Former President Donald Trump chided Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser after she requested that the National Guard be mobilized to deal with the influx of illegal immigrants being transported from southern states.

“The Mayor of Washington, D.C., wants the National Guard to help with the thousands of Illegal Immigrants, coming from the insane Open Border, that are flooding the City, but refused National Guard help when it came to providing Security at the Capitol Building for a far larger crowd on January 6th,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account on July 29.

“Figure that one out?” Trump asked.

Bowser’s government has sent two separate letters to the White House and the Pentagon seeking federal help, describing the situation at the nation’s capital as a “humanitarian crisis.” In one of the letters, Bowser added that the arriving immigrants had brought her city to a “tipping point.”

Bowser, a Democrat, blamed Arizona and Texas in the other letter, saying the migrant crisis is “cruel political gamesmanship from the Governors of Texas and Arizona.”

The D.C. mayor has also claimed that immigrants are “being tricked” into opting to take buses to the nation’s capital.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, both Republicans, announced transportation programs to send illegal immigrants on free rides to Washington, D.C., following Joe Biden’s decision to lift a pandemic-era immigration policy to expel illegal aliens. The first bus carrying immigrants from Texas arrived in D.C. in April, with Arizona sending its first bus in May.

Since then, Washington has received some 6,100 immigrants on 155 buses, Stars and Stripes reported on July 28, citing data from Abbott’s office.

Responding to Bowser’s request for the National Guard, Abbott wrote on Twitter that the problem that D.C. is experiencing is small compared to what Texas has been dealing with.

“D.C. is experiencing a fraction of the disastrous impact the border crisis has caused Texas,” Abbot stated. “Mayor Bowser should stop attacking Texas for securing the border & demand Joe Biden do his job.”

Two GOP lawmakers also suggested that Bowser should take up her troubles with Biden.

“Mayor Bowser now understands what it feels like to be a border state. How do you think folks in Texas feel?” Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) wrote in a post.

Weber added, “She should knock on Biden’s door and tell him that there is a crisis at our southern border and every state is a border state.”

“Mayor Bowser should call the White House instead and tell them to secure the southern border,” Rep. Fred Keller (R-Pa.) wrote on Twitter.

On July 29, Abbott’s office released a press release detailing what it had accomplished with the state’s Operation Lone Star, a program launched in March 2021 to prevent criminal activity along the border, including drug smuggling and human trafficking.

“Since the launch of Operation Lone Star, the multi-agency effort has led to more than 287,000 migrant apprehensions and more than 17,700 criminal arrests, with more than 15,100 felony charges reported,” the press release stated.

“In the fight against fentanyl, DPS [Texas Department of Public Safety] has seized over 325 million lethal doses throughout the state,” it added.

“Operation Lone Star continues to fill the dangerous gaps left by the Biden Administration’s refusal to secure the border,” it stated. “Every individual who is apprehended or arrested and every ounce of drugs seized would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and the nation due to Biden’s open border policies.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Gay pride strikes yet again. You need not shut down the state- just Manhattan. Don’t penalize the majority for the lack of self-control of a minority population [US Patriot]

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issued an executive order late Friday to declare monkeypox a “disaster emergency,” saying it will strengthen ongoing efforts to limit a recent increase in cases.

“More than one in four monkeypox cases in this country are in New York state, and we need to utilize every tool in our arsenal as we respond,” Hochul wrote in a press release.

“It’s especially important to recognize the ways in which this outbreak is currently having a disproportionate impact on certain at-risk groups,” she added. “That’s why my team and I are working around the clock to secure more vaccines, expand testing capacity and responsibly educate the public on how to stay safe during this outbreak.”

As of July 29, New York state’s orthopoxvirus/monkeypox cases totaled 1,383, according to the New York Department of Health’s website, a designation established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

California, the state with the second-most cases, has reported 799 infections, according to CDC data, followed by 419 in Illinois. The United States has recorded a total of 5,189 cases this year.

Hochul’s move came a day after the commissioner of health in New York state declared monkeypox an “imminent threat to public health.”

“Based on the ongoing spread of this virus, which has increased rapidly and affected primarily communities that identify as men who have sex with men … I’ve declared monkeypox an imminent threat to public health throughout New York state,” Dr. Mary Travis Bassett wrote in a press release on Thursday.

Hochul’s emergency declaration allows more health professionals to administer monkeypox vaccines throughout New York state, the governor’s office said.

“The Executive Order specifically extends the pool of eligible individuals who can administer monkeypox vaccines, including EMS personnel, pharmacists, and midwives; allows physicians and certified nurse practitioners to issue non-patient specific standing orders for vaccines; and requires providers to send vaccine data to the New York State Department of Health,” according to the release.

The governor’s announcement follows an already existing process to secure more vaccines and expand testing capacities, as well as distributing information via a website and a text notification system, the office added.

New

On Thursday, Hochul said the federal government had secured an additional 110,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine for the state, for a total of 170,000 so far.

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency, its highest level of alert, over the monkeypox outbreak.

Monkeypox, a zoonotic infectious disease usually found in parts of Central and West Africa that can also infect humans in rare cases, has been reported in over 75 countries and territories, with over 22,000 infections globally, according to the CDC.

Earlier this month, a major peer-reviewed study of monkeypox infections found that the virus is primarily being transmitted through the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men in the United States and around the world.

The Journal of New England Medicine published the study on July 21, looking at monkeypox infection across 16 countries between April and June, which is around the same period cases began to emerge in countries outside of Africa.

The study reported on 528 infections diagnosed between April 27 and June 24, of which 98 percent were in gay or bisexual men with a median age of 38. Of these cases, 95 percent of the infections were suspected to have been transmitted through sexual activity—41 percent also had HIV.

From NTD News

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Biden’s administration has confirmed a plan that would give identification cards to illegal immigrants.

The pilot program from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is aimed at modernizing “documentation provided to some noncitizens,” an ICE spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email on July 29.

“Currently, noncitizens receive paper documents from the federal government about their immigration status. Paper documents pose a security risk, are easily lost, and degrade rapidly in real-world use, creating inefficiencies for the government and noncitizens. Moving to a secure card will save the agency millions, free up resources, and ensure information is quickly accessible to DHS officials while reducing the agency’s FOIA backlog,” the spokesperson said.

“For provisionally released noncitizens, the digital modernization will provide ongoing access to important immigration documents through the secure card and connected portal.”

DHS is the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency. FOIA refers to the Freedom of Information Act.

The program is being described as a concept, with specifics still being decided.

Illegal immigrants who cross the border are supposed to be deported or detained until they appear in court, but that’s increasingly not the case.

A recent ICE program, called Alternatives to Detention, colloquially known as “catch and release,” sees many immigrants released before having a hearing. Many, but not all, are given a Notice to Appear, or a notice to show up at court on a certain date.

The Biden administration said in April it was going to release up to 600,000 illegal immigrants in the coming months amid the unprecedented surge in illegal immigration while a watchdog report released in June showed that the government is utilizing the program more as time goes on.

Concerns

Some Republicans are expressing worries about the program, saying that the Biden administration should work on cracking down on illegal immigration instead of making it easier for illegal immigrants to obtain identification.

“We are concerned that this pilot program is yet another Biden Administration move encouraging illegal immigration by rewarding illegal immigrants for breaking our laws,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) wrote to acting ICE Director on July 29.

Under Joe Biden, the United States has relaxed or reversed a number of Trump-era immigration policies.

The congressmen cited reports that said the card could let illegal immigrants travel by plane and receive benefits through certain aid programs, writing that the issuance of the cards “raises the possibility that illegal aliens will use these identification cards to improperly access benefits such as housing, healthcare, and transportation.”

Comer and Grothman asked for a briefing on the program as soon as possible and for documents and communications concerning the pilot by Aug. 12.

The ICE spokesperson said that the card “will not be an official form of federal identification” and “would be provided only after national security background checks have been performed.”

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) is also worried about the program.

He said on Newsmax on Friday that he is working on a bill that would block the Biden administration from issuing the cards.

“They’re illegal, undocumented. The only thing they should be able to access is a trip back across the border,” Van Drew said.

“So I’m doing legislation that is saying not one American tax dollar, or for that matter, any American dollar, can be spent for these cards,” he added.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Pennsylvania Department of State counts 4 million registered Democratic voters in the state and 3.5 million Republicans as of May 2022. But even with 550,000 more Democrats than Republicans, Pennsylvania is not quite a blue state. It is more purple, with 1.3 million registered voters who call themselves libertarian, Green, or “other.” These are the less predictable voters, who make Pennsylvania a swing state, capable of going Democratic or Republican.

And with 19 electoral votes, it is a must-win for presidential hopefuls.

Many, but not all Pennsylvania Republicans, believe Donald Trump is still the person for the job. They say it is vital to regaining the power of the Oval Office.

“It’s absolutely central to our survival,” Schuylkill county author Russell S. Hepler told The Epoch Times. “And 2022 as well. I don’t want to underemphasize this upcoming election, because that’s going to lay the foundation for 2024, for good, or for bad.”

Hepler, a pastor was speaking as an individual, not for his congregation. His book is titled “Yes! We Can Turn This Nation Around!: A Practical Guide for Christian Political Involvement.”

Hepler says the United States is going in the wrong direction.

“If they keep pushing this radical leftist, economic, environmental, and cultural agenda, there isn’t going to be much left to America. When you’ve got a Supreme Court nominee who can’t even define a woman, we know this nation is in serious trouble,” Hepler said. “You can’t survive if you deny reality. That has been the basis for Marxism since its beginning. It’s always based on lies. It’s based on, ‘whatever I say the truth is,’ as the government, as the party, as the big brother.’”

Rick Rathfon, chairman of Clarion County Republican party, agrees that winning is critical for Republicans.

“Look at the mess that Biden has got us into in just 18 months. I mean, we need to take both the House and Senate back in November and to try to restore sanity and dignity in Washington,” Rathfon told The Epoch Times adding that if former President Donald Trump runs, he would support him.

But it will be ugly.

