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!
Glasser portrays Milley as a dedicated military officer with a strong set of values who loathed his unstable and temperamental boss. But despite his commander in chief’s “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms” and “abrupt dismissals,” Milley was determined not to resign for the good of his country. So altruistic.
There was that one time, however, when Milley was so utterly humiliated by Trump that he spent days in his Pentagon office, writing and rewriting a letter of resignation.
The occasion came during the June 2020 George Floyd riots. Members of Black Lives Matter had tried, but fortunately failed, to burn down St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square. Trump, accompanied by several advisers and Cabinet members, famously walked to the church and was photographed as he held up a Bible. Milley was among that group.
The legacy media claimed that a crowd of BLM protesters had been “violently” cleared from Lafayette Square by the U.S. Park Police for the sole purpose of this photo-op. One year later, the inspector general of the Interior Department released a report stating that the USPP had cleared the park to allow fencing to be installed “in response to destruction of property and injury to officers.”
In her new book, of course, Glasser tells readers, “Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.”
Anyway, because members of the military are expected to remain apolitical and he had participated in a “political event,” Milley was filled with remorse.
During a pre-recorded commencement address to the graduating class of the National Defense University, Milley apologized. He said, “I should never have been there.”
“As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched, and I am not immune, as many of you saw the result of that photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week,” he told the graduates.
“I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned, uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”
Upon additional reflection, Milley penned his letter of resignation, which is included in Glasser’s excerpt.
It is a boastful, four-paragraph letter written by a disgruntled subordinate with little sense of self-awareness. He tells the president he’s done some “deep soul-searching” and “can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders.”
“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” he begins. “I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.”
Milley continues, “You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.
“The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.”
“I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal,” Milley writes. He expands upon his own acceptance of all people no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation, then moves on to his patriotism. The implication is, of course, that Trump is racist, bigoted and doesn’t love America.
“Lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships.
“That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order.
“You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.”
Is he calling Trump a fascist? A Nazi? Sounds like it. If Milley thinks Trump damaged America’s reputation, we have to wonder how he feels about Biden’s blunders.
Unfortunately, he never submitted the letter to Trump.
Glasser writes, “Milley had finally come to a decision. He would not quit. ‘F*** that s***,’ he told his staff. ‘I’ll just fight him.’ The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage.”
Trump would have been better off if this coward had resigned. Among other allegations, Milley reportedly told his Chinese counterpart he would alert him if Trump were to plan any surprise attacks.
“Gen. Milley needs to be called in TODAY and asked under polygraph what he said to China.”
I would remind Milley of a certain oath he took a long time ago. He solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
The BLM riots in the summer of 2020 were not peaceful. They were responsible for over $1 billion in property damage. They caused injury and even deaths. It’s one thing to oppose racism and quite another to excuse crime in our cities.
Either you’re for the rule of law and against terrorism, or you’re not.
Standing up for the rule of law and against terrorism isn’t politics, Gen. Milley. It’s your job.
White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed that after about five decades in the federal government, he’s planning on leaving his position by the end of resident Joe Biden’s current term.
“We’re in a pattern now. If somebody says, ‘You’ll leave when we don’t have COVID anymore,’ then I will be 105. I think we’re going to be living with this,” Fauci, 81, told Politico in an interview published on July 18 that he plans to retire by the end of Biden’s current term, which ends in January 2025.
Fauci has been the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he became a household name as the face of the federal government’s response, often generating criticism from Republicans and conservatives about his generally dire predictions about the pandemic.
Of his relationship with former President Donald Trump, Fauci said that “we developed an interesting relationship … two guys from New York, different in their opinions and their ideology, but still, two guys who grew up in the same environments of this city. I think that we are related to each other in that regard.”
And if Republicans win back either the House or Senate in 2022, Fauci noted that he will likely be investigated by GOP lawmakers. But he claimed that regarding those investigations, “I don’t make that a consideration in my career decision.”
In the Politico interview, Fauci continued to defend his public recommendations, including school closures, mask-wearing, vaccination regimes, and lockdowns.
“My telling somebody that it’s important to follow fundamental good public health practices … what are you going to investigate about that?” he asked.
