lot shorter and a lot simpler” than it used to be, she said.
Carter said it’s her understanding that flight attendants now must pass only a few tests. In years past, “there were about three tests a week for six weeks,” she said. “You were breathing through a fire hose all of this information.”
She also said that if a trainee flunked a test, that person was given one chance to retake it, “and if you failed, you were done.” Now, Carter has been told that people are being given multiple opportunities for do-overs.
As a result, “I’m hearing from flight attendants that these people don’t understand what our safety is about here.”
Employees say they feel as though core values and common sense are falling by the wayside when they are asked to give wide berth to people asserting that they are gender fluid, or identify with a gender that doesn’t match their biological sex.
“I don’t tell a pilot that I identify as a pilot, and I’m going to fly the aircraft—because there are no facts in that,” a flight attendant said.
While seeing a decline in the flight attendants who seem to be truly vested in their work, the flight attendants say the company is directing them to merely “inform” passengers about violations of safety rules, not to enforce the rules. This is in direct contrast to a few months ago, when flight attendants were required to function as the facemask police to enforce a federal pandemic restriction while it remained in effect.
Presumably in response to customer backlash over the much-despised mask mandates, Southwest has instructed flight attendants to cut passengers more slack. “We’re allowing customers to do as they please, and it’s causing safety issues,” a flight attendant said. People are refusing to remain seated during takeoffs and landings, for example. If something goes amiss, “You become a projectile; you can hurt other people,” the flight attendant added.
Airline Love Affair Ends
A longtime pilot described his passion for his job, and laments how the company killed it.
From the outset, “I was in a love affair with Southwest Airlines. They were smaller and scrappier. They were all bone and muscle. No fat. And I liked that,” he said. “We grew under the nose of American, Delta, and United, despite their tactics … We continued to grow and thrive around a very simple business model that revolved around the Golden Rule.”
That enabled the company to empower all employee groups so they could make decisions benefiting both internal and external customers. They didn’t get sucked into bureaucracies.
But the company crossed a rubicon last year when it took a stand on the COVID-19 vaccine and “woke” policies, he said. Employees were told: “You must get vaccinated and you must accept these diversity and inclusion principles even though it goes against the principles that you grew up with at this company.”
For the veteran pilot, that was a death knell, he said. “It was a complete and total divorce of the culture.”
“The company has destroyed the trust relationship. This is not the Southwest Airlines that I joined. … The love affair is over,” he said. “When you prioritize profits and special interests over people, this is what you get.”
Although the public perception is that many pilots lost their jobs because of vaccine mandates, pilots doubt that’s accurate. In the case of Southwest, many employees sought—and obtained—religious or medical exemptions.
The company still touts the Golden Rule, but that’s mostly lip service, the pilot said. “It’s the thing that allowed Southwest to rise to greatness. It’s less important now. What’s more important? I have to understand that a person’s gender can be on a sliding scale, or maybe they’re just a man who wants to dress as a woman.”
He resents the implication that “hopelessly bigoted pilots like me” need to take a new sexual harassment training module that encompasses LGBTQ considerations. He learned that if a person in that category believes they were looked at in a way that they felt was uncomfortable, “I could be written up, and I don’t even have to say anything,” the pilot said.
Southwest flight attendants were recently required to complete a DEI training or face being put on unpaid leave. That didn’t sit well. The flight attendants say they were already treating people as equally as possible—values embodied in the Golden Rule and basic human decency. “I say this as a minority: I don’t need to be told how to treat people with dignity and respect. I’ve been doing that all my life.”
Distractions Imperil Safety
These programs and the “woke” cultural shift are creating huge distractions, which by themselves pose a threat to safety in ways that most people never think about, the pilot said.
“People take it for granted that takeoffs equal landings. But I can tell you that there are close calls—regularly—where human intervention prevented things from getting really bad. … And the traveling public never knew about it,” the pilot said.
For everyone’s safety, all airline workers must be at the top of their game.
“We need the most qualified people in these safety-sensitive jobs. But it doesn’t stop at the cockpit door,” he said. If any part of the system breaks down because a person was distracted or wasn’t the most qualified person for the job, “the end result is the same if you had an unqualified pilot: the airplane is a smoking hole at the end of the runway and you have 170 people dead—and a lot of angry families.”
“If you crash one airplane, that one crash has the ability to put an airline out of business. When I go to work that weighs on me. All 170 of those lives are in my mind from the time we take off until we land,” he said. “In my mind, disaster is just around the corner.”
Ready for The Worst
Before each takeoff, pilots mentally rehearse how they would react to rare dreaded scenarios, which have actually happened: A maintenance guy doesn’t do his job and the engine falls off the airplane. Or the motor blows up. Or a fire erupts. There is an infinite number of things that can go wrong. But such incidents are exceedingly rare—and when they do happen, a miraculous interplay between humans and technology averts death and catastrophe.
“These are the things we think about,” the pilot said. “And instead, we’ve got people thinking about their special status and how they can get one of their coworkers in trouble?… When you’re cheating the laws of physics every day, DEI has no place.” (Great remark! [US Patriot])
Under these circumstances, it’s infinitesimally trivial to even give a moment’s consideration to a person’s race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or any other trait.
“I will treat that man, dressed as a woman, the same way I would treat a woman dressed as a woman, or a woman dressed as a man. I don’t care,” the pilot said. “Just do your job. Take care of those passengers. And then drag my sorry butt out of the airplane if it comes down to that, because I’m the last one to go.”
In one way, the “new” rules don’t really bother the pilot: He said he was already treating people well. That won’t change, he said. He just hates knowing that at any moment, he could be “written up because I looked at you wrong.”
As a white male, the pilot recognizes he’s “the new minority.”
He says he has to go to work every day and prove “I’m not the hopelessly bigoted, homophobic, misogynist, sexist fossil that they think I am.”
And that’s OK with him.
“I’m fine with that. I don’t care,” he said. “Because I live by the Golden Rule.”
Over two years of pandemic oversight, Johnson said he’s witnessed money being put before public health
From the early days of the pandemic, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has been trying to hold U.S. public health agencies accountable on many issues, including why the agencies censored early treatment options for COVID-19, pushed vaccine mandates, and demonstrated a lack of integrity and transparency involving the vaccine data and reporting.
After conducting two years of oversight, Johnson said that the U.S. medical system has been compromised by money from Big Pharma.
“We have a corrupt medical system in this country,” Johnson said in a recent interview for NTD’s “Capitol Report” program. “From the pharmaceutical companies down to the federal health agencies through to the research centers and medical journals. It should concern every American.”
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Agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration have not freely provided the public with accurate data about the vaccine’s origin, efficacy, and adverse effects, said Johnson, and he and others conducting oversight have had to rely heavily on other countries’ data.
“We’ve had to look to either Israel or Public Health England, Public Health Scotland. Now they’re shutting down their information streams as well,” he said. “One of my biggest concerns is our federal health agencies have not been honest. They’ve not been transparent.”
He called what the CDC is doing “willful ignorance.”
Public Health Agencies Contradicting Themselves
Johnson sent a letter to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in late July, demanding answers as to why there have been conflicting statements about the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
The Epoch Times reported that Dr. John Su, who heads the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office, claimed that the CDC has been performing Proportional Reporting Ratio analyses on data from VAERS since February 2021. The CDC, however, told the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense that it not only did not conduct the analyses but that the method was outside of the agency’s purview.
“CDC’s assertion and Dr. Su’s statement cannot both be true,” Johnson said in the letter.
“The American people deserve the truth and you have not been providing it. That is why I, together with millions of Americans, have completely lost faith in the CDC and other federal health agencies. It is time to start regaining their confidence and your agency’s integrity by coming clean, being transparent, and telling the truth,” the letter states (pdf).
“It’s all BS,” Johnson said in the interview. “As soon as the safety signals started screaming at them through the VAER system, what do they do? They denigrated the VAER system.”
The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the NTD interview, Johnson said he believes the health agencies don’t want to provide truthful information.
“I think, among many disappointments, one of the biggest disappointments in terms of the federal health agencies is they’re just not giving us the information, and I don’t think they really want to,” he said.
From the get-go, the vaccine mandates were “pointless, completely idiotic, and totally destructive,” Johnson said, adding that the agencies’ own data has long confirmed that vaccines do not prevent transmission or reoccurring infection.
Johnson implied that Big Pharma has had a role in pushing the vaccine mandates out of its own self-interest.
“I’ve always been supportive of the pharmaceutical industry,” because the drug companies need billions of dollars to develop new drugs that are important for improving lives, said Johnson. “But now I’ve just witnessed the capture of U.S. regulatory agencies by Big Pharma.”
Former President Donald Trump released a dramatic political video, hours after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, in which he laments the “declining” state of America and says it’s “time to start talking about greatness for our country again.”
“We are a nation in decline … We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump over the ominous sounds of thunder and rain in the nearly four-minute video in which he lists the apparent failures of the Biden administration, before promising, “Soon we will have greatness again.”
Trump, who is expected to announce that he will run again for president in 2024, released the video on his Truth Social platform late Tuesday.
In the video, he says that America has the “highest inflation in over 40 years” and “highest energy cost in its history.” He adds that in the two years since Joe Biden took office, America has lost its energy independence and dominance.
“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil,” Trump says. “We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers and American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world.”
Trump accuses the Biden administration of allowing “Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands,” and suggests that “it will only get worse.”
‘Weaponization of the Justice System’
“We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before. We’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump says in his video.
Late on Monday, Trump announced that the FBI was raiding his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, calling it evidence of “prosecutorial misconduct” and a “weaponization of the Justice System.”
A member of the Secret Service in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
The former president said the raid wasn’t announced and that it was motivated because Democrats do not want him to run again for president in 2024.
“They detest Donald Trump, not just on the Democrat side but the general establishment, because he’s not one of them. Because he doesn’t play their game,” his daughter-in-law Lara Trump told Fox News on Tuesday.
“They are terrified he’s going to announce any day that he’s running for president in 2024. And this is a very convenient way to just throw a little more mud on Donald Trump.”
America ‘No Longer Respected’
In his video, Trump also cites the legacy media as contributing to what he says is a nation in decline, saying America “no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is about all you get.”
Traditionally, the media acts as a guardian of the public interest and a watchdog on government activities. But Trump has in the past accused legacy outlets of being partisan and colluding with “radical left Democrats … to hide the real facts.”
“We are a nation that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon and China to use the trillions and trillions of dollars it’s taken from the United States to build a military to rival our own,” Trump says in the video.
U.S. Air Force loadmasters and pilots assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, load people being evacuated from Afghanistan onto a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 24, 2021. (Master Sgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP)
“We are a nation that over the past years is no longer respected or listened to all around the world. We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith.
“We are a nation whose economy is floundering, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming, and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of every list,” he says.
“We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump. “But soon we will have greatness again.”
‘Soon We Will Have Greatness Again’
Trump’s political video starts in black and white with only the sounds of rain and thunder underscoring it. This sequence features video representative of the Biden administration’s apparent failures, including oil fields, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, the last third of the video becomes colorized and the musical score uplifting as Trump shifts to speak about his promise of America having “greatness again.”
“It was hard-working patriots like you who built this country. And it is hard-working patriots like you who are going to save our country,” Trumps says in his video.
“There is no mountain we cannot climb. There is no summit we cannot reach. There is no challenge we cannot meet. There is no victory we cannot have.
“We will not bend. We will not break. We will not yield ever, ever, ever. We will never give in, we will never give up, and we will never ever back down. We will never let you down.
“As long as we are confident and united the tyrants we’re fighting do not stand even a little chance. Because we are Americans and Americans kneel to God and God alone. And it is time to start talking about greatness for our country again,” he says.
The video ends on a black screen with the words, “The best is yet to come.”
Former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany laid out a common pattern the Justice Department has followed in dealing with those associated with former President Donald Trump.
The Fox News host argued on Tuesday’s “Outnumbered” that the DOJ now appears to be employing the same tactic against Trump himself in light of the FBI’s raid on his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, the previous day.