One Party, Two Views

Democrats will be out to destroy Trump from day one, Rathfon said. “They’ve never quit trying to destroy him. Trump did a lot of good things for our country. He absolutely did. But I think it would be a mistake for him to run, just because of the hatred that the Democrats and the mainstream media have for him.”

“I love Governor Ron DeSantis from Florida. I hear that in my travels, and from a lot of state committee people.”

The Pennsylvania Republican Party did not respond to requests for comment in this story.

Sam Faddis is a retired CIA operations officer and author of “Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA” and “Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security.” Faddis has spoken to many Republicans as an organizer of a coalition of more than 75 patriot groups across Pennsylvania that are working together on election reform and other issues.

The majority of Pennsylvania’s Republican voters consider themselves “Make America Great Again/America first” people Faddis said, and they are 100 percent behind Donald Trump on the issues, even if they sometimes have questions about his tactics.

Issues are the center of gravity overwhelmingly for the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, he says.

“There is a gap about the size of the Grand Canyon between those [MAGA] people and a very large number of established Republican politicians sitting in Harrisburg,” Faddis told The Epoch Times.

“While I know the establishment does not want to recognize that fact—they want to continue to pretend like that issue doesn’t exist—for the base, that is kind of the issue.”

The base does not feel like establishment Republicans are representing people and what they stand for, he said.

“We’re over here with Donald Trump again, at least on all of the issues, and you guys want to pretend like 2016 never happened.”

Trump is Different

The problem is that Trump is fundamentally different from any president that came before him in recent memory, Republican or Democrat, Faddis said.

“He’s totally outside the system. He’s not part of the uni-party.”

The establishment in both parties have a general consensus on how America’s government is going to be run, Faddis said. That is, always bigger, always more expensive.

“Donald Trump is a wrecking ball, so of course he has to be destroyed as far as the establishment is concerned,” Faddis said.

If the Republican who runs is not MAGA, their campaign is dead-on-arrival in Pennsylvania, Faddis said. And he believes it would be a waste of time for another MAGA-minded candidate to challenge Trump.

“If Donald Trump runs, he will, head and shoulders, without any question, be the choice,” Faddis said. “There’s no question. I can’t imagine that another MAGA-type person could challenge him in the primary in Pennsylvania and have any hope of winning. That’s not possible.”

If Trump decides not to run, Faddis believes DeSantis would be the number one person that the most voters would instantaneously coalesce around.

“I think that, frankly, would be a smart political move, because in some ways, I think DeSantis is a less controversial guy than Trump, for the middle,” Faddis said.

“I can’t conceive of anybody, even a dyed-in-the-wool guy like Ron DeSantis, beating Trump in Pennsylvania. I mean, DeSantis is very popular here. And I love his policies. But you could not possibly convince the base to walk away from Donald Trump as it stands.”

Primary Fight

Several Republicans indicated that they don’t want to see DeSantis and Trump battle in a primary. For many, it would be like watching parents fight when you love them both and don’t want to choose a favorite.

Toni Shuppe, founder and CEO of Audit the Vote PA, has been investigating anomalies in the 2020 election since right after it happened.

“I personally believe, based on what I found through Audit the Vote, that Donald Trump won in 2020,” Shuppe told The Epoch Times. “I feel like he won the first time, he deserves his second term. I would vote for him if he runs. But I also really like Ron DeSantis.”

For most folks in this story, the dream ticket would be Trump and DeSantis, although not everyone is convinced DeSantis would be willing to take a vice presidential role when he could govern Florida instead.

For Shuppe, the dream ticket would be Trump and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. “DeSantis is young. He’s doing such a good job in Florida. I would like to see Trump and Kristi, and then potentially, eight years of DeSantis,” Shuppe said. “I think, in order to get the country back on track, restoring our constitutional republic, it’s going to take a long time. And I think that that is why a Trump-and-somebody-else ticket makes sense first, followed by eight years of someone like Ron DeSantis. That could really get things moving in the right direction.”

Kurt Dock, a Lancaster Township Republican Committee member, would like to see Trump run, but if he doesn’t, Dock believes the Republican party has strong candidates in Noem and DeSantis.

He says the Democrats have moved too far left.

“When the pendulum swings one way and goes so extreme, it usually comes back just that hard the other way,” Dock said.

“I would like to see someone a little bit more centrist. Not so much to the right. Instead of continuing the alienation, try to get some of the people that are very center, or center-left to come to our side. I don’t think it would be that tough to do.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Dan Kildee’s latest ad undermined by fact that he votes with Biden 100 percent of time

Rep. Dan Kildee (D., Mich.) is distancing himself from other Democrats in a new campaign ad. That’s a heavy lift considering his voting record and position in Democratic leadership.

In a new ad, which does not mention that Kildee is a Democrat, the congressman pitches himself as an independent who stands up to his own party. Kildee adds that his self-described habit of breaking with his party makes him unpopular in Congress.

How Kildee can call himself unpopular when he’s one of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D., Calif.) whips—whose job is to pressure other Democrats to vote on legislation—is unclear. Moreover, Kildee votes with resident Joe Biden 100 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Kildee’s rebrand attempt is a familiar one. Vulnerable Democrats who have been rubber stamps for Biden’s agenda, such as Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio), are running as far away from their party as possible, highlighting just how toxic the party brand has become in swing districts.

First elected in 2012, Kildee is a ripe target for Republicans in November. Kildee’s district changed in December of last year and now encompasses broad swaths of solid-red regions in Michigan.

Democrats are aware of this fact. In June, Pelosi sent out a fundraising plea for Kildee, calling on Democrats to support “his toughest reelection fight yet.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Morningstar research arm may downgrade companies for working in disputed areas of Israel

A financial services giant builds its ratings around the premise that any entity operating in “occupied Palestinian territories” is connected to human rights violations—a standard that one foreign policy analyst says is a key pillar of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which tries to gin up an economic boycott of the Jewish state.

The research arm of Morningstar Inc., a firm that advises investors and rates companies based in part on their social ethics, may designate a company as participating in human rights violations just for working in an area it calls the “occupied Palestinian territories,” according to Richard Goldberg, a former U.S. national security official and Middle East expert who published an independent analysis on the matter for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

Sustainalytics, the research arm, in its guidance documents says its “position is that in occupied territories where human rights are being systematically violated, any business activity in that region is connected to the violations in some direct or indirect way,” according to a review of Morningstar’s methods conducted by the law firm White & Case. This standard is also applied to other areas immersed in conflict, such as Yemen, the Western Sahara, Tibet, and the South China Sea.

Goldberg, who independently analyzed the White & Case report, said the reliance on this standard for the “occupied Palestinian territories” results in companies being downgraded just for performing work in a disputed area of Israel. He says these standards ultimately promote divestment from Israel, as companies seek to distance themselves to avoid a negative rating from the company. Ratings produced by firms like Morningstar serve as a primary guide for investors and can greatly impact a company’s appeal.

Morningstar is already battling charges that Sustainalytics unfairly downgrades companies working with Israel’s security and anti-terrorism sectors. Critics like Goldberg say the ratings system unfairly targets Israel’s partners and ultimately bolsters the BDS movement, which wages economic warfare on the Jewish state and its allies. White & Case’s review of the company’s practices found some instances of bias in certain products. It recommended multiple reforms that Morningstar says it is undertaking to make its ratings products fairer to Israel. This includes altering the language in some of its ratings products and canceling others.

Sustainalytics classifies the “occupied Palestinian territories” as the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights—areas that remain disputed.

“We’re now getting to the deepest root of the BDS activity inside Morningstar,” Goldberg said. “Every downgrade of an Israeli-connected company starts with a BDS campaign assumption that Jews have no right to live in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. If you’re a Jewish business operating near the holiest site for Jews in the world, you’re an assumed human rights violator according to Morningstar.”

“Just like the BDS campaign,” Goldberg said, “Morningstar’s premise is that companies that legitimize a Jewish presence in these areas must be investigated and harassed.”

A Morningstar spokesman would not answer specific questions about the ratings practices but told the Washington Free Beacon that the company “does not support the anti-Israel BDS movement.” The spokesman said the company is working with Jewish advocacy groups, including the Jewish Federations of North America, to address concerns of bias and implement the reforms included in the White & Case report.

Sustainalytics relies on research produced by nonprofit groups that critics view as anti-Israel. This includes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which describe Israel as an occupying force and apartheid state. Sustainalytics also has a relationship with a group called WhoProfits, which the watchdog group NGO Monitor has flagged as “a leader” in the BDS movement.

“Sustainalytics has the system rigged against Israel-connected companies from beginning to end,” said Goldberg. “You start with false anti-Israel assumptions and double standards that trigger unfair investigations, validate BDS claims with pro-BDS sources of information, and the unsurprising output is an unfair negative rating of Israel-connected companies.”

Pro-Israel organizations like the Jewish Federations, an umbrella group representing pro-Israel activities across the United States, say Morningstar’s ratings are more biased than the company acknowledges.

The White & Case report “makes clear that built-in bias against Israel infects Sustainalytics’s methodology and sources, and thus, its other [ethical] ratings products,” the Jewish group wrote in a recent letter sent to Morningstar’s top executives. “Morningstar should take the opportunity to cleanse its products of all anti-Israel bias and set an example of fairness and reliability for all companies providing [ethical] ratings, which represent one-third of dollars managed globally.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Veteran Dem political consultant Mandy Grunwald received thousands of dollars for virtual sessions

The administration directing taxpayer funds to political consulting firms is not the scandal it used to be.

A Politico report this week on the Biden administration spending tens of thousands of dollars for a Democratic political consultant to do media training for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky was treated as a non-scandal. The spending was revealed by the outlet in its Wednesday night West Wing Playbook newsletter, with two experts quoted who both credited Walensky for enlisting help.

“Kudos to her for understanding that that is actually important to prioritize,” said one, with the other noting that, while the spending “seems extravagant to most lay people,” it’s really quite reasonable.

The previous administration wasn’t given the same pass. When the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services paid a consulting firm run by Republican operatives for “strategic communications” support, Politico in March 2019 published 2,000 words on the spending and said it raised “ethical questions.” The coverage pushed the Trump administration to suspend the contract in question. Critics of Trump said the spending was an example of the administration’s “routine corruption.”