Possible Investigations
However, Fauci has faced public questions from Republicans in Congress about his agency having given funding to third-party groups to carry out research in China. COVID-19, caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, emerged in Wuhan, China, and a significant number of U.S. intelligence officials last year released a report suggesting the virus may be linked to the top-level Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Last month, amid questions from Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Fauci conceded that he isn’t able to halt federal funding from being doled out to researchers in China.
“The NIH [National Institutes of Health] is still funding research in China, at least $8 million since 2020,” Marshall said. “In the Intelligence Community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Chinese Communist Party is presented as one of the top threats to the United States, along with Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. To my knowledge, only China is receiving U.S. research dollars.”
Later, he asked Fauci, “When will you as director of NIAID stop funding research in China?”
Federal health agencies, Fauci said in response, “had very productive peer-reviewed highly regarded research projects with our Chinese colleagues that have led to some major advances in biomedical research.”
“We obviously need to be careful and make sure that when we do fund them we have the proper peer review and we go through all the established guidelines,” he said.
NIAID officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
The Western world’s “total failure of deterrence” is largely to blame for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine, former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in a foreign policy speech Wednesday in London.
The West’s decades-long failure to confront Putin and other malign regimes like China and Iran should serve as a warning that prompts a “fundamental shift in how the West approaches our enemies,” Haley said, according to an early transcript of her remarks obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. She said it is time for the Western world to cut economic ties with Russia and China to send a message to these regimes that their subversion of the international order will no longer be tolerated.
Haley, who is positioning herself as a Republican prospect for the 2024 presidential election, previewed how a future Republican administration would handle the globe’s most pressing foreign policy matters. She harshly criticized the Biden administration’s appeasement of countries like Iran but also said Europe shares blame for the world’s instability—criticism that is usually expressed behind closed doors when a foreign leader travels abroad.
“It was Western weakness that convinced Putin he could get away with attempting to swallow Ukraine,” Haley said. “He saw America as too internally divided and distracted, and Europe as too bureaucratic and soft to stop him. And sadly, I have to say he wasn’t wrong.”
Decades of appeasement—and fears about directly confronting the Russia-China-Iran axis—led to the worst European war in nearly 80 years.
“We should have made crystal clear to Putin the full implications of his actions ahead of time. We didn’t,” Haley said. “And now we have the worst war in Europe since the Second World War. This dereliction of duty was years in the making. For too long, the West wrongly feared provoking Putin, instead of taking the steps needed to prevent him from starting a war in the first place.”
The Biden administration’s recent foreign policy blunders, primarily the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, provided the fuel that sparked Putin’s war machine, Haley said.
“It pains me to say it, but if there had been no Afghanistan disaster, there would likely have been no Ukraine invasion,” she said. “Putin saw our lack of resolve in Kabul and assumed nothing meaningful would happen once his tanks rolled into Kyiv.”
But the conditions that led to Putin’s war weren’t created overnight. The United States and Europe spent decades trying to integrate Russia and China into the global economy while ignoring their totalitarian tendencies and mass military buildup.
“The West’s foolishness was boundless,” Haley said. “Whenever Russia tested us, the West shrugged off the necessary strong response, fearing it would do more harm than good.”
“It is critical that we all understand this central point: Appeasement never satisfies the appetites of tyrants. It only makes them want more,” Haley said. “Trying to be ‘inoffensive’ only emboldens our enemies. It leads to wars—like the one we are now witnessing right now in Ukraine.”
Russia is not the world’s most present threat, however, according to Haley. That distinction goes to China.
There can be “no doubt that China is the biggest national security threat the world faces,” she said.
There is only one solution to reassert Western dominance, Haley said. “We must economically detach from our enemies and rely more heavily on ourselves and our friends.”
“That means breaking the Western addiction to Russian energy,” Haley said. “It means securing strategic supply chains completely free of Chinese control or leverage. It means expecting our businesses to do their part to uphold our interests rather than those of our enemies.”
The belief that “economic interdependence with hostile regimes” would dampen their worst tendencies has been “painfully disproven,” according to Haley. If the West does not abandon these foolish ambitions, “our pain and vulnerability will only increase.”