“This is very personal for somebody the FBI was, you could argue, looking at for six years,” McEnany said.
“We know about the [Steele] dossier. We know the way it was peddled. We know that there was an insurance policy, if you read Peter Strzok’s texts. So all the things President Trump was saying, this just pours fuel on that fire,” she recounted.
In August 2016, then FBI agent Strzok texted his lover then-FBI attorney Lisa Page that the bureau needed to have an “insurance policy” in case Trump got elected.
“I will say I think you can’t look at this in isolation,” McEnany said of the raid on Trump’s home, reportedly to obtain classified documents he allegedly has not turned over to the National Archives.
“I think you have to look at this in light of other Trump-related prosecutions. What I mean by that is in this case it’s the Presidential Records Act,” she argued.
McEnany cited George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley to point out the Presidential Records Act of 1978 has rarely been used for criminal prosecution.
GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley: Biden FBI’s raid was “heavy-handed” and “unprecedented” pic.twitter.com/44eBN2xUpI
“You look at Paul Manafort who was the [2016] campaign manager for Donald Trump. It was a [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violation they pursued. FARA has been used seven times in 50 years, but it’s brought out against Paul Manafort, this despite there being rampant FARA violations: 62 percent of people admitting they report late,” McEnany, a Harvard Law School graduate, said.
The DOJ Office of Inspector General released a report in September 2016 finding that “62 percent of initial registrations were untimely.”
“And then the Logan Act, used against Michael Flynn,” McEnany said. “This is a 1799 statute that has never in the history of this country been used to successfully prosecute anyone, but it’s used as a pretext to go in and look at Michael Flynn.”
“Why are never before used statutes or rarely used statutes in those contexts being used in this manner?” she asked.
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz argued in a Tuesday opinion piece in The Hill that if the DOJ wanted documents from Trump, prosecutors should have made the case to a grand jury to obtain a subpoena specifying the materials to be seized.
“Instead, the FBI apparently seized everything in view and will sort the documents and other material without a court’s deciding which ones are appropriately subject to Justice Department seizure,” Dershowitz wrote.
.@alandersh: “I don’t think you use search warrants and prosecutions to go after political enemies”
“Defenders of the raid argue that the search warrant was issued by a judge,” he added. “Yet every criminal defense lawyer knows that search warrants are issued routinely and less critically than candy is distributed on Halloween; judges rarely exercise real discretion or real supervision. It may be different when a president’s home is the object of the search, but only time will tell whether that was the case here.”
Dershowitz pointed out no such raids were conducted on Hillary Clinton’s or former Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger’s homes, when they were accused of mishandling classified documents.
“It is true that a president or former president is not above the law — but neither should he or she be below the law. Precedents established in relation to Democrats must be equally applied to Republicans. On the face of it, this standard has not been met here,” he wrote.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News Tuesday, “In my view, this is a raid that will go down in infamy. The Biden administration has crossed the Rubicon in terms of attacking President Trump and their political opponents by misusing law enforcement.”
“I tell you the FBI and the Justice Department can’t be trusted and should be thoroughly reformed, and frankly, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think they’re redeemable at this point.”
There’s reason to suspect that the FBI search of the Florida residence of former President Donald Trump was improperly intrusive, according to several lawyers. The raid prompted a rebuke from Trump and Republicans more broadly and further escalated political tensions in the nation.
About two dozen FBI agents entered Trump’s Palm Beach resort of Mar-a-Lago at about 9 a.m. on Aug. 8 and left about 10 hours later with “a handful of boxes of documents,” one of Trump’s attorneys on the scene, Christina Bobb, told Insight.
“I didn’t actually get to oversee the search, they wouldn’t let anybody see what they were doing,” she said.
It isn’t clear what legal basis the FBI had for the raid. The agents had a search warrant signed by a judge. However, the affidavit explaining the basis—its probable cause—was filed under seal, and Trump’s lawyers weren’t allowed to examine it, Bobb said.
In general, the agents were looking for “what they deemed to be presidential records,” she said.
“I don’t think there was anything of substance.”
Trump’s legal team will take steps to obtain the affidavit, according to Bobb.
There has been a dispute between the National Archives and Trump about whether he has documents that should be stored at the archives under the U.S. Presidential Records Act.
Trump has been cooperative on that front and had previously invited the FBI to Mar-a-Lago to examine the White House records he had in storage at the time, Bobb said.
“Nothing had been hidden, and nothing had been kept secret from them, which makes this all the more ridiculous,” she said.
Potentially Illegal
“I’m stunned and dismayed,” Marc Ruskin, a 27-year FBI veteran and former federal prosecutor, told Insight. “The disregard for traditional norms and apparent lack of concern with the appearance of impropriety is indicative of an abandonment of even a veneer of independence and objectivity.”
Former federal prosecutor Mike Davis went even further, saying the raid may have been illegally invasive.
“Under the case law, you can’t do a home raid if you can secure the documents through less intrusive means,” he told “Bannon’s War Room” on Aug. 9.
The FBI had to first determine that requests for the documents or even subpoenas wouldn’t be sufficient, said Davis, who formerly advised Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on judicial nominations and now heads The Article III Project.
“There’s zero evidence” that Trump wouldn’t have cooperated, he said.
“There was no allegation or evidence that he [Trump] was destroying any of this evidence or putting it into the wrong hands. This is banana republic-level tactics from the Biden Justice Department.”
Even if Trump took classified documents, he took possession of them when he was still chief executive and had the authority to declassify them, according to Davis.
Bobb suggested that the invocation of classified documents was a disingenuous attempt of “shrouding this in a national security blanket.”
“They don’t want to disclose what they’re doing, because what they’re doing is wrong. And so they want to hide it behind the premise of ‘Oh, it’s a matter of national security and classified documents, so we can’t disclose to you what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. But just trust us. We’re not lying to you,’” she said. “Well, no, the American people aren’t going to stand for that anymore.”
Even if the DOJ tried to charge Trump with withholding documents, it wouldn’t hold up because the statute in question requires a “willful” violation, and Trump would have had to have “some malicious intent” to take specific documents, according to Bobb.
“They would have to lay the foundation that Donald Trump actually packed up his own office” or ordered somebody what specifically to take, she said.
History of Missing Documents
If Trump had documents that should go to the archives, it would add him to a lineup of former government officials.
Former FBI Director James Comey took his handwritten notes when he was fired by Trump in 2017. His home wasn’t raided. He handed the notes to FBI agents who came to interview him.
The Obama administration didn’t just fail to hand over documents, tens of thousands of its documents went missing or were destroyed. No homes were raided.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to hand over tens of thousands of emails and documents from her server, claiming that they were of a personal nature. The FBI was able to retrieve some of the documents, revealing that many were work-related. Moreover, the documents were under congressional subpoena at the time when a Clinton aide deleted them.
Immediate Skepticism
The raid prompted an immediate wave of skepticism, particularly because the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have a history of breaking protocol, misrepresentations, and even forging evidence in their case against Trump and members of his campaign.
“After six years of unfounded, absurd investigations of President Trump, the presumption is that any investigation of President Trump is politically motivated, and the burden of proof is on FBI/DOJ to prove otherwise,” Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Internet Accountability Project, wrote in an Aug. 9 Twitter post.
In 2017, the FBI and DOJ obtained two extensions of a spying warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page even though the warrant was based on false or unsubstantiated allegations. The FBI later acknowledged that spying based on the extensions was illegal.
The FBI also has a history of harsh treatment of people associated with Trump. His aides have been arrested at gunpoint, handcuffed, and “perp-walked,” and their homes and offices have been raided in pursuit of trivial or nonviolent offenses, even when the targets were cooperating with the government.
Shoe on the Other Foot
The Trump raid increased the already polarized political playing field, as Republicans can now argue that home raids of former presidents are acceptable.
“They’re setting a very dangerous precedent where you can do a home raid of a former president of the United States,” Davis said, noting that such a thing has never happened “in our 250 years as a republic.”
Already, Republican lawmakers are promising to subject the DOJ and the FBI to intense scrutiny, with the expectation of reclaiming the majority in the House after the November midterms.
“When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 8 statement. “Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”
Judge’s Epstein Connection
The search warrant was issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in the Southern District of Florida. Reinhart was a senior prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida when the office reached a nonprosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, who was later indicted for sex trafficking children and died by apparent suicide in a New York jail.
Upon leaving office, Reinhart went into private practice and represented multiple Epstein associates and employees in civil cases against Epstein by his alleged victims.
Reinhart was appointed a magistrate judge in 2018 by the district judges in the Southern District of Florida.
The warrant was issued on Aug. 5, the day after FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee and was questioned about multiple whistleblower reports alleging the politicization of the bureau. Wray cut the questioning short because he said he had to urgently travel. Flight records indicate he flew in the FBI private jet to his vacation retreat in the Adirondacks, according to New York Post columnist Miranda Devine.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the time around which the search of Donald Trump’s residence started. The raid started at about 9 a.m. Insight regrets the error.
Update: The article has been updated with a comment from Marc Ruskin.
Judge Bruce Reinhart – who is reportedly the most likely judge behind the warrant authorizing a raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar A Lago estate – is a former attorney who represented employees of convicted sex offender and notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, The National Pulse can reveal.
The National Pulse can also reveal that Judge Reinhart has donated to the campaigns of former President Barack Obama and to the establishment opponents of Donald J. Trump during the 2016 election, including Jeb Bush.
Politico – the news outlet closest linked to the establishment in Washington, D.C. – named Reinhart in their morning playbook e-mail on Tuesday, 9th August 2022:
POLITICO FINGERS REINHART
As reported by the Miami Herald, Judge Reinhart began representing Epstein’s employees on January 2nd, 2008, just one day after departing the U.S. Attorney’s Office where he served as an assistant U.S. attorney closely involved on the convicted pedophile’s case.
Accused of leveraging “inside information about Epstein’s investigation to curry favor with Epstein,” in 2011, he was named as a prosecutor who allegedly violated the rights of an underage girl whom Epstein solicited sex from in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit.
Reinhart appears to have exploited his role in the U.S. Attorney’s Office to launch a private criminal defense practice, according to the Miami Herald:
“On Oct 23, 2007, as federal prosecutors in South Florida were in the midst of tense negotiations to finalize a plea deal with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a senior prosecutor in their office was quietly laying out plans to leave the U.S. attorney’s office after 11 years. “On that date, as emails were flying between Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors, Bruce E. Reinhart, now a federal magistrate, opened a limited liability company in Florida that established what would become his new criminal defense practice.”
Reinhart insisted that he never represented Epstein himself — “only Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, described by some victims as Epstein’s sex slave.”
Reinhart has also participated in Newsmax interviews, appearing to defend Epstein by downplaying allegations of the financier and his associates soliciting underage prostitutes.
Reinhart donated twice to Obama’s campaign in 2008 totaling $2,000. Reinhart, who was appointed U.S. magistrate in March 2018, also donated to the campaign of Trump rival Jeb Bush in 2015.
FEC RECORDS.
The unearthed links come as Reinhart is believed to have signed off on a warrant responsible for the raid on Trump’s Palm Beach estate. A “source said FBI agents obtained a search warrant from a federal magistrate judge in West Palm Beach,” reports the Miami Herald.
Politico explained that of the three magistrate judges in that office, two recent warrant applications, both of which were assigned to Reinhart, were entered into the system on Monday. The subject of the warrants, however, remains sealed.
It would be difficult to find mainland U.S. Congressional districts much further away from each other than Washington’s 3rd District, in the far Southwest Corner of the state and Florida’s 7th District, which hugs Florida’s East Central Coast. But the swamp reaches everywhere in America, and these two districts are now inextricably linked by the shady tactics of the GOP establishment, working to defeat conservative candidates on behalf of Kevin McCarthy, alongside pro-impeachment forces and a compliant herd of RINOs they control.
McCarthy – a failed leader and an expert at talking out of both sides of his mouth – claims to be outraged about the deep state’s war against Trump and the conservative grassroots while he simultaneously works in the shadows to direct millions of dollars to anti-Trump, establishment candidates like those opposing Green Beret Joe Kent and Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini.