The Biden administration’s payments for Walensky’s media training were for explicitly political purposes. It brought in veteran liberal operative Mandy Grunwald’s firm to virtually train Walensky after she faced criticism in liberal media for “messaging missteps,” including one instance in which she said vaccinated people “do not carry” COVID-19. The missteps were hurting the flailing Biden administration in the polls amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In addition to Grunwald’s work with Clinton, the Democratic consultant has also worked with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.), Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), and John Hickenlooper (D., Colo.). Grunwald also served as director of advertising on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. She has contributed more than $36,000 to liberal politicians and groups since 1993, federal campaign finance disclosures show.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The word is conspicuously absent from media coverage of the monkeypox outbreak

HIV part 2. Thank you butt buddies!! [US Patriot]

Mainstream journalists have adopted what critics are calling a “don’t say gay” approach to covering the monkeypox outbreak in the United States. The media’s coverage of monkeypox, which officials in New York and California have declared a threat to public health amid rising case numbers, has studiously avoided using the word “gay” when discussing the individuals who are most at risk of contracting the viral disease.

Journalists insist on using the phrase “men who have sex with men”—decades-old terminology often used during the AIDS epidemic—to explain the fact that gay and bisexual men comprise about 98 percent of more than 18,000 monkeypox cases worldwide. Some left-wing activists have argued that even pointing this out is “stigmatizing,” while more sane individuals have suggested this is “particularly important information for gay men to know.”

Some “don’t say gay” advocates want to go even further. Earlier this week, New York City health commissioner Ashwin Vasan called on the World Health Organization to rename the monkeypox virus due to “a growing concern for the potentially stigmatizing effects that the messaging around the ‘monkeypox’ virus can have on vulnerable communities.”

It is unclear whether the media’s refusal to say “gay” is related to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Law, known to mainstream journalists and other critics as the “don’t say gay” law.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation will require doctors to answer questions about ‘health equity’ to keep their certification

Last year, Oregon Health & Science University Hillsboro Medical Center began developing an “anti-racism and structural competency curriculum” for internal medicine residents. The school wasn’t alone. Georgetown University Hospital created a “social medicine and health equity track” for its residents. And this year, the health care system Honor Health started a project “to demonstrate how health care organizations can address DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] through the formation of People Resource Groups, affinity groups”—that is, segregated groups—”based on race, ethnicity, gender, and/or orientation.”

The throughline is the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation, the charity arm of the American Board of Internal Medicine, which certifies internists and is funding the development of the curricula. Both organizations wield significant influence in medicine, and over the past few years, they have used that influence to push an ideological agenda under the guise of DEI, health equity, and “antiracism.”

ABIM’s shift toward the promotion of DEI began with its release of a statement in June 2020 decrying the “structural inequity” embedded in the health care system and pledging to confront the “constructed social world”—whatever that is—that allows illness to spread. The organization released a progress report, declaring in Kendian language how it had transitioned from being “passively non-racist” to “actively anti-racist.”

Now, ABIM is using every bit of influence it has to push DEI in medicine, requiring physicians to educate themselves in this political pablum to practice their craft. It is part of a trend, underwritten by some of the country’s largest foundations, that has seen accrediting bodies incorporate social justice ideology into their requirements for member schools. The American Bar Association, which accredits almost every law school in the country, approved a standard in February that requires law students to learn about “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” The National Association of Independent Schools, which oversees accreditation standards for more than 1,600 American private schools, requires members to practice “cross-cultural competency” to promote “diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice.”

ABIM’s push for DEI has found its way into the most basic function of the organization, which is the certification of internal medicine practitioners. Internists must pass ABIM’s Maintenance of Certification Exam every 10 years. As of April 2021, “health equity” questions are now included on all exams.

ABIM has not elaborated on the “health equity” questions it will pose, but it has dropped hints. Earlier this month, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) released a list of “DEI competencies” that ABIM has endorsed. They include the practice of “allyship” in the face of “microaggression[s]” and call on residents to demonstrate their knowledge of “intersectionality” and “engage with systems to disrupt oppressive practices.”

They are a set of medical education standards that are filled with the watchwords of identity politics and draw from the even more explicitly ideological report Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narratives, and Concepts. ABIM endorsed these competencies, posting on Twitter that “ABIM stands with AAMC as they release their new DEI competencies to better care for patients. Future physicians will benefit from a better understanding of barriers and learn skills in how to be culturally responsive.” Internists should hope that ABIM doesn’t follow the AAMC’s lead.

But ABIM’s efforts go beyond certification requirements. “When ABIM decides to do something, it pours jet fuel on the issue,” said a senior physician familiar with the board. “And over the last few years, it has chosen DEI, and in particular, anti-racism.” The organization’s Summer Forum last year, described by one physician as a gathering of the “who’s who” of medicine, focused on “building trust” through DEI efforts.

The Summer Forum is often the launchpad for a broader policy agenda. The ABIM Foundation has flexed its muscles in medical education before, most notably with “Choosing Wisely,” an educational campaign designed to reduce unnecessary medical procedures. The campaign was also first conceived at a Summer Forum. By 2015, ABIM received a $4.2 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the campaign, which by then had already gained notable traction. As one physician at an elite medical school told me, the campaign “really made a difference in medicine.”

The ABIM Foundation is now investing the same energy—and a fair bit of money—in spreading DEI education throughout medical institutions. In collaboration with the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, ABIM has launched the Building Trust & Equity in Internal Medicine Training Grant, designed to support projects “incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into the fabric of internal medicine education and training.”

Thus, ABIM is now underwriting the DEI curricula at medical schools and hospitals across the country. These grants include $20,000 to the University of California-San Diego for developing a “social justice” curriculum for its internal medicine residency program; $20,000 to University of Illinois at Chicago to “develop educational sessions targeting the microaggressions”; and $5,000 to the University of California-Davis for a program designed “to build trustworthiness among residents and faculty by challenging traditional hierarchical advising structures.”

A large portion of medical DEI programming proves to be ideologically charged, even when it hides behind the vague language of “health equity.” A lot of DEI training, moreover, raises obvious concerns. Microaggression training, for example, can easily foster hypersensitivity, self-censorship, and language policing—an especially dangerous combination in the context of medical education and residency, when teaching physicians need the freedom to give honest feedback.

Many of the physicians I spoke with were concerned that ABIM’s attempts to “build trust” through DEI would have the opposite effect. Already, one physician told me, “poor interactions with our inefficient and impersonal medical system are now increasingly interpreted through the lens of race.” ABIM’s initiatives could easily exacerbate that problem, condemning the American medical system as plagued by “structural inequity.” As the doctor put it: “Addressing mistrust by creating mistrust.”

John Sailer is a fellow at the National Association of Scholars. 

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A key inflation gauge the Federal Reserve tracks closely when setting interest rates jumped in June to its highest level in 40 years, suggesting the Fed’s fight to take the sting out of price pressures may be drawn out.

The Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index, released on July 29 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), rose from an annualized 6.3 percent in May to 6.8 percent in June—marking the fastest pace of year-over-year price acceleration since 1982.

On a month-over-month basis, the PCE inflation gauge sped up from 0.6 percent in May to 1 percent in June, the fastest since 1981.

The so-called core PCE price index, which excludes food and energy and is the main PCE benchmark by which the Fed measures the pace of inflation against its 2 percent target, rose from an annual 4.7 percent in May to 4.8 percent in June.

In February 2022, the core PCE gauge clocked in at a multi-decade high of 5.3 percent, followed by 5.2 percent in March, 4.9 percent in April, and 4.7 percent in May, with some analysts dismissing June’s 0.1 percentage point uptick as a minor blip in an otherwise falling trend.

“Went up slightly (0.1%) in June but still a clear stabilizing/downward trend on core inflation (key metric for FED),” CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch said in a tweet.

On a month-over-month basis, core PCE inflation gauge accelerated from 0.5 percent in May to 0.6 percent in June, the fastest since April 2021.

All four PCE measures came in above market expectations.

Fed Pivot Likely Or ‘Delusional’?

Traders and market analysts have increasingly been speculating whether a slowing U.S. economy and signs of inflationary pressures potentially easing will prompt the Fed to pivot in its tightening cycle and either pause hiking rates or reverse course entirely and begin to loosen monetary settings.

But hopes that the Fed will hit pause are “delusional,” according to Julian Bridgen, co-founder of Macro Intelligence 2 Partners.

“Stocks are still using the 2009-21 playbook ie as growth slows the Fed eases. But we now live in a pre GFC world, where inflation not deflation is public enemy no.1. Hence, with ECI @ 5%, PCE @ 6.8 they are delusional,” he wrote on Twitter.

“The only pivot we are getting is to 50bps vs 75bps hikes,” he added.

At its most recent policy meeting on July 27, the Fed opted for a 75 basis point rate hike, with Fed Chair Jerome Powell saying another big rise could be on the table if warranted by the data.

But traders are betting that the Fed will opt for a 50 basis point hike in September, with federal funds futures contracts putting the odds of a 0.5 percentage point rise at 73 percent and the chances for a 0.75 percentage point hike standing at 27 percent.

The Fed’s current target interest rate range is between 225 and 250 basis points.

By contrast, some analysts believe that the current economic slowdown will weigh more heavily on the Fed’s decision-making than elevated inflation.

“I still think a data dependent Fed, given a choice between growth and fighting Covid-driven inflation, will choose growth and pivot on rates later this year,” Gary Black, Managing Partner at The Future Fund LLC, wrote on Twitter.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A global push to provide students with much more than just education under the banner of “community schools” has left many parents wondering what the program is all about, who’s behind it, and why its agenda is centered around the leftist concept of “equity.”

A full-service community school strives to “meet the social, emotional, physical and mental health, and academic needs of students,” according to the U.S. Department of Education.

It’s “the next generation of coordinated school health,” says the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the country, in response to a model for these schools developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and an organization once called the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development that now goes by ASCD.

The CDC calls them “healthy schools” and has developed a 10-part framework for addressing all aspects of a child’s health on campus called the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model.