The Western world stands at an “inflection point,” facing a “set of powerful and fanatical dictators with dreams of conquest. Imperial Russia, Communist China, and Jihadist Iran pose existential threats to us and to free peoples all over the world,” Haley said. “The Western way of life depends on deterring these threats.”
A stalemate, she said, “is not good enough. Victory is required.”
In a stirring and spot-on campaign email, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis declares war on the Far Left calling it a “Radical Vigilante Woke Mob.”
While I’ve seen my share of them over the years and sent out a few myself, campaign fundraising emails are notorious for appealing to the hard-core base of both parties.
So, most of them are taken with a grain of salt by political observers.
However, the email I just received from the DeSantis re-election campaign really hit home. It accurately defined and summarized the aggressive domestic threat posed by the extreme Left to our nation’s very core:
Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.
This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.
A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.
Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.
We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.
We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”
DeSantis omitted the LGBTQ brainwashing of our young children and the collusion of major woke companies like Disney in doing so, but he has been at the forefront of battling both these evils in Florida.
The DeSantis campaign continues, noting something that impacted me directly on the huge social media platform LinkedIn: “We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.”
And of course, the last piece of the massive leftist effort: “We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.”
Referring to himself as the “Governor of the Free State of Florida,” DeSantis then goes on to make his pitch for how he will fight this grave threat to America, at least in Florida, with “faith, with reason, and with freedom.”
And of course, he asks for our financial support.
In my view, this email accurately and effectively summarizes the threat we face from the extreme Left in America today. DeSantis is on the front lines of this battle in Florida, but he also seems to be preparing to take the fight nationally as well.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Columnist Naomi Wolf, author of “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” asserts that after two years of pandemic policies, people in free societies are behaving more like those in authoritarian societies.
Wolf maintains that America is now less free, and becoming almost unrecognizable.
“A handful of bad actors” including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Big Tech, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) used the pandemic to “exploit the crisis in such a way as to reengineer our free democratic open societies, especially in the West, especially in the United States, into a post-free society, a post-humane society,” said Wolf during a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
The Biden administration in April extended the 2-year-old coronavirus public health emergency for another 90 days.
Wolf said, based on history, the ongoing lockdowns and extension of the public health emergency indicate society is in the last phase of a tyrannical takeover, because with emergency powers, laws protecting liberty can be suspended.
According to Wolf, there are 10 steps every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10, said Wolf. Some of the other steps include demonizing whistleblowers and critics, calling dissent “treason,” “espionage,” or “subversion,” and controlling the media narrative.
During the last two years of lockdowns and mandates, Big Tech and the elites have profited while the average Americans have seen the American Dream slowly “closing” on them, she said.
“And so often, when a democracy is dying, or a regime is turning the screws on freedoms to create an established new form of tyranny, it happens intentionally in a very incremental way,” said Wolf. “And you really see this from 1930 to 1933 in Germany.”
She said humanity is witnessing the formation of a two-tier society of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, in which people who would never discriminate against others based on categories of race and sex are now discriminating against the unvaccinated.
“Suddenly, they’re happily embracing a discrimination society in which some people are cast as clean and valuable members of society and other people are ostracized and marginalized and ‘othered’ and described as sort of dirty and causing infection to others,” said Wolf.
She argues that big tech companies had an active role in creating these perceptions and in “shaping legislation and certainly in presenting the drama of COVID and lockdowns to us, and then the vaccine rollout, in such a way as to change human behavior and to change human society,” said Wolf.
Wolf cited the emails between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing Facebook’s role in getting the right public health “messages out” during the lockdowns.
Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Dr. Anthony Fauci. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images; Greg Nash/Getty Images)
People had no choice but to rely on tech platforms while they were locked down, and Big Tech used that to manipulate the public, said Wolf.
“What I do trace in the book is how there was a vast profit that tech companies made by suppressing human assembly, by helping to message that it was unsafe or unlawful to gather in person,” she said. “And when you understand that big tech companies are competing with human beings gathering in human spaces, you understand why there was a vested interest in suppressing human assembly.”
Wolf thinks big tech companies will not stop at just harvesting data on the computer, but that they want to dominate peoples’ bodily autonomy with vaccine passports.
“What these companies want more than anything is to leave the parameters of your computer and to colonize other currently non-colonized spaces, notably the human body,” said Wolf.