Grassroots favorite Kent – Gold Star husband and recipient of six bronze stars who was endorsed by Trump in Washington’s 3rd Congressional district – thrilled grassroots Republicans by narrowly toppling pro-impeachment Republican incumbent Jamie Herrera Beutler in a huge comeback, after trailing badly on election night.
Kent triumphed despite millions of dollars of establishment money being spent to defeat him. The night he took the lead for good in the GOP primary, Kent appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, renewing his call for a fundamental reining in of the deep state and intelligence agencies that had just conspired to raid Mar a Lago, the curbing of which he had made a centerpiece of his congressional campaign.
Even as the vote was still being counted, Kent sounded the alarm on Twitter about the same cast of characters that spent more than $4 million in dark money attempting to defeat him now targeting Sabatini, another grassroots conservative favorite who is currently leading the race in Florida’s open seat 7th Congressional district (August 23rd primary).
“The left uses dark money to seize the levers of power,” he tweeted in response to the news that a mysterious dark money firm, with the same financial backers and structure that had targeted him, was going after his friend and political ally. “Look at Soros Zuck etc. The right uses dark money against candidates who want to fight back against the left. Send @anthonysabatini whatever support you can. They are coming for him because he’s fighting for us.”
The left uses dark money to seize levers of power, look at Soros, Zuck etc, the right uses dark money against candidates who want to fight back against the left.
Kent’s victory was indeed remarkable. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, widely considered the nation’s leading guru on redistricting and elections, described Herrera-Beutler early in the campaign as a lock to make it to the general election. Thanks to Trump and a grassroots push, she failed.
But the swamp plays for keeps , and nothing enrages them like a loss. They thought they had won in Washington State on election night, where Herrera Beutler had a large lead against Kent, only to watch it wither away over the following days as Pro-Trump election day votes were counted. The establishment had spent more than $4 million in late, dirty, DC money to attempt rescue Herrera Beutler, one third of which went directly to boost her, one third of which went to attack Kent and one third of which went to split the grassroots vote by boosting a fake alternative to Herrera Beutler who reneged on a pledge to exit the race.
Sabatini, the latest target of the establishment’s ire, is a strongly pro-Trump and pro-DeSantis America First candidate and military veteran who, like Kent, has crusaded against the nation-building wars that the GOP establishment and Democrats combine on to fleece American taxpayers. He’s been the strongest and most outspoken voice in the Florida legislature on everything from critical race theory (CRT) to immigration and has been described as the most pro-Trump member of the Florida legislature.
Sabatini has led in the public polling in the race, and the money (more than $600,000 so far, with doubtless more to come) has been timed, as it was with Kent, so that the donors do not need to disclose their names until after the primary election. Sabatini is hoping that the grassroots energy that has powered his campaign will provide him with sufficient funding to hold on against the onslaught.
In a brief interview, Sabatini encouraged patriotic conservatives to “raise the volume” of their protests against the establishment, claiming that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and to make sure they let their friends in Florida’s 7th district know the national importance of the race.
“The war within the Republican party now determines what the GOP will do in the future, and the establishment is hiding in the shadows and playing every dirty trick in the book. The real fight is in the primary.”
Sabatini is cautiously optimistic for a late Trump endorsement (it helps that he leads in the polls and counts Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz in his corner). Florida political operatives are confident this would put him over the top—but Trump’s attention has to this point been focused on going after explicitly pro-impeachment representatives and other major Trump critics, while Sabatini’s top opponents are ciphers with no record to stand on.
“The Republican establishment wants 22 to be a referendum against America 1st. They want controlled, weak Republicans who vote as they are told.” said Joe Kent in a tweet thread late in the primary campaign.
The Republican establishment wants 22’ to be a referendum against America 1st, they want controlled weak republicans who vote as they are told.
In the last week 2.5 million has been spent against me b/c I’m leading in the polls & Beutler might not make the top 2.
“They’re looking for presidential records, what they deemed to be presidential records, and anything that could potentially be classified,” Christina Bobb, the lawyer, told The Epoch Times on Aug. 9.
“We had been very cooperative with them before. And it’s unclear to me why they went to such drastic measures to do this. But they did. And as far as the probable cause goes, they wouldn’t give that to us,” she added.
In mid-January, the National Archives and Records Administration arranged for the transport from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives 15 boxes that the archives said contained presidential records. Under the Presidential Records Act, the records should have been transferred in January 2021 as Trump left office, and some of the boxes contained classified information, the institution said in a statement at the time. The administration did not return an inquiry on Tuesday.
Approximately two dozen FBI agents arrived around 9 a.m. on Monday morning and remained at Mar-a-Lago, which is in West Palm Beach, for about 10 hours.
Agents initially resisted showing Bobb the warrant but ultimately did. But the agents would not allow any representatives of the former president to oversee the search, Bobb said. The justification for the search also remains under seal. Trump’s legal team plans on asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to unseal the search warrant affidavit, which would outline why authorities asked for the warrant.
“We don’t know what the probable cause is. I don’t think there is a good cause to do such a drastic thing. But they did,” Bobb said.
The FBI has declined to comment. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have not returned requests for comment. The White House has said the DOJ is independent and that Joe Biden and others in the White House were not notified of the raid ahead of time.
‘Peaceful’
Agents kept Mar-a-Lago neat while they were searching for documents, with one even picking up trash, according to Bobb. The agents “took a handful of boxes of documents,” she said.
“I don’t think that there was anything incriminating. I don’t think there was anything of substance. So I’m sure that they will say otherwise. But we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with, but it was all paper. I hear the conspiracy theories and the rumors that there were other artifacts or something taken—it was all paper,” she said.
Agents previously visited the resort in June, and were given access to a storage facility there, according to Bobb. “Nothing had been hidden and nothing had been kept secret from them, which makes this all more all the more ridiculous,” she said.
“Donald Trump didn’t commit a crime,” Bobb said, adding that prosecutors would not be able to show that Donald Trump knew about the boxes the FBI took.
“They would have to lay the foundation that Donald Trump actually packed up his own office, and Donald Trump was actually the custodian of these records, and that he actually moved them,” she said.
If the DOJ decides to press charges against Trump, then the effort would not get very far, she predicted.
“I just don’t see it making a bit of difference. I think President Trump is going to most likely run for reelection,” she said. “I can’t wait until he does. And he will be the next President of the United States.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other GOP leaders have responded to an FBI search of the 45th President’s Florida Mar-a-Lago home after former president Donald Trump said it was “currently under siege, raided, and occupied” on Aug. 8.
Decrying the alleged raid in a post on his social media app, Truth Social, Trump said, “these are dark times for our Nation.”
“After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” he said.
Taking to Twitter following Trump’s post, Republican leaders condemned the alleged raid, with several warning that such a move could set a dangerous precedent, while others accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Justice Department for political purposes.
Pompeo, the former secretary of state under Trump, said that executing a warrant against a former president of the United States was a “dangerous” precedent to set.
“The apparent political weaponization of DOJ/FBI is shameful. AG must explain why 250 yrs of practice was upended with this raid,” Pompeo wrote. “I served on Benghazi Com where we proved Hilliary (sic) possessed classified info. We didn’t raid her home.”
A car passes in front of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Feb. 11, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The raid is mostly likely connected to an investigation regarding Trump’s handling of official papers. His lawyer, Christina Bobb, confirmed with CNN on Monday night that the FBI had seized documents during their search at his Mar-a-Lago home.
The FBI is directed by Christopher Wray who was appointed by Trump.
‘Banana Republic’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the raid of Trump’s home represents “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents,” while noting that people like Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden “get treated with kid gloves.”
Hunter Biden is currently under federal investigation for alleged tax fraud, lobbying crimes, and money laundering in a probe dating back to as early as 2018.
“Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic,” DeSantis said.
Elsewhere, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) noted on Twitter that the midterm elections aren’t far off. Trump has hinted that he will run for president again in 2024, and teased last week that he could make an official announcement soon, either before or after the November elections.
“Time will tell regarding this most recent investigation. However, launching such an investigation of a former President this close to an election is beyond problematic,” Graham wrote.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) questioned why the FBI had declined to raid the homes of previous administrations, including the Clintons and Obama.
“Bill and Hillary Clinton took $28,000 worth of furnishings from the White House. Obama violated the Presidential Records Act. Why did the FBI not raid their houses? This is a political witch hunt to take down President Trump,” the GOP lawmaker said.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump address guests at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Jan. 20, 2021. (ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the House, said in a statement that the justice department had reached “an intolerable state of weaponized politicization” and vowed that, when Republicans take back the House, they will “conduct immediate oversight of the department, follow the facts and leave no stone unturned.”
“Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” he added.
‘Start With Hunter Biden’s Laptop’
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) also said on Twitter that the FBI raid on Trump’s home was “unprecedented and highly concerning,” and that “if the FBI is looking for classified info or incriminating evidence, they should start with Hunter Biden’s laptop.” He added the hashtag “#Demdoublestandard.”
Meanwhile, Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Countless times we have examples of Democrats flouting the law and abusing power with no recourse.”
“Democrats continually weaponize the bureaucracy against Republicans. This raid is outrageous. This abuse of power must stop and the only way to do that is to elect Republicans in November,” McDaniel added.
The FBI has declined to comment to The Epoch Times on the alleged raid.
While GOP lawmakers condemned the move, the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump PAC, alleged in a statement that the raid is a “positive sign that Donald Trump may be brought to justice for the myriad of criminal offenses committed by him and his family while President.”
“Never before has a former President’s home been raided in a criminal probe. While this search warrant is seemingly for the mishandling of classified material, it is a serious crime that must be fully investigated,” the group said, adding that the raid is the “first step for law enforcement, or Congress, of holding Donald Trump accountable for the orchestration of a conspiracy to remain in power that resulted in the January 6th attack on our nation’s capital.”
Trump expressed anger at the move, alleging in his Monday statement that it was part of the “political persecution” that has been targeting him now for years “with the now fully debunked Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, and so much more, it just never ends. It is political targeting at the highest level!” he wrote.
“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries,” Trump added. “Sadly, America has now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.”
Heather Lang steps down after allegations that Morningstar subsidiary blacklists companies that do business in Israel
A senior executive at the ratings giant Sustainalytics—who spent years working at an anti-Israel advocacy group—announced last week that she is stepping down amid scrutiny of the company’s reliance on sources that critics say lead to bias and discrimination against Israeli companies.
Heather Lang, a onetime official at the anti-Israel activist organization B’Tselem, announced last week her departure as a senior vice president at Sustainalytics, a subsidiary of the corporate-ratings giant Morningstar, after 18 years at the company.
“Tomorrow is my last day at Sustainalytics after an incredible 18-year journey!” wrote Lang in a social media post last week. “It’s been an absolute privilege to work with such wonderful colleagues and friends.”
The news comes as Sustainalytics—one of the major ratings agencies that score companies based on their environmental, social, and governance practices—has facedallegations that its scoring system is biased against Israel and that it downgrades companies that help the Jewish state’s national security operations. Prior to joining Sustainalytics, Lang worked at B’Tselem, a self-described human rights group that asserts that “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations,” according to its website. NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that monitors Middle East organizations, describes B’Tselem as “part of a network of NGOs that promote artificial and manufactured definitions of apartheid to extend the ongoing campaigns that seek to delegitimize and demonize Israel.”
Morningstar enlisted law firm White & Case to conduct an internal investigation into potential anti-Israel bias at Sustainalytics. This came after the Illinois Investment Policy Board, a state commission, launched a probe into whether the company was in violation of Illinois laws against anti-Israel boycotts.
Lang’s presence at Sustainalytics raises questions about the neutrality of its executives, a week after the Missouri attorney general launched an investigation into allegations of anti-Israel bias at the ratings giant.
Lang did not indicate that her departure is related to the investigation or allegations of bias. But Israel advocates said the company should be cautious about anti-Israel activism among its leadership.