But community schools don’t only address students’ health. The NEA describes a community school as “a network of partnerships offering services that remove barriers to learning, like trauma, hunger, homelessness and the myriad of other problems faced by families living in poverty.”

On the NEA’s website, Cindy Long recounts an example in Las Cruces, New Mexico that offered mental health services to a 13-year-old boy who witnessed the murder of his uncle, then days later lost his father to suicide.

“[T]he full-time community school coordinator spent hours researching and applying for a grant to pay for his father’s and uncle’s funerals, a time-consuming effort that would be impossible for staff at a regular public school to handle on top of regular workloads,” wrote Long.

She also discusses schools that offer food banks, family computer rooms, donated clothing, on-site laundry facilities, medical and dental care, and more.

Long said the hope is that these services can be expanded to address “the needs of a student’s siblings, parents, grandparents, and neighbors. The idea is that lifting up a student isn’t possible unless her community is lifted up, too.”

However, some parents and community members disagree with schools taking on these far-reaching responsibilities.

Taking on ‘the Role of the Parent’

Kelly Schenkoske, a California parent who has extensively researched community schools and hosts a podcast called “A Time to Stand,” told The Epoch Times the CDC and ASCD are working together “to turn every school into a community school,” and that while the schools may sound wonderful, there are legitimate concerns.

“The schools are trying to take on the role of the parent and remove the parent from their relationship with the child. This is a complete obstruction and an assault on the family,” said Schenkoske, who homeschools her two children. “For me, the biggest concern with all of this is having the school be the nucleus of every community and handing over more control to the government and all of these ‘experts’ who are going to invade the home and tell families how to parent.”

Schenkoske became especially concerned when she learned the California Teachers Association (CTA), one of the largest teachers unions in the state, and the NEA have fully backed the WSCC model and that state educators recently held a conference in Los Angeles where they discussed community schools and multiple plans centered around equity, she said.

The United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization, most U.S. states, teachers and many non-government organizations also support the push for community schools.

California has already invested $4.1 billion in the Community Schools Partnership Program, including about $649 million in grants to 268 school districts across the state. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) received more than $44 million.

The state program offers various grants to partners ranging from $100,000 to $2 million, and the U.S. Department of Education is also offering grants through its Full-Service Community Schools (FSCS) program.

CTA Vice President David Goldberg did not respond to inquiries, but he said at a virtual press conference on June 6 the teachers union is “all in” for community schools.

He applauded the state’s “deeper investment” in the community schools model, stating that “academic learning does not exist separately from social emotional learning.”

Echoing California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent assertion that democracy itself is under attack in the United States, Goldberg touted the community schools model as a way of “developing democratic processes” to include the voices of parents, students, educators, and administrators at the table.

California Models

Former teacher Ingrid Villeda said she left her position at the 93rd Street Academy in south Los Angeles to become the community school coordinator at the elementary school. She told The Epoch Times that most of the new funding will go to pay salaries for the next five years for community school coordinators, parent representatives, and employees with the Healthy Start program, another initiative that was designed to increase the health of women and children.

Community schools differ from other schools because they get input from “community stakeholders,” Villeda said.

“Traditionally, a principal arrives at a school, and it’s their vision that is rolled out, and when those principals change or go to other schools, the school goes through this trajectory of change until another leader comes in, and then it stabilizes again,” she said. “With community schools, and all stakeholders having a voice, you create a vision that includes everyone, so it’s not dependent on me or the principal, but on our needs … and the vision is there for the long term.”

Villeda has worked with the community to provide free vision and dental screenings for children. Out of 925 students at the school, 350 were able to get free eyeglasses, she said.

In LAUSD, some high schools have health centers on campus. Her school has a partnership with nearby Fremont High School which is equipped with a full-service health center.

“So usually, if parents tell me they need to take their kid to the doctor … we call directly and we actually make an appointment for them, and show them how to get there,” Villeda said.

Currently, there are about 30 community schools operating in Los Angeles and six in San Diego with plans to convert 10 additional schools this year and more in the future, according to Villeda.

The NEA and the CTA say there are about 5,000 community schools nationwide.

Equity: Who Decides What a Child Needs?

Villeda, a self-described Democrat and “lefty” union activist, said that although equity means different things to different people, to her it means having access to services and opportunities.

“Equity to me is not that we all have the same, but that everyone has what they need,” she said. “And there are some of us that need more than others.”

If children don’t have everything they need, then it becomes the problem of the schools, Villeda said. The schools are then forced to find solutions, and that’s what they’re doing through community schools, she said.

“Me giving a child a sweater at school doesn’t mean that child is going to get an ‘A.’ It just means that that child is going to be able to sit in a classroom without being cold,” she said.

However, James Lindsay, author of “Race Marxism” and co-author of other books such as “Social (In)justice,” and “Cynical Theories,” told The Epoch Times that to understand the new education lingo, parents should first be aware that “equity means socialism.”

Equity is the “rebranding of socialism,” he said. “It’s the adjustment of shares so that individuals and groups are made equal.”

This means the proponents of equity, including the World Economic Forum (WEF), want to dismantle and rebuild “the whole system” of food distribution, transportation, and housing so the outcomes are made more equitable, Lindsay said.

He claims the WEF is also trying to create a bottom-up demand for health equity among the youth and ultimately change those systems in ways that may not appeal to everyone.

“They’re redesigning the whole system to create better so-called health outcomes, and they use it to justify bringing in things like ‘affirmative’ trans health care, as they call it,” he said.

“People need to understand that there is a purpose behind this, and it’s largely controlled by a few people who want to reshape what’s going on in the world according to what they think is necessary or that they want,” Lindsay said.

The WSCC model “mirrors the Soviet model where a council of appointed individuals make all the decisions with the schools,” he said.

‘Gender-Affirming Care’

A University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) document lists Planned Parenthood, which has actively supported “gender-affirming care,” as a potential partner of community schools. But schools and the medical community have recently come under fire for using this policy to encourage the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery on minors who identify as transgender.

Lindsay contends that these transgender medical interventions are “not care,” but are instead “amputating children’s genitals and sterilizing them.”

Planned Parenthood is the single largest provider of sex education in the U.S., reaching 1.2 million people with education and outreach each year and promoting Comprehensive Sex Education as well as programs for LGBT youth.

In Dec. 19, 2019, Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles (PPLA) issued a press release announcing its instrumental role in the opening of 50 “Wellbeing Centers” in L.A. high schools, billed as the “first-of-its-kind collaboration between local partners to address the social, emotional, and sexual health needs of young people throughout Los Angeles County.”

According to the CDC’s virtual healthy school tour, under the WSCC model, school-based health centers can refer students and families to the public health department “for family planning, prenatal care, and concerns about sexually transmitted diseases,” and health educators will “frequently collaborate on activities and training for children and adolescents in the community.”

Planned Parenthood did not respond to an inquiry about whether its role in sex ed would be expanded under the community schools model nor whether it has applied for or received grant money as a community partner.

Meanwhile, Kimberly Ells, author of “The Invincible Family: Why The Global Campaign To Crush Motherhood and Fatherhood Can’t Win” and a policy advisor for Family Watch International, said she’s opposed to the WSCC model.

More and more parents are opting for homeschooling and realizing they may be better at educating their own children than the public school system they’ve trusted in the past, she said.

Ells wrote an article earlier this year for The Daily Signal, condemning “Communist-Style Community Schools” which she views as a globalist attack on the traditional role of parents and families.

“It’s like the worst example of cutting off the branch that you’re sitting on that I’ve ever seen. To try and undercut the family is to undercut civilization, because societies can’t thrive without strong families,” she told The Epoch Times.

A chapter in her book exposes the UN’s push to make Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) a “human right” of all children, while the program focuses heavily on gender theory and advocates for abortion, Ells said.

Another chapter focuses on the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, and how it exploits health to include many of these controversial medical practices, she said.

“We need to wake up to the fact that there is a global agenda,” Ells said. “Even in the Sustainable Development Goals, one of the goals is health, but then it depends on what you believe ‘health’ to be.”

The California Department of Education, CTA, and NEA did not respond to inquiries.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

PUNTA GORDA, Fla.–Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. told schools to “ignore federal guidelines aimed at preventing discrimination against students based on gender identity, saying they would “vastly expand the application” of Title IX.

In a July 27 letter to superintendents, school boards, private schools, and charter schools, Diaz advised that guidance documents from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture “are not binding law” and asked school officials to “refuse to change their practices.”

The letter accused the federal government of trying to “impose sexual ideology on Florida schools” that would create a risk to the “health, safety, and welfare of Florida students.”

“The Department will do everything in its power to protect the well being of all Florida students,” Diaz said in his letter. “And to vindicate the right of all parents to know what takes place in their child’s classroom.”

The guidelines from the federal government extend protections under the law to include schools’ “obligations not to discriminate based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

In June, Miguel Cardona, U.S. Department of Education Secretary explained in a news release that the guidelines will “ensure all our nation’s students—no matter where they live, who they are or whom they love—can learn, grow, and thrive in school.”

More than 50 years ago, Title IX was enacted to prohibit gender-based discrimination in educational institutions. In June, the U.S. Department of Education released a proposal that stated it would “provide greater clarity regarding the scope” of sexual discrimination. The U.S. Department of Agriculture became involved through the school-lunch programs in May when it was announced that it would begin interpreting Title IX to “include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

In his letter, Diaz warned schools against making certain accommodations for transgender students who “identify” as the sex opposite of which they were biologically assigned, especially when it comes to bathroom accommodations.

“Specifically, for example, nothing in these guidance documents requires you to give biological males who identify as female access to female bathrooms, locker rooms, or dorms; to assign biological males who identify as female to female rooms on school field trips; or to allow biological males who identify as female to compete on female sports teams,” Diaz wrote.

In 2021, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law legislation barring transgender female athletes from competing on high-school girls’ and college sports teams. In April, the governor signed a bill that restricts instruction concerning gender identity and sexual orientation to children in lower grades. Dubbed by critics as the “don’t say gay” bill, it has been challenged in federal court and is still pending.

At a July 27 press conference, the governor took aim at schools that push “woke gender ideology.”