This would give these companies and governments the ability to switch off peoples’ access to commerce, travel, and other goods and services if they did not comply with a particular mandate, Wolf added.
Some forms of digital tracking and surveilling are already here in the United States, she said.
“You’re now expected to swipe these QR codes just to see the menu, or just to get in. And the QR code uploads your data to a central database,” she said, adding that she’s seen the software “that maps the relationships of everyone sitting at that table, and then builds databases and networks of relationships.”
This illustration photo shows a person looking at the app for the New York State Excelsior Pass, which provides digital proof of a Covid-19 vaccination, in Los Angeles on April 6, 2021 (Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images)
Wolf said that on a scale of one to 10 on the Chinese social credit system, the United States is currently at a three.
“There’s a change that’s happened in American cities in the last two years,” she said.
Because most people around the world, particularly in U.S. cities, use digital apps to travel, do banking, and shop, a digital social credit system similar to China’s is imminent, she said.
Our data is being harvested and used by the “global technocratic elite” to control human behavior, said Wolf.
“We’ve assumed that the worst it can be is data are harvested from us with everything that we choose to do using our free will as human beings,” said Wolf.
“But what I’ve seen is that digital technology has its own logic, and it isn’t restricted by what human beings want to do. So once digital platforms and their oligarchical masters can figure out how to change people’s behavior to suit technology, there’s nothing, moral or ethical, that will keep them from changing people’s behavior to suit their technology, and to suit their business plans,” she added.
The pandemic has revealed how this type of digital control is playing out, because humans, before the prevalence of digital technology, did not choose to “socially distance” to fight pandemics, said Wolf.
“The dream of our digital overlords is for technology to tell humans what to do, and that’s exactly where we’re at,” said Wolf.
While some people might label her a conspiracy theorist, her opinions are based on a long career as a journalist, political consultant, and now tech CEO, Wolf said. Furthermore, she has witnessed firsthand the powerful elites making historical decisions under the radar, she said.
Wolf was well acquainted with this group of powerful people until recently when she was ejected from their circles for writing oppositional pieces on lockdowns.
“But it’s really true that the global technocratic elite have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow Germans or Americans or Russians or Chinese, and they now are able to align above the level of nation-states,” she said.
The panel ‘Leaders for Europe’s Digital Decade’ at the 2022 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on May 25, 2022. The yearly meeting takes place from May 22 to 26 with heads of governments and economic leaders. (Eric Lalmand/AFP via Getty Images)
For example, one of the WEF’s goals is to make nation-level decision-making less and less important, and the World Health Organization’s goal is to make public health decisions on a global scale, bypassing countries’ own authorities via the pandemic treaty, said Wolf.
“These technocratic elites really do believe that they can order the world better than you and I and that they have the right to,” she said. “That’s really scary.”
Little by little, humanity’s tolerance for cruelty and authoritarianism has grown.
“The war wasn’t just on us as a political entity, the war was on American culture, and is on American culture,” she said. “And they’ve succeeded largely, unless we wake up, because we were a kind, decent, inclusive culture that respected other people’s boundaries and freedoms. … And now a CCP-style cruelty is something that we tolerate.”
What people believe is largely determined by the news they consume, said Wolf, and many people only watch news outlets that give a skewed picture of pandemic treatments and policies, largely funded by wealthy people like Bill Gates.
“I do trace in ‘The Bodies of Others’ how millions of dollars flowed and are flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the BBC and the Guardian and NPR and other formerly very credible, objective news outlets.”
Because most people get slanted news coverage, the country is more divided and many people on the left refuse to consider any other narrative or look at primary source documents, because they believe only government sources are giving them “scientific” information, said Wolf.
This skewed messaging has been able to convince people that the mandates and lockdowns are more American and important than liberty or critical thinking.
Wolf said the most brilliant aspect of the pandemic messaging was that it was framed altruistically.
“You know, ‘You’ve got to exclude those people for the good of the community,’ or ‘You’ve got to mask yourself and your child to save your child,’” said Wolf. “This really brilliantly upended American culture because it cast freedom as selfish.”