“If Morningstar is serious about rooting out anti-Israel bias in their ranks, it would behoove them to ensure no more of their officers have a history of demonizing the Jewish state,” a former Israeli government official told the Washington Free Beacon.
Sustainalytics referred a request for comment to Morningstar. Morningstar declined to comment on Lang’s departure, telling the Free Beacon that the company “does not support the anti-Israel BDS movement. Matters related to an individual’s employment are confidential.”
According to an online biography of Lang, posted by a conference at which she spoke, she previously worked as a “corporate social responsibility consultant and spent several years living in Israel, working for leading human rights watchdog organization B’Tselem.”
While at B’Tselem, Lang was the editor of the group’s 1999 Human Rights Report, which accused Israel of various humanitarian abuses, including blocking water from Palestinians and discriminatory deportations.
Lang’s prior work for B’Tselem was not mentioned in the White & Case probe.
According to the White & Case investigation, Sustainalytics has relied on research from Who Profits, a group that supports boycott campaigns against Israel.
Dem donor Lauri Strauss is behind debate that will allow Dem candidate to debate empty podium
A Joe Biden donor is the organizer behind a U.S. Senate debate in Georgia that will allow Democratic senator Raphael Warnock to symbolically debate an empty podium after Republican challenger Herschel Walker turned down the invitation.
Atlanta Press Club director Lauri Strauss, who is organizing the debate, and at least three other members of the group’s board have donated thousands to Democrats, including Biden, Georgia Democratic senator Jon Ossoff—and Warnock himself.
Strauss in 2020 donated $173 to Biden and $35 to Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), according to campaign finance records. Strauss is the organizer of the press club debate and personally extended the group’s invitation to Walker, according to an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
“Mr. Walker’s opponent has confirmed his participation in our debate, and we hope to have your confirmation as well,” wrote Strauss in a June 21 email to Walker’s campaign. “I look forward to hearing back from you.”
News of the donations comes after Walker declined to attend the debate, citing political bias at the Atlanta Press Club. The contributions could fuel criticism of the organization, which has said it will allow Warnock at the Oct. 16 event to debate with an empty podium symbolizing Walker’s absence. If one candidate does not show up, having the other candidate debate an empty podium is a long-standing policy for the APC.
Walker’s campaign has agreed to participate in a different debate hosted by Nexstar Media Group on Oct. 14, which Warnock declined.
“We’re not going to be bullied by their thinly veiled threat of an empty podium—because it’s not a podium, it’s a campaign prop. So we’re leaving the elite media behind and rejecting the partisan Press Club debate,” said Scott Paradise, Walker’s campaign manager, in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.
Other members of the Atlanta Press Club’s board also appear to be Democratic donors, according to campaign finance records. Keith Pepper in 2020 donated over $2,500 to Warnock and over $500 to Ossoff. Rene Alegria donated $500 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, $250 to Biden, and $60 to Ossoff. Deisha Barnett donated $500 to Warnock.
The Atlanta Press Club did not respond to a request for comment.
Strauss told the Free Beacon that she “made donations to Joe Biden and Mark Kelly in 2020, both of whom are longtime family friends.” But she said she has not contributed to any Georgia candidates and added that the other board members “do not have anything to do with our debates.”
She also said the Atlanta Press Club is “proud of our reputation [for] holding balanced and fair debates for all candidates” for the past 30 years and said the debate series was funded by an endowment from the late Charlie Loudermilk, a Republican philanthropist who passed away last week.
Former Georgia congressman and House speaker Newt Gingrich, a surrogate for Walker, told the Free Beacon the donations are an indication of the group’s political slant.
“Herschel Walker is exactly right to reject the Atlanta Press Club debate proposal as many of its leadership donated to Democrats, including radical-left Senator Warnock,” said Gingrich. “They are a one-sided, biased organization. Walker should continue to insist on open fair debates in front of Georgians. Let Warnock hide behind his liberal media supporters.”
Florida Democrat Charlie Crist hired Jack Cocchiarella after college Dems chapter ousted young activist over troubling allegations
Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s (R.) top Democratic opponent paid thousands of dollars to a young liberal activist who is facing “campus-wide allegations of sexual assault” at his former Ivy League school.
On July 8, Democrat Charlie Crist’s gubernatorial campaign paid $2,250 to Politically Correct Strategies—a consulting company registered to Gen Z liberal activist and former Dartmouth student Jack Cocchiarella—for “digital consulting.” Just weeks later, on July 28, the prestigious school’s College Democrats chapter revealed it ousted Cocchiarella from the club “in late October 2021, following campus-wide allegations of sexual assault.” Those allegations emerged publicly in a string of December 2021 Redditposts, which accused Cocchiarella of using “his Twitter notoriety and left-wing credentials to position himself as an ally. Then, once people let their guards down, he rapes them.”
Crist, who did not return repeated requests for comment, has remained silent on the accusations facing his campaign aide. By his own logic, that silence means he endorses Cocchiarella’s alleged behavior—in a June 29 tweet, Crist pressed DeSantis to condemn the January 6 riots, writing, “Is it just me, or do you agree that his silence = endorsement?”
Crist is not the only prominent Democrat to hire Cocchiarella following the troubling allegations. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R., Ga.) Democratic opponent, Marcus Flowers, has paid Cocchiarella’s firm more than $40,000 since October 2021, when the activist announced his “new role” as Flowers’s digital director.
Flowers has his own alleged issues with women. In July 2016, the Democrat attempted to dump his ex-wife—Russian national Svetlana Chudinova—at a local homeless shelter, court documents reported by the New Republic show. Flowers did not dispute the incident and instead defended his attempt to offload Chudinova, saying he “felt she had a personality disorder that was not previously disclosed.” In turn, Chudinova accused Flowers of threatening to strike her.
Flowers’s campaign did not return multiple requests for comment.
Cocchiarella, whose Twitter account boasts more than 250,000 followers and includes a photo of the activist smiling alongside Joe Biden, enrolled as a Dartmouth freshman during the 2021-22 school year. While it’s unclear what specific “digital consulting” services he provided Crist, Cocchiarella publicly endorsed the former governor over fellow DeSantis challenger Nikki Fried (D.) just days after Crist’s campaign paid him.
Flowers, meanwhile, routinely replies to Cocchiarella’s tweets to solicit campaign contributions. In October 2021, he called the young activist “an outstanding young man.” In addition to his work with Crist and Flowers, Cocchiarella has collaborated with the Lincoln Project, an anti-Republican super PAC founded by disgraced sexual predator John Weaver.
Cocchiarella reduced his public presence as allegations against him swirled. A notoriously avid Twitter user, Cocchiarella did not send an original tweet for more than a week after Dartmouth College Democrats confirmed the “campus-wide allegations,” instead opting to populate his feed by sharing posts from liberal politicians and journalists. The activist has also blocked users who raised the allegations in his replies.
Cocchiarella during an Aug. 1 podcast appearance did, however, confirm his decision to transfer from Dartmouth to fellow Ivy League school Columbia. The activist did not discuss why he opted to leave Dartmouth after just one year at the college and is yet to publicly address the allegations leveled against him.
Cocchiarella, Dartmouth College Democrats, and Dartmouth’s Title IX office did not return requests for comment.
Kirsten Engel’s support for leftist groups could alienate voters
An Arizona Democrat hoping to flip a Republican-held House seat promoted the radical immigration group whose members chased Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) into a bathroom, among other left-wing activists.
Kirsten Engel, a law professor at the University of Arizona, raved about her meeting with Living United for Change in Arizona, praising the pro-immigration group’s “efforts to help register voters.” Activists with the pro-immigration group stalked and filmed Sinema in a bathroom last year in protest over her opposition to a $3.5 trillion spending bill. The group has also called for called for the Phoenix city council to defund the city’s police department.
This was only the latest instance where Engel boosted radical progressive groups. As a state senator in 2020, Engel urged Democrats to “consider donating to, getting involved with, and learning from” several left-wing organizations to advance the Black Lives Matter cause, including the Minnesota Freedom Fund and Showing Up For Racial Justice.
The Freedom Fund has come under scrutiny for posting bail for violent criminals, including a domestic abuser later charged with murder. Showing Up For Racial Justice, a coalition of white civil rights activists, publishes a “defund the police toolkit” and supports other drastic reforms to the criminal justice system. Engel said in support of the groups that it was up to “white Americans” to “commit ourselves to unlearning the racism all around us so we can dismantle it in our institutions.”
Engel’s support for the anti-police groups could complicate Democrats’ efforts to flip Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, a seat that is crucial to maintaining majority control of the House. Engel, who left the state senate last year, will face Republican nominee Juan Ciscomani in November’s general election. Rep. David Schweikert (R.), who currently represents the sixth district, is running in Arizona’s first district after the state’s congressional maps were redrawn.
Engel, who touts her criminal justice reform efforts on the campaign trail, endorsed the Minnesota Freedom Fund and Showing Up For Racial Justice in a June 2020 call-to-action decrying “state-sponsored violence” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
“The broader public is finally becoming aware of the racist violence at the hands of law enforcement that has been so devastating to our brothers and sisters in the Black community,” wrote Engel.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund raised tens of millions of dollars in donations thanks to the help of Democrats like Engel and Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris called on her followers to “chip in now” to contribute to the fund in order to pay for bail for protesters arrested at anti-police protests. Christina Bohannan, the Democratic nominee for a House seat in Iowa, also solicited contributions for the Freedom Fund, the Washington Free Beaconreported.
The Freedom Fund paid the bail for relatively few protesters, and instead used most of its money to free inmates arrested on other charges. The fund helped free a domestic abuser, George Howard, who was later arrested on murder charges in a road rage incident. Another bail recipient, Timothy Wayne Columbus, was freed while in jail on charges of sexually molesting an 8-year-old girl.
Engel’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
‘I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,’ Rep. Cori Bush (D.) told reporters
Joe Biden, whose average approval rating sits at just 39.6 percent, insists Democratic voters want him to seek reelection in 2024. Several members of Biden’s own party, however, are refusing to back the 79-year-old president.
“I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,” Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.) told reporters last month when asked whether she would back Biden in the next presidential election.
Multimillionaire Michael Bennet is working to cast himself as an outdoorsman. It may be a hard sell.
Sen. Michael Bennet’s (D., Colo.) latest reelection ad depicts him clad in outdoor gear, casting a fly fishing line into the Arkansas River. But the multimillionaire businessman isn’t exactly a regular fisherman, local records suggest. The campaign obtained a one-day fishing license in order to shoot the ad, according to Axios.
The new ad is the second in the last month featuring Bennet enjoying Colorado’s outdoors and a clear attempt to shake the image that the two-term lawmaker is a wealthy, D.C. insider.
“The worst sin any candidate can do is come across as insincere and phony and I think Bennet comes close to doing that,” said Colorado Republican strategist Dick Wadhams. “He’s going to have to answer for that on the campaign.”
Bennet’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Bennet, who has seen his net worth increase by the millions during his time in the Senate, is running for reelection against former carpenter and construction CEO Joe O’Dea. Republicans are optimistic that Biden’s historically low approval rating has made Bennet’s seat competitive. According to FiveThirtyEight, Bennet votes with Biden 98 percent of the time.
O’Dea’s campaign is working to characterize Bennet as a lawmaker who left his home state to profit off his position as a senator. As average Coloradans struggle to pay for groceries, O’Dea’s campaign said in a recent Tweet, Bennet is checking “his stock portfolio.”
Bennet’s net worth is valued up to $31 million, his financial disclosure forms show. A considerable amount of that money is located in Cayman Islands hedge funds, those same forms state, making a detailed accounting difficult. Bennet has also set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment funds for his children.
The fly fishing guide featured with Bennet in the ad is not exactly a regular small businessman. Rather, he is Chaffee County commissioner Greg Felt, whom Colorado governor Jared Polis (D.) appointed in 2020 to the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Felt’s claim in the ad that he is “not a Democrat” is not entirely true, given that he voted as a Democrat in several election cycles starting in 2002, according to a review of Colorado’s voting records.