The governor, during the press event, suggested that school systems in other cities and states are included in their instruction suggestions that would encourage students to question their genders.

“Basically, this will be for elementary school kids where they’re instructed to tell them, ‘Well, you may have been a boy, that may have been what you said, but maybe you’re really a girl—that’s wrong,’” DeSantis said of the schools promoting “woke gender ideology.”

He said that Florida has “laid down a marker” to ensure that it’s “not something that gained a foothold here in the state of Florida.”

“The kids are off limits,” he said at the Tampa press conference.

Diaz’s letter told school administrators that the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services was “communicating with schools” and “suggesting they should comply with the U.S. Department of Agriculture guidance.”

He advised schools to ignore what he called “any suggestions” from the state agriculture department that schools display a poster themed “And Justice for All” that would indicate participation in the federal program.

The federal agriculture agency described the posters as a “primary method utilized to inform customers of their rights that displays information relevant” to federally assisted programs.

Diaz’s letter prompted Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, a Democratic gubernatorial hopeful, to hold a press conference on July 29 to address the assertions in Diaz’s letter, as well as to accuse the governor of “creating a fictitious culture war.”

“Manny Diaz and the Department of Education have no oversight over the National School Lunch Program,” she said at her press conference on July 29. “This has nothing to do with bathrooms or locker rooms like Commissioner Diaz has suggested.”

Fried said the governor needs to prioritize the people of the state instead of creating another “manufactured crisis,” because he is “running for president.”

The education commissioner, she said, should focus on the task of “focusing on his job” and addressing the teacher shortage instead of “being Ron’s errand boy.”

The federal school food nutrition program has specific rules and regulations before funds are dispersed to the state, she explained.

“The department, as well as all of our schools, need to be in compliance,” Fried said. “Commissioner Diaz has overstepped his role—he has no oversight when it comes to our feeding programs in the state of Florida—when it comes to our school nutrition program.”

Neither the U.S. Department of Education nor the U.S. Department of Agriculture responded before press time, but the spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education said the Biden administration was responsible for attempting to hold federal programs “hostage.”

“Resident Biden is attempting to force his radical agenda on Florida schools by holding hostage programs our students need,” Alex Lanfranconi, Director of Communications for the Florida Department of Education told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “Our schools have NO obligation to follow this federal guidance and will not be threatened into submission.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The U.S. government has reached a new deal with Moderna for 65 million additional COVID-19 vaccine doses, the Biden administration announced on July 29.

The deal is valued at $1.7 billion.

Moderna will sell doses of its vaccine that target Omicron subvariants, according to the agencies that announced the agreement. The actual contract has not yet been made public.

Moderna and other vaccine makers have been updating their COVID-19 vaccine formulations because the vaccines are based on the Wuhan strain, which has not been prevalent since 2020. The vaccines have proven increasingly worse at protecting recipients as newer variants emerge.

BA.5, an Omicron subvariant that is currently dominant in the United States, bypasses the protection from vaccination and prior infection better than earlier strains, according to emerging data. Prior infection, or natural immunity, continues to hold up better than vaccination, according to the studies.

U.S. drug regulators in June recommended vaccine makers tweak their formulations to include components of BA.5 and BA.4, another Omicron subvariant. The companies had been focusing on early Omicron strains, which have since largely been displaced.

“Currently available vaccines have helped reduce the most serious outcomes (hospitalization and death) caused by COVID-19, but results from post-authorization observational studies have shown that effectiveness of primary vaccination wanes over time against certain variants, including Omicron. And while initial booster doses have helped restore protection against severe disease and hospitalization associated with omicron, studies have also indicated waning effectiveness of first booster doses over time,” Dr. Peter Marks, a top Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official, said in a recent statement.

“As we move into the fall and winter, it is critical that we have safe and effective vaccine boosters that can provide protection against circulating and emerging variants to prevent the most severe consequences of COVID-19,” he added.

Any updated formulations would need to be cleared by the agency.

“We are pleased to extend our successful collaboration with the U.S. government,” Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, said in a statement on Friday. “Moderna’s mRNA platform is enabling us to rapidly create mRNA-1273.222, a bivalent vaccine that specifically targets Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, the most prevalent variants of concern in the U.S. today.”

Pfizer Purchase

Before the Moderna agreement, the U.S. government agreed to buy 105 million updated Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine doses.

That agreement was valued at $3.2 billion.

Both agreements were hammered out with the Department of Defense, which coordinated with the Department of Health and Human Services. They include options that enable the government to buy up to 600 million doses in total, or 300 million from each company, if additional doses are deemed necessary. However, that would require more funding from Congress, Biden administration officials say.

Deliveries of the updated Moderna and Pfizer vaccines could come as early as the fall, pending FDA authorization and backing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We must stay vigilant in our fight against COVID-19 and continue to expand Americans’ access to the best vaccines and treatments,” Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “As we look to the fall and winter, we’re doing just that—ensuring Americans have the tools they need to stay safe and help keep our nation moving forward.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

President Donald Trump has warned that America’s economy is on track for a bigger disaster than a recession, with his remarks coming shortly before government statistics showed GDP printing negative for the second consecutive quarter, which is a rule-of-thumb definition for a recession.

“Where we’re going now could be a very bad place,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona last week. “We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem.”

The former president singled out the collapse in Americans’ real wages, a historically depressed labor force participation rate, and the Democrat push for the Green New Deal that he said would crush economic growth.

“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression,” the former president said.

Trump’s remarks came several days before the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released data showing that real U.S. GDP fell by an annualized 0.9 percent in the second quarter after contracting 1.6 percent in the first quarter.

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.

Vance Ginn, Chief Economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD in an interview that, while officially it’s NBER that calls recessions, the two-quarter rule is “usually how it’s done by a rule of thumb.”

“I think this is definitely recession that we’re in now from these bad policies,” Ginn added, blaming a series of “progressive policies” coming out of the White House and the Democrat-controlled House.

Stagflationary Winds Blowing

In his remarks, Trump also took aim at resident Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, blaming him for soaring inflation.

“Biden created the worst inflation in 47 years. We’re at 9.1 percent, but the actual number is much, much higher than that,” Trump said.

While the former president didn’t provide his own estimate for the true rate of inflation, an alternative CPI inflation gauge developed by economist John Williams, calculated according to the same methodology used by the U.S. government in the 1980s, puts the figure at 17.3 percent, a 75-year high.

Trump also said that persistently high inflation combined with an economic slowdown has put the country “on the verge of a devastating” spell of stagflation, which is a combination of accelerating prices and slowing economic growth.

Inflation is “going higher and higher all the time,” Trump said, adding that it’s “costing families nearly $6,000 a year, bigger than any tax increase ever proposed other than the tax increase that they want to propose right now.”

In Trump’s first full month in office in February 2017, the headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at 2.8 percent in annual terms. While the CPI measure fluctuated during his tenure, the highest it ever reached 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.

‘War on American Energy’

Soaring energy prices have been one of the key contributing factors to inflation, accounting for around half of the headline inflation figure, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In his criticism of Biden’s policies, Trump singled out what he called “Biden’s war on American energy” and blamed it for pushing up gasoline prices.

Since taking office, Biden has taken a number of executive actions targeting the oil industry, including rescinding the Keystone XL pipeline permit, halting new oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands and waters, and ending fossil fuel subsidies by some agencies.

The price of gasoline is around double what it was when Biden took office, with the president blaming various factors, including a lack of refining capacity, the war in Ukraine, and corporate greed.

In a bid to lower prices at the pump, Biden ordered the release of oil reserves from the national strategic reserve, called on U.S. refineries to boost output, and pushed OPEC to pump more crude.

In his speech, Trump said this amounted to “begging” other countries to pump more oil instead of trying to ramp up domestic production.

“We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country in the world. We are a nation that is consumed by the radical left’s Green New Deal, yet everyone knows that the Green New Deal will lead to our destruction.”

“Just two years ago, we were energy-independent. We were even energy-dominant. The United States is now a beggar for energy

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

WILL REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS INSIST DAN PRZYGODA IS ALLOWED NOWHERE NEAR THE CAPITOL, AFTER THESE REVELATIONS?

A producer working for the Congressional January 6th Committee posted violent threats towards President Trump supporters and Republican politicians, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.

The unearthed posts from Twitter are the latest piece of evidence undercutting the alleged independent, nonpartisan efforts of the committee, as well as the hypocrisy of those now claiming to be working to expose violence towards elected officials or law enforcement. The news comes after the committee’s own chairman, Bennie Thompson, was exposed for his links to violent, secessionist movements in the 1960s and 70s.

But producer Dan Przygoda’s threats aren’t 50 or 60 years old. In fact, they appear to have been posted on the day of President Trump’s inauguration, on January 20th, 2017. On the same day, violent left-wing activists descended on Washington, D.C., burning cars, assaulting people, and smashing windows. On that day, at least 217 people were arrested. It is unclear if any of them were incited by Przygoda’s Twitter feed.

The House Select Committee on January 6th hired Przygoda in June 2022 to assist the staging of a series of hearings televised to the American public, many in prime time. Przygoda previously worked for ABC News, Bloomberg, and Good Morning America.

On the afternoon Trump’s inauguration – as AntiFa activists rampaged through the nation’s capital – Przygoda tweeted that he would be “getting this new attachment for my car when I drive around Trump country…” Included in the tweet was a short, black-and-white animation, or “gif,” of a car punching pedestrians as it passes with an automatic, metal arm.

Similarly, in November of 2016, while appearing to reference a variety of movies including Men in Black, he created a scenario whereby then Vice President-elect Mike Pence gets punched in the head.

””welcome to Miami!” *punches Pence in the head as he climbs out of his spacecraft*,” he wrote to his Twitter followers.

The January 6th committee’s recent production staff hire is also an Emmy-nominated news producer whose résumé includes stints as a producer and editor at outlets including Bloomberg and ABC News.

Akin to Przygoda, Congressional members of the committee have also made controversial remarks in the past, including its Chairman Bennie Thompson, who praised radical secessionist groups attempting to overtake states within the U.S. and organizations with deep ties to the the Nation of Islam.