Now that those in power have effectively conditioned people to be fearful and submissive, they can keep reinstituting emergency powers, she argued.
“That’s what emergency law means,” she said. “They can do whatever they want, basically. It’s a weaponization of boards of health, it’s a weaponization of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the [Department of Health and Human Services].”
Wolf said although the situation is dire, people can do something to push back against this tyranny by being informed about what is really going on in the country, assembling in groups, and getting involved politically on the local level.
As it stands now, “I will say that each side is being fed narratives and stereotypes about the other that would persuade each side that the other is absolutely insane and dangerous, dangerously insane,” said Wolf.
“I get that conservatives think, ‘liberals don’t know what a woman is.’ That is not actually literally true, and liberals think ‘conservatives all want to torch our democratic processes, storm the Capitol, and are misogynist, racist thugs who are trigger happy,” said Wolf.
The last two years have conditioned people to fear each other and so the conversations that would have normally occurred when people gathered are not happening and keeping the country divided, said Wolf. She said she will gladly talk to people on the right.
Communist Party cadres hang a placard on the neck of a Chinese man during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The words on the placard state the man’s name and accuse him of being a member of the “black class.” (Public Domain)
“People I love think I’m doing something wrong in even talking to conservatives and libertarians. That’s very dangerous. The left, especially, has decided that you’re morally complicit if you have a conversation across the aisle,” Wolf said. “That is censorship, that is cancel culture, that’s un-American, that is an importation from Communism.”
She urges people to remember what makes America unique and a beacon to other nations: to remember we are the great experiment where neighbors talked to each other, listened, and didn’t “rat” each other out if they did not agree with each other, Wolf said.
In the United States, the right to worship freely is often called America’s first freedom. It is a necessary component of U.S. foreign policy and our commitment to creating a more peaceful world.
History has shown that governments and societies that champion religious freedom are safer, more prosperous, and secure. Our commitment to protect this fundamental human right is both a moral necessity and a national security imperative.
On June 2, the U.S. Department of State released the 2021 International Religious Freedom Report. The more than 2,000-page report is a comprehensive, fact-based account of nearly 200 countries and territories around the world that is made publicly available for use by all guardians of religious freedom, including governments, religious communities, and activists.
For more than two decades, the International Religious Freedom Report has been an essential tool for the United States to advance and defend the universal right to worship freely.
Under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the State Department is required to submit an annual report to Congress detailing the status of religious freedom in countries, government policies violating religious beliefs and practices, and U.S. policies that promote religious freedom.
As former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo previously said of the report, “Its very existence is evidence of our strong resolve to defend human dignity.”
First, discriminatory laws and policies are used by foreign governments to abuse their own people. For example, excessive prison sentences and home raids target people of faith in Russia, the Taliban and ISIS-K threaten and attack religious minorities in Afghanistan, and the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minorities.
Second, the report found that the rise of intolerance and hatred in societies fuels violence and conflict. According to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, record-high levels of antisemitic incidents took place in Germany and the United Kingdom in 2020. In a separate report, the Commission stated that 82 percent of Jews in Sweden, 85 percent in Poland, 86 percent in Belgium, and 95 percent in France said that antisemitism is a “very big” problem.
Lastly, the partnership and collaboration among members of civil society, governments, and multilateral partners have been important to making progress in advancing and defending religious freedom.
Using the findings of the report, the president is also required to designate any nation that has “engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom,” as a “Country of Particular Concern.” Nations that are severe violators of religious freedom but don’t meet all of the CPC criteria are designated as “Special Watch List Countries.”
On Nov. 15, 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken designated Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan as Countries of Particular Concern.
The Special Watch List designations included Algeria, Comoros, Cuba, and Nicaragua. As I previously wrote, the administration removed Nigeria, but in the wake of the ongoing violence, it should be redesignated as one of the world’s most serious violators of religious freedom.
The Biden administration’s updates to these designations, which have yet to be released, will be watched closely by religious liberty advocates and perpetrators of persecution alike.
Tragically, as evidenced by the latest International Religious Freedom Report, religious oppression is a daily reality for millions of people of faith around the world.
The United States plays a consequential role in exposing these atrocities so that violators of religious freedom can be held accountable. America will not sit back as people are targeted, punished, and persecuted for their faith.