Bennet’s ad will air for two weeks across Colorado as part of a $1.2 million ad campaign launched in mid-July. None of his ads contain any references to Joe Biden or some of the landmark bills Bennet voted for, such as the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, which many economists say contributed to skyrocketing inflation.
The Free Beaconreported earlier this month that Bennet’s first ad misled voters on who funds his campaign. Bennet claims he does not accept campaign contributions from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists, despite his campaign finance records showing otherwise.
Bennet was appointed to his seat in 2009 after his predecessor, Ken Salazar, became secretary of the interior. He dropped out of the 2020 presidential race after receiving just 164 votes in the Iowa caucuses and fewer than 1,000 in the New Hampshire primary.
In June, Toyota warned buyers of its bZ4X electric SUV not to drive their vehicles for fear the wheels could fall off. Toyota said at the time the cause was a mystery, but it would look into the glitch.
Toyota has not yet found a solution to the problem and is offering to buy back the SUV from its owners, according to CNN.
“We know that our customers have many choices when it comes to purchasing a vehicle. We appreciate their loyalty and are supporting them through this recall,” Toyota said in a statement, according to The Verge. “However, if a customer does not want to proceed with the provided options, we will offer to repurchase their bZ4X.”
Plan B for owners who want to keep a vehicle they may never be able to drive is to have free use of another Toyota vehicle until such time as Toyota figures out what went wrong and how to fix it.
Toyota offers to buy back recalled bZ4X fully electric SUV from customers | A headline writer’s dream. Toyota’s first full #EV recalled and a buyback offer literally because the wheels keep falling off! How can a car maker get something so basic, so wrong? https://t.co/lDJo4u43Zrpic.twitter.com/n9lcYPTgIo
As part of that deal, Toyota will pay $5,000 toward an owner’s car payments or as a partial refund. Toyota also said that it will extend the factory warranty on the bZ4X by whatever length of time it becomes before an owner gets her or his vehicle back, according to CNN.
The offer for those who do not sell their vehicle back also includes free EV charging once the owners get the vehicle back and the cost of gasoline for their loaner, according to Autoweek.
It was unclear in the announcement how owners of the vehicle, whose price starts at $43,215, would handle dealer markups, according to Car and Driver.
In June, the company announced that all 2,700 of its new electric bZ4X SUVs were a danger to their drivers, with only 260 to date having been delivered in the United States.
“After low-mileage use, all of the hub bolts on the wheel can loosen to the point where the wheel can detach from the vehicle,” Toyota said in a June 23 statement on its website.
“If a wheel detaches from the vehicle while driving, it could result in a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash,” the company said. “The cause of the issue and the driving patterns under which this issue could occur are still under investigation. No one should drive these vehicles until the remedy is performed,” Toyota said.
“No remedy is available at this time,” Toyota said in its June release.
Toyota’s somehow gone from “The best built cars in the world” to “The hub bolts loosen which may cause a wheel to fall off, & almost two months later we don’t know how to fix it”https://t.co/wOJjNc44pW
In a column for Bloomberg, Anjani Trivedi, who covers industrial companies in Asia, wrote, “If that’s the level of quality and safety traditional auto giants are willing to commit to, then investors and regulators should increase their scrutiny.”
The bZ4X debuted in Japan in June, according to CNBC.
The company’s president, Akio Toyoda, said in December that Toyota planned “to roll out 30 BEV models by 2030.”
“Toyota has been under pressure to up its game in EVs, so will be very disappointed that a recall has been necessary on its first mass-market electric cars,” David Leggett, automotive editor at GlobalData, told CNBC.
House GOP leaders have pledged to take action on the “weaponized politicization” of the Department of Justice (DOJ) “when Republicans take back the House” in the midterm elections, after federal agents raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Monday.
“I’ve seen enough,” House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in a statement late Monday. “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.”
“When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned,” McCarthy added.
“Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy’s comment came after the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Monday. Trump has characterized the raid as “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical left Democrats who desperately don’t want [him] to run for President in 2024.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Ranking Member on the House Judiciary Committee, which provides oversight over the DOJ, called on House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) to bring FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland onto the House floor for questioning on Friday.
“What was on the warrant? What were you really doing? What were you looking for? Why not talk to President Trump and have him give the information you’re after?” Jordan asked in an interview with Fox on Monday night. “We deserve answers now, and this Friday would be a good time.”
“Jerry Nadler: call up Christopher Wray, call up Merrick Garland, bring them in front of the House Judiciary Committee, so we ask them the questions that the American people deserve the answers to.”
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Minority Whip, called the raid the “weaponization of the FBI by Biden’s DOJ against his political opponent.”
“Let’s be clear: This is a brazen weaponization of the FBI by Biden’s DOJ against his political opponent—while giving their political allies free passes,” Scalise said in a statement published late Monday. “It’s exactly why the IRS shouldn’t get an army of 87,000 more agents.”
“House Republicans will hold them accountable next year,” the lawmaker added.
Rep. Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, called Monday “a dark day in American history” and said that the “political weaponization of the FBI and Department of Justice is an actual threat to democracy.”
“There is a reason that Americans no longer trust these agencies,” Stefanik said in a Monday statement. “This is the same corrupt agency that illegally fabricated FISA warrants, knowingly deceived Americans about Russian ‘collusion’ for years, and weaponized itself to perpetuate this hoax with their all-too-eager mainstream media accomplices.”
“There must be an immediate investigation and accountability into Joe Biden and his Administration’s weaponizing this department against their political opponents—the likely 2024 Republican candidate for President of the United States,” the congresswoman added.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), vice chair of the House Republican Conference and a part of Trump’s legal defense team during the Democrats’ 2019 attempted impeachment of Trump, said Biden and Garland “completely weaponized the DOJ” and “eroded the people’s faith in our system of justice.”
“Today’s raid on the former President’s home in the middle of an election season looks like another egregious & unprecedented abuse of power,” Johnson said in a statement on Monday.
“We will restore order & accountability as soon as we regain the gavels for a Republican majority in November. It can’t happen soon enough!” he added.
Former President Donald Trump said his Florida Mar-a-Lago home is “under siege” and “occupied by a group of FBI agents” in a statement late Aug. 8.
“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
“After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Trump said.
The FBI declined to comment on a press inquiry from The Epoch Times. Its parent agency, the Department of Justice (DOJ), did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb confirmed with CNN on Monday night that the FBI seized documents from Mar-a-Lago.
“President Trump and his legal team have been cooperative with FBI and DOJ officials every step of the way. The FBI did conduct an unannounced raid and seized paper,” Bobb said.
The alleged raid by the FBI came two days after Trump’s latest hint at a 2024 run, in which he stopped short of giving an official announcement.
“Well, it’s not a long period, regardless, whether you go before or after, certainly not a very long period of time,” the former president said when responding to questions from the press before he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, on Saturday.
“It’s coming,” Trump said, “and I think people are going to be very happy.”
“Our country has never been in a position like this. We lost everything. We’ve lost energy independence. We’ve lost our prestige. We’ve lost every single thing you can lose,” Trump said during the event, noting the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he previously called “the greatest tactical mistake in history,” and the border crisis.
A police car outside former President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 8, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
Lawmakers React
‘Weaponized’ Justice System
The 45th president said during his speech that he may be the “most persecuted” person in the history of America.
“A friend of mine recently said that I was the most persecuted person in the history of our country,” Trump said during his speech at CPAC. “And then I thought about it, because I didn’t have time to think much because I’m always being persecuted, and I felt he may very well be right.”
Trump called the raid “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want [him] to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls,” adding that Democrats “will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections.”
“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” Trump said.
During an America First Policy Institute event in July, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), who was part of Trump’s legal defense team during the Democrats’ 2019 attempted impeachment of Trump, told The Epoch Times in an interview that the Biden administration has completely “weaponized” the Department of Justice (DOJ).
By design, the American justice system “is a bulwark against tyranny,” Johnson said. “But if the Department of Justice, for example, is weaponized for political purposes—which is what we’re seeing right now in the Biden ministration—that jeopardizes that foundational pillar itself.”
“Today’s raid on the former President’s home in the middle of an election season looks like another egregious & unprecedented abuse of power,” Johnson said in a statement on Monday.
“We will restore order & accountability as soon as we regain the gavels for a Republican majority in November. It can’t happen soon enough!” Johnson added.
‘Third-World Marxist Dictatorship’
“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries,” Trump said in his Monday statement. “Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) echoed Trump’s comment.
“Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships,” Rubio said in a statement on Twitter late Monday. “But never before in America.
“After today[‘]s raid on Mar A Lago what do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents for?
“The FBI isn’t doing anything about the groups vandalizing Catholic Churches, firebombing Pro-Life groups or threatening Supreme Court justices. But they find time to raid Mar A Lago,” Rubio said.
Outcry from Republicans
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said in a statement on Monday: “The FBI raid on President Trump’s home is an unprecedented political weaponization of the Justice Department. They’ve been after President Trump as a candidate, as President, and now as a former President. Using the criminal justice system in this manner is un-American.”
“The DOJ & FBI are being weaponized like never before to target political opponents. This Admin has thrown the rule of law and faith in our democratic institutions out the door,” said Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) in a Monday Twitter post. “Joe Biden and Merrick Garland must answer immediately for today’s raid against an American president.”
“The inconsistent and partisan application of the law by the FBI has gone too far,” Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) said on Monday. “The Democrats, for too long, have used our government agencies from the FBI to the IRS to target their political opponents. This inconceivable raid is an attack on our Republic.”
“This action, a raid on a former President and political rival, is something we would expect from Putin on his rivals… not here, not in the USA,” Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.) said.
“The weaponization and politicalization of federal agencies is egregious and scary. These are Gestapo-like tactics. If the FBI can do this to President Trump, what do you think 87,000 new IRS agents will do to the American people?” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said. “Did Biden sign off on this raid? The American people deserve answers.”
“I stood up to America’s bureaucratic corruption, I restored power to the people, and truly delivered for our Country, like we have never seen before. The establishment hated it,” Trump said in his Monday statement.
“Now, as they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories, and see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop me, and the Republican Party, once more. The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt must be exposed and stopped,” Trump said.
“I will continue to fight for the Great American People!”
Posts shared on Facebook that claim the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) classified monkeypox as an airborne virus, it can cause paralysis, and can last months are false, officials said.
Facebook posts containing the claims reviewed by The Epoch Times show they both have a BBC News logo and credit the World Health Organization and CDC. One of the posts says, “CDC has now classified this disease as airborne and anyone within 15 feet can catch it,” while it adds that it is now being classified as a form of herpes, the illness can last up to four months, and it can lead to paralyzation.
Under the Facebook post, some said the information is fake and one said that it’s “trying to scare us to take more vaccine shots.” The person added, “Only way it can spread is through contact from someone who has it, kissing, sex, cuddling.”
A spokesperson for the BBC told Reuters and The Associated Press the news outlet did not make the images. A spokesperson for the CDC told the Associated Press that the post’s claims “are not correct.”
The CDC, WHO, and other health organizations have not classified monkeypox as “airborne,” and they have said it spreads via close, prolonged contact from one person to another person. Homosexual males are the primary spreaders of the virus, officials say.
CDC spokesperson Kate Fowlie told AP that the virus “is not known to linger in the air and is not transmitted during short periods of shared airspace.” She added, “In the current monkeypox outbreak, we know that those with the disease generally describe close, sustained physical contact with other people who are infected with the virus.”
Transmission is primarily through skin-to-skin contact, and “direct contact with monkeypox rash, scabs, or body fluids from a person with monkeypox,” according to the CDC website.
“Touching objects, fabrics (clothing, bedding, or towels), and surfaces that have been used by someone” infected with monkeypox can also transmit the virus, the agency says.
Paralysis is not generally associated with monkeypox, according to health agencies, and the virus doesn’t last for four months, but rather between two and four weeks, officials say.
Symptoms of the virus include fever, swollen lymph nodes, malaise, and a rash or lesions that may initially be mistaken for chickenpox or a sexually transmitted disease.