Left-wing activists have also routinely attacked federal buildings, escaping any punishment or inquiry as rigorous as the ongoing efforts surrounding January 6th.

The Biden administration spent millions last year to halt the wall construction

The Biden administration is set to close four wide gaps in the U.S.-Mexico border wall in an open area of southern Arizona near Yuma, to “address operational impacts” and “immediate life and safety risks.”

The four gaps are within an incomplete border barrier project—the former Yuma 6 project area near the Morelos Dam, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The area has become one of the busiest corridors for illegal crossings.

The border barrier project, which was operational under the Trump administration, was left incomplete after resident Joe Biden in 2021 sent back $2.2 billion in border wall funds to the Department of Defense to be used for overseas defense construction projects. The funds had previously been diverted by President Donald Trump to build the border wall, which at one time was going up at the pace of one mile a day. Completing the border wall was among Trump’s top campaign promises.

“Due to the proximity to the Morelos Dam and the swift moving Colorado River, this area presents safety and life hazard risks for migrants attempting to cross into the United States where there is a risk of drownings and injuries from falls,” the DHS stated on July 28. “This area also poses a life and safety risk to first responders and agents responding to incidents in this area.”

Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas authorized the project’s completion, which will be paid for out of the DHS’s fiscal year 2021 budget.

“Prior to construction, DHS will engage in standard environmental planning and conduct stakeholder outreach and consultation. DHS will move as expeditiously as possible, while still maintaining environmental stewardship,” the statement continued. “This project supports CBP’s and DHS’s priority to deploy modern, effective border measures and also improving safety and security along the Southwest Border.”

The U.S. Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector has quickly emerged as the third busiest of nine sectors along the border, with much of the traffic funneling through the Morelos Dam. Illegal immigrants arrive in the small town of Algodones and walk unencumbered across a concrete ledge on the dam to the United States, where they wait for U.S. Border Patrol agents to take them into custody.

In the Yuma sector alone, U.S. border agents stopped illegal immigrants 160,482 times from January through June, a figure nearly four times that of the same period in 2021, according to CBP data. The only other sectors with more traffic were Del Rio and Rio Grande Valley in South Texas.

The area has been especially attractive to Colombians, Venezuelans, and other nationalities who have flown to Mexicali, Mexico, and taken a short bus or taxi ride to Algodones to walk across the border before being released into the United States.

Biden halted further wall construction after he took office, but in the lead up to the 2022 primary elections, has since made closing the gaps just south of Yuma a priority.

A report by Senate Republicans in July 2021 said that Biden’s efforts to halt border wall construction was costing American taxpayers $3 million per day, and the administration is estimated to have spent at least $1.8 billion by July 2021.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The social media company ‘must explain itself for this outrageous act of censorship,’ Senator Marco Rubio says

Twitter on July 28 imposed a blockade on all content from The Epoch Times without explanation, raising further concerns about freedom of speech on the platform and drawing ire from three U.S. senators.

The platform enforced a warning on all links from The Epoch Times. A click on a link directs users to a page titled “Warning: this link may be unsafe,” which prompts users to return to the previous page.

“The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe,” the warning stated, citing Twitter’s URL policy.

We are aware that Twitter has marked all links to https://t.co/copOc5TSA6 as “unsafe.” We believe this is a mistake and we have submitted a review to @TwitterSupport. pic.twitter.com/UyFqoiaUkq

— The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) July 29, 2022

The notice said that the link could fall into any of four categories: “malicious links that could steal personal information or harm electronic devices”; “spammy links that mislead people or disrupt their experience”; “violent or misleading content that could lead to real-world harm”; or content that “if posted directly on Twitter, are a violation of the Twitter Rules.”

Twitter’s warning page allows users to proceed to the Epoch Times link if they click on the word “continue” at the very bottom of the page.

The platform has not responded to multiple requests from The Epoch Times for clarification.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who serves on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who serves on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs,  decried the move as an act of censorship.

“Twitter is blocking all links to @EpochTimes, including a story about a human trafficking survivor, and labeling them as ‘spammy’ and ‘unsafe.’ Twitter must explain itself for this outrageous act of censorship,” Rubio wrote in a July 29 tweet.

Johnson described Twitter’s action as “alarming.”

“Twitter is censoring @EpochTimes under the guise of ‘unsafe’ speech. Remember what happened the last time corporate media and big tech tried to censor my investigation on Hunter Biden corruption?” he wrote. “The truth always prevails.”

Scott asked Twitter in a July 29 tweet “where’s the respect for free speech and freedom of press, Twitter.”

“We all remember your biased censorship of [The New York Post] and how that ended for you,” Scott said.

Human Trafficking Interview Censored

Among the first to be affected by Twitter’s blockade was Eliza Bleu, a human trafficking survivor. In an interview that premiered at 7:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, Bleu shared about how abusers groomed her by preying on her vulnerabilities.

Bleu tried to repost the link after watching the interview, and to her surprise and dismay, found that she “couldn’t even click on the link.”

“I’m pretty disheartened that the interview link was labeled as unsafe, because it’s not unsafe,” she told The Epoch Times.

“By watching the interview, anyone can tell it’s pretty educational,” she said. “I wasn’t talking about anything that wasn’t factual. I was just really just trying to educate, raise awareness, and bring attention to the issue.”

She added that the link seemed to be accessible when the interview first aired but became blocked sometime afterward.

Twitter Targets American Media, Not Chinese State Media

The Epoch Times was founded in 2000 by Chinese Americans who fled communist China and sought to create an independent media outlet to bring uncensored and truthful information to the world.

At least 10 staff members for The Epoch Times were arrested that year in China, with one editor-in-chief spending a decade in prison.

While operating outside of China, the media outlet has remained a consistent target of attacks from the Chinese regime over the past two decades.

The printing press of the Hong Kong edition of The Epoch Times has suffered a series of violent break-ins, including arson, over the years, viewed as attempts by Beijing to intimidate the publication. In an official statement last year, resident Joe Biden’s State Department condemnded an attack on an Epoch Times reporter in Hong Kong.

Major Chinese state media, by contrast, remain accessible on the platform as of press time.

Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute think tank and a contributor for The Epoch Times, also expressed his shock.

“The @EpochTimes, the entire media complex, has been declared by Twitter to be unsafe. This stuns me, even though I thought I was beyond shock at this point,” he wrote.

Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A group of health care workers who sued their hospital over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate are slated to receive $10 million, according to a settlement agreement filed on July 29.

About a dozen workers at the NorthShore University HealthSystem in Illinois lodged the suit in October 2021, arguing that the facility was illegally not granting religious exemptions to the mandate.

After eight months of negotiations, the workers and NorthShore “have agreed to settle this case,” according to a memorandum filed in federal court.

Under the settlement’s terms, NorthShore will pay $10,337,500 into a settlement fund for workers affected by its mandate—specifically, workers who between July 1, 2021, and Jan. 1, 2022, asked for a religious accommodation and were denied and either received a vaccine to avoid termination or were fired or resigned. About 473 workers fit under that category.

NorthShore will also adjust its vaccine mandate “to enhance its accommodation procedures for individuals with approved exemptions for sincerely held religious belief.”

Workers fired because they refused to get vaccinated due to their religious beliefs are eligible to apply for re-employment.

U.S. District Judge John Kness, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, was asked to approve the proposed settlement.

Liberty Counsel, the legal group representing the platiniffs, described the settlement as a first-of-its-kind for an action against a private employer who denied hundreds of requests for religious exemptions to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

“The drastic policy change and substantial monetary relief required by the settlement will bring a strong measure of justice to NorthShore’s employees who were callously forced to choose between their conscience and their jobs,” Horatio Mihet, vice president of legal affairs at the group, said in a statement.

“This settlement should also serve as a strong warning to employers across the nation that they cannot refuse to accommodate those with sincere religious objections to forced vaccination mandates,” he added.

Fund

If the agreement is approved, affected workers could apply for money from the $10 million fund.

Each worker who eventually got a vaccine despite raising religious objections would be eligible for approximately $3,000 while those who were fired or resigned could get up to about $25,000, according to estimates.

The final amounts will depend on how many workers apply for money, among other factors.

In addition, the agreement sets aside $260,000 for the named plaintiffs in the case. Each would be slated to receive about $20,000, on top of the other funds.

Liberty Counsel is also asking for $2 million in attorneys fees, or about 20 percent of the total settlement.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Twenty-two states are suing resident Joe Biden’s administration for threatening to zap school-meal program funding unless the states comply with new rules surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation in schools.

The lawsuit represents the latest volley fired in the ongoing battles between state officials and Biden, who they accuse of usurping their authority through his executive orders.

The states complain that a federal nondiscrimination rule, set to take effect Aug. 15, seeks to impose “obligations that apparently stretch as far as ending sex-separated living facilities and athletics and mandating the use of biologically inaccurate preferred pronouns,” said the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, Tennessee, on July 26.

“The Biden administration’s sweeping rhetoric treats normal practices, such as sex-separated bathrooms and athletics, as ‘discriminatory’ even though DOJ and the Department of Education treated those as legal, nondiscriminatory practices as recently as last year,” the suit says.

A fact sheet about the proposed policy cited examples of discriminatory acts, as interpreted by bureaucrats, under the new rule: “Preventing a transgender high school girl [a biological male] from using the girls’ restroom” and “preventing a transgender high school girl [a biological male] from “try[ing] out for the girls’ cheerleading team,” the lawsuit says.

The Tennessee and Indiana attorneys general are heading the coalition of states alleging that Biden and the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the meal program, “issued directives and rules that misconstrue the law and impose unlawful requirements,” the lawsuit says.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provided $2.6 billion to Tennessee last year; in sum, the 22 states received almost $29 billion through the program for low-income schoolchildren, working families, the elderly, and people with disabilities.

Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita railed against the “extreme left-wing agenda” that he believes is fueling these policies.

“They’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding,” Rokita said in a statement.

Rokita says he is, “fighting for Hoosier common sense and the rule of law,” which is what he believes citizens elected him to do.

The White House did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment on the lawsuit, which involves: Tennessee, Indiana, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Before filing suit, attorneys general from 26 states sent a letter to the president on June 14, expressing their concerns.