A U.S. senator Friday spoke out against the “woke” policies implemented by the military, which has become especially apparent during LGBT Pride Month of June.
“The United States military should be focused on one objective – creating the most lethal fighting force on planet Earth,” Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told The TennesseeStar. “Instead, Joe Biden’s military leaders are secretly attempting to turn our brave warfighters into social justice warriors. Communist China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do not care how woke our military is or what our soldiers’ pronouns are.“
She echoed a similar sentiment on Twitter.
“The Biden Defense Department should focus energy on combatting our adversaries — not wokeism,” she said.
Communist China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do not care what our soldiers’ pronouns are.
The U.S. Air Force celebrated Pride Month with a message of its own on Twitter.
“Pride in all who serve,” the military branch said, attaching a photo of its members running alongside a pride flag.
Many Twitter users were quick to criticize the Air Force for the post, noting that there is not an American flag in the photo.
The Department of Defense’s Inspector General’s [DOGIG] office celebrated Pride Month on Friday, too.
“The [DODIG] recognizes June 2022 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) Pride Month. During Pride Month, we commemorate the achievements and contributions of the LGBTQ+ community, to include service in defense of our Nation,” that office said.
The @DoD_IG recognizes June 2022 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) Pride Month. During Pride Month, we commemorate the achievements and contributions of the LGBTQ+ community, to include service in defense of our Nation. pic.twitter.com/K69xtRi6EM— DoD Inspector General (@DoD_IG) June 17, 2022
The Department of Defense (DOD) itself, the parent organization of America’s military branches, sent out a June 7 press release officially recognizing Pride Month.
“DOD is committed to ensuring and promoting an atmosphere of dignity and respect for all civilian and military personnel,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks said. “We strive to make the Department of Defense a workplace of choice for all Americans willing and qualified to serve. In doing so, we set a bedrock foundation where all personnel are valued and given an equal opportunity to succeed.”
‘China is the drug he just can’t quit’: GOP Senator slams NIAD head’s remarks
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was unable to commit to stop federal funding from going to Chinese scientific research, despite the U.S. intelligence community assessing the regime as America’s top adversary.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), made the remarks while appearing virtually at the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee hearing on June 16, during an exchange with Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).
“The NIH is still funding research in China, at least $8 million since 2020. In the Intelligence Community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Chinese Communist Party is presented as one of the top threats to the United States, along with Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. To my knowledge, only China is receiving U.S. research dollars,” said the senator during the hearing. “When will you as director of NIAID stop funding research in China?”
Since 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a total of $8.3 million in grants to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its division National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, along with five top public universities in mainland China and Hong Kong, according to the NIH website.
Although this amount doesn’t capture dollars later funneled to a Chinese institution through a U.S.-based organization, such as New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which had partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to perform coronavirus-related experiments that some experts said fit the definition of gain-of-function research, that is, experiments that increase the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a virus.
Fauci, in response to Marshall’s question, said that the U.S. federal agencies “had very productive peer-reviewed highly regarded research projects with our Chinese colleagues that have led to some major advances in biomedical research.”
“So I don’t think I’d be able to tell you that we are going to stop funding Chinese,” Fauci said.
“We obviously need to be careful and make sure that when we do fund them we have the proper peer review and we go through all the established guidelines,” he continued, adding that “grants that go to foreign countries, including China, have State Department clearance.”
“Dr. Fauci’s remarks prove that China is the drug he just can’t quit,” Marshall later told The Epoch Times about the NIAID head’s response.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) questions Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a Senate panel on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
“Dr. Fauci told the truth for once after years of repeated dishonesty that has eroded Americans’ trust in our public health institutions. In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, our government should know it’s dangerous and wrong to continue funding research projects supported by the Chinese Communist Party.”
The senator, at the hearing, followed up by asking Fauci if he agrees that the American public lacks records and studies from EcoHealth Alliance’s research.
Fauci’s answer was evasive.
“We have access to an extraordinary amount of information that has gone there,” he said, arguing that the publicly available information in the scientific journals is sufficient.
“Obviously none of us know everything that’s going on in China but if the question at hand is the rather small … peer-reviewed high-priority grant that was given from Eco[Health] to China in a sub-award we have a lot of good information that’s in the publishing.”