As for the claim about it being a form of herpes, monkeypox is classified as a pox virus in the poxviridae family related to smallpox, cowpox, and others. Herpes, meanwhile, is within the herpesviridae family.
A doctor who was banned from Twitter for posting about COVID-19 vaccines is willing to serve as the lead plaintiff in a potential class-action lawsuit against the social media company, his lawyer has informed the tech giant.
Dr. Andrew Bostom “stands with a growing number of similarly situated people who have had their Twitter accounts suspended for sharing their views and opinions on COVID-19,” James Lawrence III, Bostom’s lawyer, told Twitter in a letter dated Aug. 6.
“Dr. Bostom is ready, willing, and able to serve as a lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Twitter for breach of contract if that becomes necessary,” Lawrence added.
Bostom, with the Brown University Center For Primary Care and Prevention, was permanently suspended in June after sharing the results of a study that linked Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine with lower sperm and semen concentration in men.
After Lawrence contacted Twitter on Bostom’s behalf, the company reversed the suspension, admitting he did not appear to violate any rules with the post.
Just two weeks later, Bostom was banned for asserting that the only randomized controlled trial data on children shows zero hospitalizations prevented by COVID-19 vaccination, while trial data from adults showed the vaccines caused more severe adverse events than the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations it prevented.
Twitter told Bostom in the suspension notice that he violated the company’s policy on spreading misleading information related to COVID-19.
New Letter
But the post does not violate the policy, Lawrence told Vijaya Gadde, head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter.
The first portion of the comment is backed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s briefing document (pdf) analyzing Pfizer trial data in children aged 6 months to 23 months, the lawyer said, noting that there were zero hospitalizations in the placebo arm but one in the vaccinated arm.
The second portion is supported by a recent paper that analyzed serious adverse events from the original Pfizer and Moderna vaccine trials and concluded that people who were vaccinated were at higher risk of an event than those who did not get a shot.
“His comments can be substantiated by actual pediatric and adult data. This is not ‘misinformation’ by any means, but rather a restating of actual scientific analysis of the data from clinical trials of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines,” Lawrence wrote.
Both the vaccines are built on messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology.
Even if the comment did violate Twitter’s policy, the company failed to follow its own five-strikes rule, which gives users five violations before a ban, the lawyer said.
He recently represented journalist Alex Berenson in a case against Twitter in which a judge said Twitter violated its own rule in its ban of Berenson. The suit was settled, and Berenson was reinstated.
Twitter is being urged to restore Bostom’s account by 8 p.m. on Aug. 12.
Former President Donald Trump has warned Americans to brace for something “a lot worse than a recession” while blaming the Biden administration’s poor stewardship of the economy for soaring inflation and denouncing the tax hikes in the latest Democrat spending bill.
Trump made the remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday, where the former president raised the alarm on the state of the union.
“Our country is being shot. It’s being destroyed,” Trump told attendees, while touting his administration’s record on the economy and national security.
Trump spoke of “creating the most secure border in American history, record tax and regulation cuts, $1.87 gasoline, no inflation, low interest rates, record growth in real wages, record growth in our economy.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on August 6, 2022. (Bobby Sanchez for The Epoch Times)
Soaring Inflation, Recession
During Trump’s tenure, the highest the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent.
Under Biden, inflation has climbed steadily, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.
In his speech, Trump drew a contrast with the economy under Joe Biden, blaming the president for the highest inflation in decades that Trump estimates is costing American families as much as $7,000 a year.
“After the pandemic, we handed the radical Democrats the fastest economic recovery ever recorded, the history of our country, ever recorded,” Trump continued. “They’ve turned that into two straight quarters of negative economic growth, also known, despite their protestation to the contrary, as a recession.”
Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth are a common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, although recessions in the United States are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using a broader definition than the two-quarter rule.
Despite a number of economists arguing that the United States is in a recession based on the two-consecutive-quarters rule, the Biden administration insists that the economy isn’t in a recession, citing NBER’s consideration of a broader range of indicators.
A key argument against recession made by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others in the Biden administration is that the U.S. labor market remains tight, with unemployment at 3.5 percent and, at 10.7 million, the number of job openings remaining well above the 6 million or so people classified as unemployed.
Joe Biden gives remarks during a meeting on the economy with CEOs and members of his Cabinet in the South Court Auditorium of the White House on July 28, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Worse Than Recession
In his CPAC speech, Trump then issued an ominous warning that, absent a course correction, the recession could spiral into something even worse.
“Just hope that the recession doesn’t turn into a depression, because the way they’re doing things, it could be a lot worse than a recession,” Trump said, echoing similar remarks he made at a rally in Arizona at the end of July, where he warned that “we’re going to have a serious problem” unless political change takes place.
“We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona, warning that “we’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression.”
During his appearance at CPAC, Trump issued a call for urgent action at the polls in the upcoming midterms.
“The future of our country is at stake. We don’t have time to wait years and years. We won’t have a country left. What I used to say about Venezuela is true. We have to save the economy, defeat the Biden, Pelosi, Schumer tax hike, which is happening right now tonight,” Trump continued, referring to the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” that cleared the Senate not long after his speech.
Senators passed the sweeping bill, estimated at $740 billion, in a 51–50 vote on Aug. 7, with the package next going to the House for consideration.
During the deliberations, Senate Democrats rejected an amendment offered by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) that sought to ban any of the $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from being used to target Americans making less than $400,000 per year.
“My colleagues claim this massive funding boost will allow the IRS to go after millionaires, billionaires and so-called rich ‘tax cheats,’ but the reality is a significant portion raised from their IRS funding bloat would come from taxpayers with income below $400,000,” Crapo said in a statement.
Crapo’s amendment was rejected on a party-line vote, with the Democrat bill including softer language that features a non-binding statement of intention not to squeeze more revenue from America’s middle class.
Tax Hikes
According to an analysis by Americans for Tax Reform, a U.S. advocacy group, the spending bill includes a number of tax hikes on American households and businesses.
This includes a $6.5 billion natural gas tax that ATR says will increase household energy bills, a $12 billion crude oil tax that will end up being passed on to drivers in the form of higher gas prices, and a $52 billion income tax hike on mid-sized and family businesses.
In a separate analysis, ATR said that the Democrat bill’s changes to the book tax threaten small businesses.
Elaborating on that theme, economist and author Antonio Graceffo wrote in an op-ed for The Epoch Times that the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” would drive up prices for American households.
“Nearly half of these new taxes will be paid by manufacturers, creating disincentives to produce. Diminished industrial output will drive up the cost of goods and reduce the variety and quantity of goods available on store shelves,” Graceffo wrote.
“Beyond the manufacturing sector, the act increases taxes on businesses in general, which, combined with higher interest rates will decrease new investment and hamper job creation. Ultimately, these increased costs will be passed on to customers,” he added.
‘We Have to Win’
During his CPAC speech, Trump revealed what he sees as the key to bringing the country and its economy back on track.
“We have to win an earth-shattering victory in 2022. We have to do it, coming up in November,” Trump said.
“This election needs to be a national referendum on the horrendous catastrophes the radical Democrats have inflicted on our country,” he continued.
“The Republican party needs to campaign on a clear pledge that, if they are given power, they’re going to fight with everything they have to shut down the border, stop the crime wave, beat inflation, and hold the Biden administration accountable. They have to hold it accountable. Job number one for the next Congress,” Trump said.
The national midterm election takes place on Nov. 8, with 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats up for grabs.
As the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol continues its effort to prove allegations of insurrection against former President Donald Trump and his supporters, Capitol Police and House Democrats continue to block all efforts to force the release of all surveillance video footage and emails, which could possibly exonerate those being accused of wrongdoing. Now, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) is citing a United States Code that could legally force the release of that evidence.
In a July, 29, 2022 letter to Capitol Police Board Chair William J. Walker, obtained by The Epoch Times, Gohmert—backed by the signatures of 23 additional GOP lawmakers—demanded the release of footage captured on Capitol Hill security cameras on Jan. 6, 2021, currently being withheld under “sovereign immunity.”
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) questions Attorney General William Barr who appears before the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 28, 2020. (Matt McClain-Pool/Getty Images)
“As you must be aware,” Gohmert wrote, “2 U.S.C. § 1979 states that ‘any Member … of either House of Congress’ can ‘obtain information from the Capitol Police regarding the operations and activities of the Capitol Police that affect the Senate and House of Representatives.’ Subsection (c) makes clear that nothing in that law may be construed to prevent us, as Members of the House of Representatives from our ability to obtain those videos.”
Gohmert concluded that “Releasing this information is absolutely essential to proper governance and truth to protect and perpetuate this self, governing nation.”
‘It’s About Revenge’
As The Epoch Times reported July 5, attorneys of Jan. 6 prisoners and defendants have provided evidence in several cases that indicate the government is manufacturing evidence to arrest and incarcerate people who attended the protest at the Capitol. In the meantime, Gohmert insists the government is also hiding evidence that could be used in the defense of these people.
“That’s exactly what they’re doing,” Gohmert reiterated, noting how he himself has been a victim of the Jan. 6 Committee’s “Soviet-style propaganda.”
Reports disclose how Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to the then-Whitehouse Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, told the Committee during her June deposition that Gohmert asked then-President Donald Trump for a pardon.
Gohmert demanded a release of the full, unedited video and transcript of Hutchinson’s deposition, saying the way the video was presented erased the fact that he was actually seeking pardons for “very deserving military members, former military, and one civilian servant.”
“I’ve been personally affected by the lies created by using tape,” Gohmert told The Epoch Times. “They had Cassidy Hutchinson saying I requested a pardon without getting the full context. I have never asked for a pardon for myself. I’ve never done anything that needed a pardon. But I was requesting pardons for a number of people that have been screwed over by the justice system.”
While a spokesperson for the Capitol Police declined to comment on the letter to The Washington Times, they did push back on allegations that Jan. 6 prisoners and defendants were not provided full access to video that has been provided to the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO).
“Every January 6th defendant has access to the same footage, which is everything the USAO is releasing,” the spokesperson told The Washington Times. “They do not just get what is relevant to them.”
The Road to 2 U.S.C. § 1979
In a May 19, 2022 letter (pdf) to Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), Select Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote that the Board was seeking the Congressman’s “voluntary cooperation” in advancing their investigation.
“Based on our review of evidence in the Select Committee’s possession,” Thompson said, “we believe you have information regarding a tour you led through parts of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021.”
“The American people deserve a full and accurate accounting of what happened on January 6th,” Thompson’s two-page letter concluded. “We aim to make informed legislative recommendations taking account of all relevant facts. Thank you in advance for your consideration of this request.”
The letter was also signed by the Committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) speaks during a hearing in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on May 6, 2019. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
In an immediate same-day response, Committee on House Administration Ranking Member Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) and Committee Member Loudermilk issued a joint press release, calling out the Select Committee for its false accusations.
“A constituent family with young children meeting with their Member of Congress in the House Office Buildings is not a suspicious group or ‘reconnaissance tour,’” the letter states. “The family never entered the Capitol building.”
“The 1/6 political circus released the letter to the press before even notifying Mr. Loudermilk, who has still not received a copy,” the letter accuses. “The Select Committee is once again pushing a verifiably false narrative that Republicans conducted ‘reconnaissance tours’ on January 5th. The facts speak for themselves; no place that the family went on the 5th was breached on the 6th, the family did not enter the Capitol grounds on the 6th, and no one in that family has been investigated or charged in connection to January 6th.”
In a letter dated May 20, 2022, addressed to Capitol Police Board Chair William Walker and members Karen Gibson and J. Brett Blanton, Davis demanded the release of “all January 5th Capitol Tapes.”
“If the Board does not release the relevant footage in a timely manner, I will have no choice but to exercise my authority under 2 U.S.C. § 1979 to release the footage myself.”
Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Il.) speaks in Washington on Jan. 9, 2020. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
On June 15, 2022, Thompson sent another letter (pdf) to Loudermilk, again accusing him of personally escorting individuals through the Capitol Building for the purposes of conducting reconnaissance ahead of the rallies on Jan. 6. Thompson also reminded Loudermilk that the Committee had “invited” him to meet with them on May 19, 2022, about the “evidence,” which consisted of surveillance footage of Loudermilk leading a “tour of approximately ten individuals” through areas that are “not typically of interest to tourists, including hallways, staircases and security checkpoints.”
“Surveillance footage shows a tour of approximately ten individuals led by you to areas in the Rayburn, Longworth, and Cannon House Office Buildings, as well as the entrances to tunnels leading to the U.S. Capitol,” Thompson said in his letter. “The below image shows you leading individuals on the tour:”
Screenshot of image from a June 15, 2022 letter written by Select Committee Chairman Bernie G. Thompson to United States Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), accusing him of personally escorting individuals through the Capitol Building for the purposes of conducting reconnaissance ahead of the rallies on Jan. 6. (Letter from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol)
Two additional images in the letter show “an individual appearing to photograph a staircase in the basement of the Longworth House Office Building” while Loudermilk speaks “with others nearby,” and of people from Loudermilk’s tour “taking photographs of the tunnel leading from the Rayburn House Office Building to the Capitol.”
Images from a June 15, 2022 letter sent by Select Committee Chairman Bernie G. Thompson to United States Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), showing members of the Congressman’s tour taking photos. (Letter from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol)
Loudermilk did not comply with the interview request.
On June 16, 2022, the Committee released surveillance footage of Loudermilk’s “tour,” overlayed with graphics and preceded by selected footage from other videos that add to their narrative of Loudermilk’s supposed guilt.
The Problems with Pick-and-Choose
For Mike Howell, senior advisor for Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation, the threat by Davis to release the Jan. 5 footage of Loudermilk, if the Capitol Police do not, raises a serious question.
Mile Howell, Senior Advisor of Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation. (Courtesy of Mike Howell)
Howell noted how Davis only threatened to release video footage that pertained to the Loudermilk incident and insisted he had the authority to do so.
“The question that’s been percolating is, ‘If you have the authority to release the tape from January fifth, why are you not releasing all of the tapes?’ That would be of major importance because there are a lot of major criminal cases coming down and defense attorneys have had problems trying to get access to these tapes themselves,” he told The Epoch Times.
Gohmert agreed the Committee should not be allowed “to just pick-and-choose which sections they show.”
“Yes, they should be able to show the defense what they’re going to use in prosecution. But they are also required to show the things that were more exonerating and exculpatory and that does not appear to have happened at all,” he said.
Howell sees at least two problems with this game of pick-and-choose.
First, the request by Davis only to release a segment of video he believes will prove his point is no different than the Jan. 6 Committee “selectively releasing portions they think show the best side of their version of events.”
Second: “If the authority exists, and Davis has the power through this statute to release the footage from Jan. 5,” Howell surmised, “why haven’t the tapes already been released in full?”
While Howell did remark that some will cite security issues as the reason for withholding most of the footage captured by cameras at the Capitol, he said he’s “got news for them.”
“There are cameras all over the Capitol,” Howell countered. “So it’s not a matter of special camera angles. I think the real reason why they’re not being released is because it can potentially show information and video footage that could be helpful to people being charged by the Department of Justice as well as damaging to the narrative that the January 6 Committee is trying to establish.”
According to a sworn affidavit from Capitol Police General Counsel Thomas DiBiase, surveillance camera footage from the U.S. Capitol Police’s extensive system of cameras on U.S. Capitol grounds states “disclosure of any footage from these cameras is strictly limited and subject to a policy that regulates the release of footage.”
“Per Department 1000.002, Retrieval of Archived Video (see attachment 1), the release of any footage from the Department’s CCV system must be approved by the Assistant Chief of Police for Operations.”
Howell said the tapes need to be released to give people a “full accounting” of what happened on Jan. 2, 2021 and allow attorneys to go through the footage to find out if there is anything in there that may be helpful to their clients.
“In the minds of many Americans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, this event has been made out to be akin to 9/11.” Howell said. “So, the question is, why can’t the American people see what actually happened that day. I think there’s massive public interest in this, and that outweighs any other concerns, so the tapes belong in the public.”
‘Why Are You Only Threatening’
While Howell finds Davis’s threat to release the Loudermilk video a bit curious, he isn’t surprised. At the time, when Davis made the threat, he was struggling through a primary challenge against fellow Republican and Trump-endorsed candidate Mary Miller after redistricting pitted the two incumbent Republicans against each other.
“So he, in an effort to shore up some bona fides on the right, basically threatened to release these tapes,” Howell surmised. “Now he’s lost his primary and nothing has happened. He hasn’t released the tapes and he hasn’t said anything else since.”
Still, Howell believes the House Administration Committee—to which the Capitol Police reports and of which Davis still serves as ranking member—does have the power and authority to demand the release of the surveillance footage.
“They aren’t an independent police agency,” Howell noted of the Capitol Police. “They report to Congress. So Congress can tell Capitol Police what to do. I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up on it. You have the tapes and you can release them? Why are you only threatening to release them?”
Gohmert said “these tactics are things that were supposed to be left behind 70 or more years ago. We had evolved to a justice system that was the fairest in the history of the world. Now, this Justice Department and the majority in the House are taking us back six or seven decades and they’ve gone beyond how bad it used to be and they’re approaching a Soviet-style justice system. Stalin would be proud of what they’re doing. It’s grossly unfair, grossly unjust. It doesn’t resemble the justice system at all.”
Like Howell, Gohmert also wants to know why Davis only demanded the release of surveillance footage that might prove the innocence of his colleague, just as the members of the Select Committee are selecting bits and pieces they think will prove the guilt of their political enemies.
The Next Step
Asked for the next step, Gohmert said he is going to give the Capitol Police a chance to respond to his letter.
“It they don’t respond quickly, I think we do need to take legal action,” he said. “If they respond and say, ‘you’re not entitled to it, we’ve ignored lots of laws already and this is just one more law we’ll ignore,’ then we have got to—for the sake of the country, for the sake of our justice system and for the sake of truth—stand up and hold the Justice Department accountable for their violations of the law.”
Another thing bothering Gohmert is what he is learning through talking to Jan. 6 prisoners “en mass at the D.C. Jail.”
“I have been deeply concerned and a lot of us have been demanding that all of the video be released for months,” Gohmert explained. “The Supreme Court made clear that the Department of Justice has to release any potentially exonerating or exculpatory evidence to the defense. They put so much pressure on defendants and kept many of them in jail so that they just agree to plea guilty without ever seeing the exculpatory evidence, which is absolutely outrageous because that lets the DOJ off the hook.”
Gohmert said it was the moment he learned that 2 U.S.C. § 1979 isn’t a House rule, but that it’s actually a law, that he knew he had to take a stand, and while he knows that there are still some members of the Capitol Police who “want to see right prevail and truth and justice prevail” he said he “can only hope they will do the right thing” and release the surveillance footage.
“If they’re not willing to do it,” Gohmert vowed, “we’ve got to go to court as quickly as possible and require them to produce [the video]. This is a law. This is not a suggestion. It is absolutely imperative that Congress have access to all of that. So, that’s why we made the request and then sent the letter out so we could get it out as quickly as possible.”
“It will be interesting to know who’s been holding up the video,” Gohmert speculated, “because some of the people who have refused to answer questions” may soon “have to respond after their subpoenaed and drug into court.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Davis, the Capitol Police, and the Office of the Inspector General.
Jennette McCurdy was a mainstay for years as character Sam Puckett on Nickelodeon’s “iCarly.” But in a new memoir, she alleged her time at the network was far from the happy, free-spirited character she portrayed on the screen.
Vanity Fair published an excerpt Friday of McCurdy’s new memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” In it, McCurdy detailed the treatment she was allegedly subject to while working on the show.
At the beginning of the excerpt, McCurdy described a dinner she had with “The Creator,” an anonymous character in the memoir.
McCurdy wrote that “The Creator” pressured her to consume alcohol, which she initially refused.
“I’ve never had alcohol before,” McCurdy said in the excerpt. “And I’m only eighteen. Couldn’t I get in trouble?”
“The Creator” told her the stars of “Victorious,” another popular show on Nickelodeon, got “drunk together all the time,” McCurdy wrote.
“The iCarly kids are so wholesome,” he said, according to the excerpt. “We need to give you guys a little edge.”
McCurdy wrote that she eventually took a sip of alcohol, and she told “The Creator” she enjoyed it. After he pressured her further, she admitted she did not like the taste of the drink.
“The Creator laughs,” McCurdy wrote. “I’ve done well. I’ve pleased him. Mission accomplished. It’s the same mission I have every time I get dinner with him, which has gotten more and more frequent lately as my new contract for the spin-off he promised me is being worked out.
“The Creator is doing the thing that I’ve heard from my co-stars he does with every new star of a show that he’s making — he takes you under his wing. You’re his favorite. For now. I like being his favorite for now. I feel like I’m doing something right.”
McCurdy said this uncomfortable dinner was just one of many questionable interactions she had with “The Creator,” interactions that crossed from ugly into creepy, into abusive.
In another scene she described, “The Creator” put his hand on her knee at dinner, then said he thought she was cold.
He draped his jacket around her, then patted her shoulders, then began to massage her.
“My shoulders do have a lot of knots in them, but I don’t want The Creator to be the one rubbing them out,” McCurdy wrote. “I want to say something, to tell him to stop, but I’m so scared of offending him.”
Eventually, she wrote, Nickelodeon offered her $300,000 when it canceled “Sam & Cat,” if she would promise not to talk about her experiences at Nickelodeon.
“What the f***?” McCurdy wrote, describing her thoughts at the time. (She didn’t use asterisks.) “Nickelodeon is offering me three hundred thousand dollars in hush money to not talk publicly about my experience on the show?
“My personal experience of The Creator’s abuse? This is a network with shows made for children. Shouldn’t they have some sort of moral compass? Shouldn’t they at least try to report to some sort of ethical standard?”
McCurdy wrote that she ultimately decided not to take the money, but that did not erase her experiences.
While “The Creator” is never named in the book, Yahoo! Entertainment reported that producer Dan Schneider was the creator of “iCarly.” ViacomCBS launched an investigation into his behavior before he left the network in 2018, according to a July report in Deadline.
She also described an incident from the show “Sam & Cat,” the “iCarly” spinoff show featuring her “iCarly” character and actress/singer Ariana Grande as the Cat Valentine character from “Victorious,” Yahoo! Entertainment reported.
McCurdy alleged Grande was allowed to pursue other career opportunities during the show, but she was not.
“What finally undid me was when Ariana came whistle-toning in with excitement because she had spent the previous evening playing charades at Tom Hanks’s house,” McCurdy wrote. “That was the moment I broke.”
On top of her issues at the network, McCurdy wrote that her home life was incredibly challenging.
According to Yahoo! Entertainment, she described to her mother that she was embarrassed of being pictured in a bikini during a wardrobe fitting.
Her mother reportedly told her to ignore her issues at the network because “everyone wants what you have.”
he Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose research into coronaviruses is believed by many to be the source of COVID-19, is engaging in similarly risky studies tracking bats and their ability to infect humans in caves across China.
The unearthed paper follows the controversial lab using funds from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance to gather bat samples. Beginning in 2014, led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman” Shi Zhengli, researchers used the samples to conduct risky “gain-of-function” research, as now-deleted webpages reveal the lab manipulating bat coronaviruses to “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
The new study, published in May of 2020, appears to be engaging in similar research methods.
Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli, tracked and sampled the Cave Nectar Bat since it is “known to carry both filoviruses and coronaviruses,” according to the paper.
“In this study, we tracked 16 bats in Mengla County, Yunnan Province, China, using miniaturized GPS devices to investigate their movements and potential contact with humans. Furthermore, to determine the prevalence of coronavirus and filovirus infections, we screened for the nucleic acids of the Měnglà virus (MLAV) and two coronaviruses (GCCDC1-CoV and HKU9-CoV) in anal swab samples taken from bats and for antibodies against these viruses in human serum samples,” explains an overview of the researcher’s work.