“By vastly expanding the concept of ‘discrimination on the basis of sex’ to include gender identity and sexual orientation, the guidance does much more than offer direction,” the letter stated.

“It imposes new—and unlawful—regulatory measures on state agencies and operators receiving federal financial assistance from the USDA. And the inevitable result is regulatory chaos that would threaten the effective provision of essential nutritional services to some of our most vulnerable citizens.”

The National School Lunch Program provides meals to 30 million schoolchildren daily.

About 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential childcare institutions receive federal funding to provide subsidized free or reduced-price meals for qualifying children, a news release from Rokita said.

The states’ suit against the Department of Agriculture is similar to a separate federal lawsuit that 20 states, including Tennessee and Indiana, pressed against the Department of Education and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In that case, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the states. The order temporarily blocks the federal agencies from forcing the states to allow biological males to compete on girls’ sports teams.

The court ruled that they won’t be required to eliminate sex-separated showers and locker rooms, nor will they be compelled to use designated pronouns that individuals request.

The school-meals lawsuit against the department seeks the same relief.

In both the Education Department suit and the Agriculture Department suit, the controversial changes did not go through Congress.

Instead, federal agencies created them under an executive order that the president issued in January 2021, requiring policies that would fight discrimination based on “gender identity or sexual orientation.”

The states say they do not deny SNAP benefits based on those factors. But they take issue with memoranda and a “final rule” that both attempt to impose “unlawful and unnecessary new obligations.”

The states “sue to prevent the department from usurping authority that properly belongs to Congress, the states, and the people, and to eliminate the nationwide confusion and upheaval” that the proposed rule has caused, the lawsuit says.

“When will the Biden administration learn that making law is the legislature’s role?” Ohio attorney general David Yost said in a news release.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

‘Religious liberty is fragile, and religious intolerance and persecution have been recurring features of human history’

The Supreme Court justice who drafted the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade decried a “growing hostility” toward religion in the West in his first public appearance after the ruling.

“The problem that looms is not just indifference to religion, it’s not just ignorance about religion,” Alito said, starting his keynote address at the 2022 Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit in Rome on July 21. His 37-minute speech was released on July 28.

“There’s also growing hostility to religion or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors,” the justice said.

The keynote address marks the top judge’s first appearance after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion in the United States, with a ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It came as a defiant comeback as lawmakers in the United States and across the world voiced opposition to the ruling, with some even calling the June ruling an “assault” on democracy.

‘The Proud Civilization’

Alito, a Roman Catholic, reflected on the parallels between the United States and Rome, as once a “proud” spiritual civilization, nonetheless proved “no human achievement is ever permanent.”

“I find myself thinking about the proud civilization that was centered here two millennia ago,” he said. “As I think back, I also think ahead, and I wonder what historians may say centuries from now about the contribution of the United States to world civilization.”

“One thing I hope they will say is that our country, after a lot of fits and starts, and ups and downs, eventually showed the world that it is possible to have a stable and successful society in which people of diverse faiths live and work together harmoniously and productively while still retaining their own beliefs,” Alito added, noting that the fact that Americans can exercise religious liberty has been “truly a historic accomplishment” for the country.

In this United States, the Justice said, where religious liberty goes hand-in-hand with many other rights, a “growing hostility” towards religion is threatening the protection of this sacred right across the country.

“And the problem that looms is not just indifference to religion, it’s not just ignorance about religion. There’s also growing hostility to religion, or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors,” the justice added.

Yet, according to Alito, this hostility to religion and religious freedom threatens a range of other fundamental rights.

“The exercise of religion very often involves speech, a spoken or written prayer, the recitation of Scripture, a homily, a religious book or article these are all forms of speech they are also forms of religious exercise. If this sort of speech can be suppressed or punished, what is to stop the state from crushing other forms of expression?

“We consider the relationship between freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. A religious service in a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple is a form of assembly. If a government can ban those assemblies, will it hesitate to outlaw others?

“On the other hand, if religious liberty is allowed, it will be harder for the state to restrict other speech and other assemblies,” Alito said.

While most legal academics nowadays believes that “religion doesn’t merit special protection,” Alito added, “the Constitution of the United States provides a clear answer” to the question of whether religious liberty warrants protection.

“Constitution protects the free exercise of religion … And for judges like me, who think to the belief that it matters what the Constitution says and what it does not say, that is enough,” the justice said. “It’s the law, and don’t ask me why.”

‘What Really Wounded Me’

In what he described as an “unusual” sense of “diplomatic impulse” in him, Alito responded to foreign lawmakers and celebrities who “felt perfectly fine commenting on American law.

“One of these was former Prime Minister Boris Johnson—but he paid the price—post hoc ergo propter hoc right?” Alito said, applying the “after this, therefore resulting from it” fallacy to the fact that the UK PM resigned after voicing opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling.

But the justice did not stop there.

“What really wounded me—what really wounded me—was when the Duke of Sussex addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare the decision—whose name may not be spoken—with the Russian attack on Ukraine,” Alito said, referring to Prince Harry, who claimed the overturn of Roe v. Wade was a part of “a global assault on democracy and freedom” in a speech in July.

Religious Liberty

The justice went further to reflect on religious persecution across the world—such as in Nigeria, Egypt, and India—and, most prominently China, but all were not successful.

“During my lifetime, the People’s Republic of China did its best to eradicate religion completely. And yet it failed. Just as the Roman emperors who spent centuries trying to destroy Christianity failed,” the justice said.

As an example of this, Alito added, was that “the Cultural Revolution did its best to destroy religion, but it was not successful. It could not extinguish the religious impulse.”

The cultural revolution was a tumultuous period between 1967 to 1977, during which the Chinese Communist Party sought to eradicate traditional beliefs and values.

Alito’s speech came after the highest court made multiple rulings on cases pertaining to religious liberty in the United States, including a June ruling that ruled in favor of a football coach who petitioned for his right to pray and another ruling in the same month that struck down Maine’s ban on religious school funding.

China’s Long-Arm Persecution

Currently, plaintiffs in another high-profile religious freedom case before the Supreme Court is seeking in what they describe as China’s long-arm religious persecution in the United States.

Twenty-three attorneys general (AGs) across the nation, in a joint amicus brief, described the point of law in the case as “an issue of national importance,” supporting the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs’ complaint (pdf) describes around 40 incidents of threats or physical assault against them for participating in parades representing Falun Gong, handing out flyers about Falun Gong, or managing a booth with Falun Gong-related literature in the United States.

Falun Gong is a spiritual practice consisting of meditative exercises and moral teachings centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It became widely popular in China in the 1990s. In 1999, the communist regime, perceiving that popularity to be a threat, began nationwide persecution targeting the practice and its adherents.

Millions of practitioners have since been held in detention centers, jails, and labor camps across China, where they are subject to physical torture, forced labor, and forced organ harvesting.

With respect to one incident in July 2011, two plaintiffs describe in graphic detail an attack by Li Huahong, head of the Chinese Anti-Cult World Alliance, a CCP-affiliated organization that targets religious dissidents overseas with violence and harassment.

According to two witnesses, a mob of 20 to 30 people then surrounded two Falun Gong practitioners. One of them was held for about 30 minutes until the police arrived, while a mob yelled “kill her” and “beat her to death.”

“In this case, a religious group known as the Falun Gong, which originated in China, experienced persecution and harassment on American soil,” according to a statement from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office on June 29.

“The group started in China under a Communist regime hostile to religious pluralism,” the AGs wrote. “Many Falun Gong practitioners have thus fled to America. Yet even after coming here, Petitioners allegedly continue to face persecution and abuse from Communist sympathizers.”

The AGs, in their amicus brief, said the 2021 ruling of a lower court dismissing the case is “wrong on an issue of national importance that stands at the center of our constitutional tradition”—namely, religious liberty.

In doing so, the court “unduly narrowed a statute meant to bar the worst acts of violence in many of America’s sacred places,” the AGs said.

“America’s commitment to religious freedom is ‘essential.’ … It constitutes ‘one of our most treasured and jealously guarded constitutional rights,’” the AGs wrote, quoting previous court opinions.

“Our hearts are restless until we rest in God,” Alito said in his speech.

“And, therefore, the champions of religious liberty who go out as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves can expect to find hearts that are open to their message,” the justice said.

Eva Fu contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

With an expected GOP takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives following November’s midterm elections, Republicans in the chamber are poised to launch a slew of investigations aimed at dialing up the pressure on the Biden administration over a range of issues—from border security to Hunter Biden to the origins of the pandemic.

Domestic concerns faced by everyday Americans—most notably a historic inflation rate—will be key priorities, according to Chair of the House Republican Conference Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).

House Republicans will take the administration to task on alleged “policy failures that have created an inflation crisis, energy crisis, border crisis, and crime crisis impacting every American family,” Stefanik told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

Big Tech’s censorship of conservative voices will also be scrutinized, she added.

On the foreign policy front, the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the United States and abroad, and U.S. strategy toward Iran are set to come under focus.

Republicans are already laying the groundwork to take on “an aggressive oversight role” next year by issuing preservation notices and document requests so a potential GOP majority “will be ready to hold the Biden administration accountable from day one,” a House GOP leadership aide told The Epoch Times in an email.

Oversight Committee

Many of the inquiries are expected to be spearheaded by the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the chamber’s main investigative panel that has broad authority to scrutinize various facets of the administration.

The committee’s ranking member James Comer (R-Ky.), who is poised to take the chair should the Republicans flip the House, foreshadowed an ambitious agenda by a GOP-led panel.

“[W]e will return the House Oversight and Reform Committee to its core mission of rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government and holding the Executive Branch accountable,” Comer told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

Another committee member Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) had a clear message for the Biden administration via email to The Epoch Times: “Their days of corruption, fraud, and abuse will no longer be met with blind eyes.”

Hunter Biden

Chief among a GOP-led House Oversight Committee’s priorities is an investigation into Hunter Biden and his foreign business dealings.

For more than two years, the president’s son has been at the center of growing controversy over his overseas business activities, including in Ukraine, Russia, and China, conducted while Biden was vice president in the Obama administration.