The NIH gave a total of $3.1 million grant to EcoHealth over the five years from 2014 to 2019. A fifth of that, $599,000, went to the Wuhan lab, in part for identifying and altering bat coronaviruses deemed likely to infect humans, documents obtained by The Intercept show.
Fauci earlier this week tested positive for COVID-19 and joined the Thursday Senate hearing remotely. His response to Marshall omitted reference EcoHealth’s lack of disclosure over some of its research activities, which would have prompted an NIH review over biosafety measures.
In this image from video, Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies to a Senate panel via remotelink on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
In one experiment at the Wuhan facility, funded by NIH via EcoHealth, mice infected with a modified version of the original bat coronavirus “became sicker than those infected” with the original version, an “unexpected result” that was not “something that the researchers set out to do,” Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director at the NIH, told lawmakers last October.
He said EcoHealth had violated grant terms by failing to promptly notify the NIH about the finding.
Fauci, at the Thursday hearing, also told Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) that he believes the outbreak of the virus “is very, very likely a jump in species from an animal host,” and less likely to be the result of a lab leak.
“I believe it’s essential to have cooperation and collaboration with the Chinese,” he said when Braun asked him whether he thinks Beijing will cooperate with him to “get to the thorough bottom of” COVID-19 origins.
New York billionaire and refiner John Catsimatidis warned that rising interest rates could produce ill effects on the U.S. economy.
The White House’s “obsession” against “turning on North American oil spigots” has triggered a significant hike in energy costs and inflation, Catsimatidis told Fox Business on Tuesday. He noted that the Biden administration asked Saudi Arabia and other nations for more crude oil production rather than boosting domestic output.
“We have 100 years’ worth of oil [in the U.S.]. Let [the government] open up the spigots and the price of crude oil will come back down to $55, $60, maybe $65—half,’” said Catsimatidis, the head of the United Refining Company and also the Gristedes Supermarkets retailer.
He added that the Federal Reserve’s choice to hike interest rates amid high inflation and soaring energy costs could trigger a recession. Other high-profile business leaders have issued similar warnings in recent weeks. Federal data for April indicated the inflation rate has risen 8.3 percent, while AAA data suggests the average price for a gallon of regular gas is nearing $5.
“Somebody’s on the path to destruct America, and somebody’s got to say ‘guys, enough is enough,’” he told Fox. “You know what the cost has been to the American people because of the rising gas prices—the cost of the rising food prices—it’s going to go even higher with $120 oil,” Catsimatidis said.
White House officials this week suggested that there is little the administration can do to alleviate high costs at the pump. They’ve primarily cast the blame on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, along with oil companies.
“You know, this is, in large part, caused by [Russian aggression],” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo alleged in a recent interview with CNN. “Gas prices have gone up over $1.40 a gallon” since Russian troops moved closer to Ukraine’s border earlier this year, “and the president is asking for Congress and others for potential ideas,” she said.
Republicans have said Biden’s executive orders—including a flurry of rules that were authorized after President Biden took office in January 2021—have driven up the public and private costs of oil drilling in the United States by halting drilling on public lands and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to the interior U.S.
But Raimondo told CNN that the prices will not go down until the conflict ends, again pinning the blame on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“But again, especially what we need to do is get [Moscow] to end this war. And that is also something that we are working as hard as we can to do. … The President is thinking about this every day and pushing his team and Congress to come up with any idea possible because we’re deeply aware of how this is hurting American families,” Raimondo said.
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HOMELAND SECURITY
GOOD OR BAD IDEA? Senator wants to ‘mobilize’ military veterans to guard schools. In the wake of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is calling to “mobilize” military veterans to serve as security officers at schools around the country.
Beyond weapons: Time for a new US strategy on Taiwan. Enlarging Taipei’s military cooperation throughout the Indo-Pacific is today potentially the most effective way to break Beijing’s heavy-handed efforts to quarantine Taiwan politically. Deciding what military assets America should provide Taiwan is crucial, but the bigger picture is to interweave Taiwan into the emerging alliances and coalitions forming to deal with the Chinese threat.