The study also shows that researchers worked with “recombinant proteins,” a term that commonly appears in “gain-of-function” research.
The research was published in the journal Zoological Research and was funded by several Chinese Communist Party-run scientific organizations including the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The National Pulse has previously exposed the NSFC’s deep ties to China’s military.
The group’s 2020 funding guidelines identify “innovative research in defense and military and civilian integration” as receiving “preferential” funding. The foundation also inked a 2016 “strategic cooperative agreement” with the Science and Technology Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission – the regime’s paramount military policy-making body.
Annual reports from NSFC reveal several researchers from PLA-run institutions received millions in funding.
The paper also follows lies from EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak about the lab’s work with live bats, which were proved false through recovered footage from the lab. Deleted webpages and patents filed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology also show that researchers worked closely with bats despite the lab acknowledging that “the risk of being bitten by a bat still exists” even when protective gear is worn.
Twitter has permanently banned author James Lindsay for calling a transgender attorney a “child sexualization specialist” on the social media platform.
Lindsay said he made the comment after Alejandro Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic who previously worked as staff attorney for the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, accused him of being racist and sexist.
Caraballo celebrated and took credit for Lindsay’s suspension, saying, “Tell James, I want him to know it was me” in a post on Twitter.
Over the last two weeks, Lindsay said, trans activists have banded together, targeted him, and claimed responsibility for a “mass reporting” campaign—which is against Twitter rules.
“They not only launched a massive reporting [campaign], but they bragged that they did it,” he told The Epoch Times on Aug. 5, the day he was banned. “Twitter has a terms of service agreement that you can’t mass report or induce mass reporting. It’s considered targeted harassment, and it’s against the terms of service to do it, but nobody ever enforces it—ever.”
The Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on April 26, 2022. (Amy Osborne/AFP via Getty Images)
He was previously twice locked out of his @conceptualjames Twitter account, once on July 21 for responding “ok groomer” to Ari Drennen, an LGBTQ program director at Media Matters, and again on July 26 for using the word “groomer” in old Twitter posts that trans activists publicized.
Drennen, who took credit for getting Lindsay locked out of his account on July 21, wrote an article published online July 22 suggesting Twitter suspend users “slandering LGBTQ people as ‘groomers’” and calling Lindsay a “right-wing CRT alarmist.”
To get back into his Twitter account in that case, Lindsay said he was “forced to confess” the “ok groomer” comment violated Twitter rules because “it’s the only way to get your account back unless you want to get locked into appeal limbo.”
Lindsay has since appealed the permanent ban. When prompted to “describe the problem” to Twitter, he wrote: “The problem is that you arbitrarily changed the rules and suspended my account after repeatedly forcing me to lie to admissions of guilt for ‘violations’ that aren’t real. You should un-suspend my account and correct your biased and arbitrary policy enforcement.”
Ironically, Lindsay said that he felt like he was “let out of prison” after the ban.
“I don’t know why I want to go back. It’s so strange how immediate it is that I just feel relief that I’m not on there anymore,” Lindsay said. “The only reason I want it back as a matter of practicality, because it drives something like 80-something percent of my traffic to my website.”
He accused Twitter of using tactics similar to those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to coerce people into confessing to fake crimes.
A small group of Beijing residents walk in February 1967 in downtown Beijing, past a huge poster showing Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” (Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)
“That is a tactic of Maoism—a communist tactic to force people to confess to crimes to be able to get leniency. That’s literally how Mao ran his prisons in CCP-controlled China in the ’50s,” he said.
The term “groomer” has several meanings, and although it can refer to pedophilia, it can also mean a recruiter who “grooms” someone into a cult, club, or organization, or a person who “grooms” another for a job or position, he said.
Lindsay contends he used the term “groomer” to describe someone involved in what he views the “cult indoctrination” of others into the trans activism or and gender ideology movement and was not accusing anyone of pedophilia.
“I would not accuse anybody of that without substantive evidence. It’s a horrific accusation,” he said.
He has admitted publicly that he openly criticizes those involved “defending and engaging in cult grooming into a gender ideology rooted in queer Marxist theory.”
People protest a school board’s pro-transgender policy outside of a middle school in Falls Church, Va., on June 16, 2022. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
“It’s weird because the cult indoctrination is sex, gender, and sexuality, and so they’re indoctrinating people with concepts of sexuality which sexualizes children, but that’s not the same thing specifically as pedophilia, which is also the sexualization of children. There is this weird double meaning, or two meanings to the word,” he said.
Lindsay has produced a series of podcasts called “Groomer Schools” for his website, New Discourses, which has been very popular, he said.
“So, I’ve been calling these people ‘groomers’ for months. I started doing it back in October,” he said. “[It wasn’t] ambiguous in terms of what it means until 10 minutes ago.”
Twitter did not respond to an inquiry about Lindsay’s allegations that activists had launched a mass reporting campaign against him, but told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement on Aug. 5 that his account was “permanently suspended” for “hateful conduct” according to Twitter policies.
While Lindsay opposes “cancel culture” on social media, especially for expressing an opinion on an issue, he said people who abuse their positions or power to impose an ideology on school children “should be fired.”
Students walk outside Hewes Middle School in Tustin, Calif., on Aug. 12, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
As the author of several books, including “Race Marxism” and “Social (In)Justice,” that delve deep into today’s culture wars, Lindsay is no stranger to controversy, but he has never been banned from Twitter for his opinions on critical race theory, for example.
“It’s not the broader constellation of things I’m calling out; it is specifically that they want to protect the transsexual ideological grooming of children, and it is huge and it is coordinated,” he said. “There is a vested interest in protecting this specific thing, and I don’t know why that is.”
Tiffany Justice, co-founder of national parental rights organization Moms for Liberty, was recently locked out of the group’s Twitter account for a week over a post condemning controversial proposed legislation that would make California a transgender sanctuary state, and for also challenging gender ideology.
She wrote on Twitter July 25, “Gender dysphoria is a mental health disorder that is being normalized by predators across the USA. California kids are at extreme risk from predatory adults. Now they want to ‘liberate’ children all over the country. Does a double mastectomy on a preteen sound like progress?”
After Justice deleted the post, the Moms for Liberty Twitter account was unlocked.
Media Matters has also accused Twitter account Libs of Tik Tok, Gays Against Groomers founder Jaimee Michell, and others of slandering people with the term groomer.
Last week, Twitter also locked the Gays Against Groomers account. The group had posted: “Damaged people damage people. The internet is a dangerous place for kids, especially when you have radical alphabet activists openly grooming them. Protect your children from these people at all costs.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used COVID-19 for biological warfare, according to a new report by nine experts with the Center for Security Policy (CSP).
Generals, medical experts, and foreign policy experts including former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra and former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin contributed to the report, which is available in book form on Amazon.
The report, titled “The CCP is at War with America,” stated that there is no evidence COVID-19 was a natural virus, arguing that there is significant evidence it came from a CCP lab. It also stated that the CCP deliberately allowed the virus to spread worldwide by allowing international flights while locking down movement within China.
The CSP describes the report as an “exercise in competitive analysis that strongly challenges the Director of National Intelligence’s September 2021 conclusion.”
The Plague War
U.S. intelligence experts in 2021 concluded that they might never know for certain where COVID-19 came from. But the CSP put the blame squarely on the Chinese communist regime.
“The preponderance of evidence indicates that SARS-CoV-2 was lab-manufactured,” the report stated. “In any event, Beijing acted with murderous intent in spreading the disease beyond China’s borders.”
As proof of these claims, the report pointed to genetic features of COVID-19 not found in natural viruses. It noted that China’s military has a biological warfare program.
Finally, it highlighted that the Chinese regime restricted internal travel to stop the spread of COVID-19 but kept its international borders open. At the same time, it bought up global supplies of personal protective gear.
Even if the original release of the virus was an accident, its worldwide spread was intentional, the report stated. The likely motive was to ensure that the rest of the world would be set back economically by the virus to the same degree China would be.
The cover of The CCP is at War with America report on Amazon. Screenshot taken Aug. 5, 2022. (Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times)
“Xi’s regime clearly saw the imperative need to ensure that it would not suffer economic privation alone, to the advantage of its enemies, especially the United States,” the report read. “Actively spreading the virus was, thus, a means of waging economic warfare, and the Chinese Communists applied themselves to doing so with a vengeance.”
According to the report, the CCP worked to spread its COVID-19 quarantine policies around the world so it could weather the pandemic at an advantage. The damage COVID-19 measures did to America’s economy put the CCP ahead.
“A principal beneficiary of such economic trauma would be the Chinese Communist Party,” the report read.
Weapons of Choice
The report also stated that the Chinese regime has a history of biological warfare. In the early 1990s, Chinese general Chi Haotian told China’s biological weapons program that it should depopulate America so China could take it over, according to the report. But China kept these plans secret.
“Right now, it is not the time to openly break with [America],” the general said. “Our reform and opening to the outside world still rely on their capital and technology.”
Biological weapons could be China’s road to world domination, the report stated. Chinese military journals have openly published articles about genetically-targeted biological warfare. China has collected genetic profiles of foreigners while keeping a close guard on the genetic profiles of Chinese people, it added.
“If Chinese scientists succeed in designing pathogens targeting only foreigners, the next germ, virus, or microbe from China could end non-Chinese societies,” the report stated.
“Xi will be the first supremo to possess a weapon making worldwide Chinese rule possible,” it read.
The report suggested that COVID-19 fatalities outside China should be considered “murder victims.”
The paper offered several conclusions. These include that the CCP and any who colluded with it must be held accountable for the pandemic’s results; the government shouldn’t impose vaccine mandates on the vulnerable; the United States should develop deterrents against Chinese bioweapons; and future medical health measures shouldn’t follow Chinese totalitarian lockdown advice.
“We must never again allow our constitutional freedoms to be denied on the pretext of a public health emergency, especially at the insistence of foreign powers, let alone our mortal enemy,” the report stated.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it will conduct “flyovers” of the Permian Basin region in Texas and New Mexico to “survey oil and gas operations to identify large emitters of methane” amid the Biden administration’s climate policy initiative.
“The flyovers are vital to identifying which facilities are responsible for the bulk of these emissions and therefore where reductions are most urgently needed,” said Earthea Nance, an EPA official, in an Aug. 1 news release. The flyovers, which will use infrared cameras, will be conducted until Aug. 15, the agency said.
With the announcement, it means the administration will continue to target the oil and gas industry, coming after Joe Biden sent letters to the heads of major oil companies in June and threatened to take action to increase supply. The move drew pushback from the CEOs of ExxonMobil and Chevron, who both accused Biden of taking an increasingly hostile approach to the industry.
The Permian Basin accounts for 43 percent of the nation’s oil supply, meaning any federal regulation or rules may impact gas prices nationwide.
“The flyovers will continue through August 15. By emphasizing identification of potential super-emitters, this effort builds on previous aerial surveillance efforts in the Permian Basin area starting in 2019,” the EPA release said.
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Its announcement came days after an Associated Press report claimed that 533 gas and oil facilities in the Permian Basin are emitting what it described as excessive amounts of methane. But an EPA spokesperson told the Washington Post this week that the flyovers are not connected to AP’s article.
Republican Criticism
Republicans are poised to target the EPA’s flyover announcement and blame the Biden administration for causing further pain at the pump.
Several weeks ago, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, warned that an EPA proposal reversing a 2017 decision to designate certain regions in the Permian Basin as compliant with 2015 Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards would imperil the U.S. oil supply.
“While you express concern about out-of-control gas prices, your Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is threatening to increase them even further,” Abbot wrote in a letter to the White House in late June. “The EPA’s process could interfere in the production of oil in Texas which could lead to skyrocketing prices at the pump by reducing production, increase the cost of that production, or do both.
“Your administration’s announced action is completely discretionary. Thus, you have the power to stop it. If you do not, this action alone might serve as a catalyst for economic harm leading to an even deeper reliance on imported foreign energy and a faster economic decline into the pending recession by forcing even more pain for American consumers to pay at the pump,” the governor said.