ESCALATION OR MORE OF THE SAME? – Putin threatens new targets if Ukraine gets longer-range rockets; missiles hit Kyiv. In a television interview with state media that was recorded Friday and aired Sunday, Putin said he considered the medium-range missiles Biden promised last month to be replacements for similar artillery that Ukraine has lost in the fighting. But should longer-range systems arrive, Putin said, his military would begin hitting targets it has so far avoided. He offered no specifics.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 103. A Russian state media journalist reported Moscow’s Major General Roman Kutuzov was killed in eastern Ukraine, adding to the string of high-ranking military casualties sustained by Moscow. Ukraine has reversed a Russian advance in Severodonetsk and recaptured about 20 percent of the strategic eastern city, meaning Ukraine now controls half, the governor of Luhansk said.
LET THE NORDIC GAMES BEGIN – Major Baltic Sea exercise kicks off as Swedish, Finnish NATO bids wait on Turkey. The NATO exercise BALTOPS – to be held on the Baltic Sea next week – is the latest showing of unity and military strength as Sweden and Finland trade neutrality for NATO’s embrace in the wake of Russia’s three-month-old invasion of Ukraine.
OVERDUE – US, S Korean navies end key exercise amid N Korea tension. The three-day exercise that began Thursday in international waters off Okinawa was apparently the allies’ first joint drill involving a U.S. aircraft carrier since November 2017.
YES, NORTH KOREA – WE HAVE MISSILES TOO – US and South Korea respond to North Korean launch with 8 missiles of their own. U.S. Forces Korea and the South Korean military fired one U.S. missile and seven South Korean missiles eastward into the sea to demonstrate the countries’ ability to “respond quickly to crisis events,” the U.S. military said Monday.
US excludes Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua from Americas summit. The decision, which followed weeks of intense deliberations, risks an embarrassing boycott of the U.S.-hosted gathering this week in Los Angeles if Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and some other leaders choose not to show up.
GUARDIANS ALERT – How the US Space Force plans to police outer space. Outer space is getting crowded, with both commercial endeavors and secretive military projects. And it’s going to be up to the newest United States military branch, the Space Force, to protect American interests there.
REAL ISSUE – OR EASY FIX? Military families not having enough food is a national security issue, report says. The key factors that make up military life were found to be significant contributors to food insecurity for military families and could hinder the ability of the armed forces to recruit and retain troops if it isn’t addressed, according to two reports released this week.
GENEVA (Reuters)—North Korea, which is under sanctions for developing nuclear weapons in defiance of United Nations Security Council Resolutions, has taken over as head of a U.N. body aimed at striking disarmament deals amid scorn from critics.
This year North Korea has tested a flurry of ballistic missiles – also banned by UNSC resolutions – and appears to be preparing to conduct a new nuclear test for the first time since 2017.
It gained the presidency of the Conference on Disarmament because it rotates alphabetically among its 65 members.
“The DPRK remains committed to contributing to global peace and disarmament and attaches importance to the work of the conference,” Ambassador Han Tae Song told the Geneva meeting, saying it was an “honour and a privilege” to hold the role.
The nuclear-armed state fired several missiles last week, including one thought to be its largest intercontinental ballistic missile.
Western envoys took turns to condemn Pyongyang’s actions on Thursday, with Australia describing them as “destabilising”.
However, they did not heed a call to walk-out of the meeting as requested by dozens of NGOs, witnesses said. Instead, some diplomatic missions sent lower-level representatives than the ambassadors who would typically be expected to attend.
The overall reaction from the floor was seen by observers as mild compared to the reaction to Syria’s presidency of the same body in 2018. During that meeting, Canada read out the testimonies of Syrian chemical attack survivors’ accounts in protest.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, which monitors the performance of the global body, saidNorth Korea‘s chairmanship would “seriously undermine the image and credibility of the United Nations”.
Expectations for this series of meetings under Pyongyang’s presidency were in any case low. The Conference on Disarmament — the world’s only multilateral forum for disarmament — has not reached a deal since the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996.
“This can only highlight the irrelevance of the CD in the current context,” said Marc Finaud, an expert at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, said of North Korea‘s role.
(Reporting by Emma Farge; Additional reporting by Josh Smith in Seoul; Editing by Alison Williams)