Hunter is currently the subject of a federal investigation being run out of Delaware and, according to a recent CNN report citing unnamed sources, it is “nearing a critical juncture.”

Hunter has previously denied wrongdoing, and the elder Biden has maintained that he has never discussed Hunter’s business activities with his son.

The president’s son’s extensive financial dealings with foreign individuals and businesses, raise concerns about conflicts of interests, illegal lobbying, and whether his ties influenced U.S. foreign policy during the Obama administration, critics say.

Republicans have honed in on Hunter’s work for Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, while his father was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine, and Hunter’s dealings with several Chinese companies and businessmen with links to the Chinese Communist Party.

“We will continue to conduct oversight of Hunter Biden and the Biden Family’s pattern of peddling access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves,” Comer said.

“They have racked up over 150 suspicious activity reports for their foreign business deals, which is a national security threat,” the lawmaker said, referring to a CBS report saying that U.S. banks had flagged more than 150 financial transactions involving Hunter or the president’s brother, James, for further review by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Some of the transactions involved large wire transfers, the report said.

“We need to know if resident Biden benefited financially from these deals and if he is beholden to the interests of foreign adversaries,” Comer said.

COVID-19 Origins

The ranking member highlighted that the committee would continue to investigate the origins of COVID-19, focusing on the possibility that the pandemic was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.

“Growing evidence shows COVID-19 likely originated from the Wuhan Lab and the Communist Party of China covered it up,” Comer said.

An array of circumstantial evidence has prompted some officials and scientists to point to the WIV as the most likely source of the pandemic. These include the WIV’s gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, reports that staff members became sick with symptoms consistent with both seasonal flu and COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, before the Chinese regime acknowledged the outbreak, and that a WIV public database of 22,000 samples and viral sequences was taken offline in September 2019 before the onset of the pandemic.

The Chinese regime’s persistent refusal to allow outside access to the lab and its data has made it nearly impossible to fully investigate the lab leak theory.

Domestically, the potential role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in aiding WIV’s activities has been viewed with particular alarm by Republicans, who are looking to intensify the inquiry. The NIH has previously funded WIV via New York-based health nonprofit EcoHealth, including one grant that amounted to what experts have described as gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

“We will seek to hold U.S. government officials accountable for any wrongdoing, and ensure Americans’ tax dollars aren’t being used on risky research at unsecure labs,” Comer said.

Other Key Priorities

The ongoing struggle by the administration to control the flow of illegal immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border is set to become another focal point for Republicans serving on the House Oversight Committee, and other panels.

“We will also continue our oversight of Biden’s border crisis that has led to historic illegal immigration, a surge of deadly drugs pouring across the border, and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars,” Comer said.

With a GOP-led House Energy and Commerce Committee, Biden’s energy policies amid a deepening global squeeze on oil and gas are expected to come under close scrutiny.

“We will build on our robust oversight over how the administration is censoring conservative speech, shutting down American energy and increasing gas prices, abusing its public health emergency powers, [and] colluding with political allies like teacher’s unions,” a spokesperson for Energy and Commerce Republicans told The Epoch Times in an email.

Meanwhile, a Republican-led House Financial Services Committee would focus on probing regulatory agencies’ alleged efforts to impose a “far-left agenda” on the U.S. financial system, as well as the Biden administration’s implementation of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan, said Laura Peavey, communications director for the House Financial Services GOP, in an email to The Epoch Times.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A New York judge overturned a law that allowed the state government to place even healthy citizens in quarantine camps for an indefinite time without review.

Until July 8, the New York Department of Health had immense power to enforce quarantine measures on citizens. It received this power from the state’s Rule 2.13.

Legislators never voted to allow the New York Commissioner of Health to put any individual into quarantine for any length of time.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Department of Health ordered the rule’s protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then, the state renewed Rule 2.13 every 90 days. The commissioner wanted to make the rule permanent, respondents told the court.

The court overturned Rule 2.13, stating that the executive branch had wrongly used legislative authority.

“Involuntary detention is a severe deprivation of individual liberty, far more egregious than other health safety measures, such as requiring mask wearing at certain venues,” the court’s opinion read.

“Involuntary quarantine may have far-reaching consequences such as loss of income [or employment] and isolation from family.”

The court barred state enforcement of Rule 2.13 because the executive branch lacked the authority to introduce it. But the court decision also condemned the rule for its failure to consider individual freedom or due process.

“The commissioner has unfettered discretion to issue a quarantine or isolation for anyone, even if there is no evidence that person is infected or a carrier of the disease. Further, the commissioner sets the terms, duration, and location of the detention, not an independent magistrate,” the court document read.

Previous New York laws about quarantine protected individual rights, it added.

But Rule 2.13 put all power into the hands of the commissioner of health, the document stated.

In the 1953 New York quarantine law, isolation can only happen after a complex process.

First, a doctor must report someone who is currently sick with a contagious disease to government health officers.

Then, the health officers must investigate and report their findings to a magistrate, who can then hold a quarantine hearing.

But Rule 2.13 allowed the commissioner to order quarantining for anyone, anywhere, at any time.

People isolated under the rule only got a judicial review and the right to a lawyer after they were put in quarantine, the court wrote.

This order offered only “lip service” to constitutional due process.

“These protections are after-the-fact and would force the detainee to exercise these rights at a time when he or she is already detained, possibly isolated from home and family, and in a situation where it might be difficult to obtain legal counsel in a timely manner,” the court decision read.

The case was the result of a pro bono lawsuit by attorney Bobbie Anne Cox.

“You can’t make laws or rules that don’t have protections built in to protect the citizens,” Cox said.

However, laws like the New York one still exist in other states.

In Florida, the state health officer can order quarantines for any individual that “poses a danger to the public health.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A Los Angeles Times story published Wednesday has revealed a rising undercurrent of hostility toward foreigners — in Mexico. And the foreigners? They’re mostly Americans.

Though American citizens have long been the largest segment represented in Mexico’s vital tourism industry, with resort destinations like Cancun, Acapulco, Cabo San Lucas, and Puerto Vallarta coming instantly to mind as premier vacation destinations, the trouble seems to be with the Americans who aren’t leaving. And the locals in Mexico City particularly are getting fed up.

“We’re the only brown people,”  Fernando Bustos Gorozpe, a 38-year-old writer and university professor, observed during a recent visit with friends to a cafe, the Los Angeles Times reported. “We’re the only people speaking Spanish except the waiters.”

He couched his criticism of Americans living in the Mexican capital in phrasing that hearkens to the immigration controversy that has shaped American politics for over a decade, noting an “indifference as to how their actions are affecting locals.”

He also told the Times he believes that “Americans, many of whom are white, are reinforcing the city’s pervasive — if infrequently discussed — caste system.”

“Mexico is classist and racist,” Bustos added. “People with white skin are given preference. Now, if a local wants to go to a restaurant or a club, they don’t just have to compete with rich, white Mexicans but with foreigners too.”

Mexico City is being flooded by Americans — including legions of remote workers drawn by cheaper rents.

They’re transforming classic neighborhoods, the housing market and even racial dynamics.

More and more, locals are asking them to please go home.https://t.co/wivG6TDWTP

— Kate Linthicum (@katelinthicum) July 27, 2022

Speaking with Kate Linthicum of the Times, Bustos described a sensation oft-lamented in many southwestern cities by Americans of European descent: He had a realization that native Mexicans in many areas of the capital are becoming outnumbered.

The English language, while the lingua franca in much of the western world for over a century, has been slow to take hold south of the border — or at least it was. Linthicum wrote, “English — well, it’s everywhere: ringing out at supermarkets, natural wine bars and fitness classes in the park.”

Linthicum went on to describe large segments of the city which were largely depopulated or closed down following the cataclysmic 1985 Mexico City earthquake, now flourishing with an influx of Americans. Many of these people come from California and bring with them large sums of money, typically earned through the remote-work freelancing landscape of the ‘digital nomad’ culture.

These younger, untethered professionals, in taking advantage of the comparatively low rent prices coupled with their significantly higher income than locals, are able to live well and pump money into communities that are rapidly adapting in order to better cater to them.

Mexico News Daily referred to the situation unironically as a “foreign invasion” that has left Mexicans incensed over the “gentrification” of their traditional neighborhoods in the historic city.

Spanish-language publication Milenio described the situation (translated): “Loaded with suitcases with casual clothes, their laptop, a plane ticket and a good batch of dollars, thousands of Americans are crossing the Rio Grande to settle in neighborhoods that, although expensive for most Mexicans, offer many foreigners the possibility of spending less than in their countries,” the publication reported.

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“Fleeing the ravages of inflation that raised consumer and housing prices and the social consequences of COVID-19 , in this reverse migration they are not looking for jobs in our country, but rather take advantage of the high value of their dollars.”

A common complaint is that businesses are switching signage and advertisements to English and that the approximately 1.6 million Americans staying in Mexico, according to the US State Department, are driving up prices for goods and services and edging out the Mexican locals in a city that they feel is becoming less and less theirs.

Christina Pushaw, press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, commented on the story with a recommendation to the Mexico City denizens: “Mexico, I have an idea for you. PLEASE BUILD THE WALL along our southern border.”

Mexico, I have an idea for you. PLEASE BUILD THE WALL along our southern border.

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) July 27, 2022

The Mexican people who have become frustrated by the turn of events offered a blunt message to their new neighbors:

“New to the city? Working remotely?” vulgar posters appearing around the city read in English. “You’re a f***ing plague and the locals f***ing hate you. Leave.”

What’s Happening:

Have you been rooting for Senator Joe Manchin? The man has almost singlehandedly stopped his own party from blowing up the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court and spending recklessly.

Well, it looks like it’s about time to stop rooting for the rogue Democrat.

For months, Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin refused to support Biden’s radical spending plan.  But, with just months until the midterms, the “moderate” is suddenly in favor of massive spending and higher taxes.

From The Hill:

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on Wednesday said they had struck a climate, health and tax package deal.

It seems Mitch McConnell was going to oppose the semiconductor deal if Manchin supported the spending bill. But it seems McConnell moved too quickly and was tricked by the Democrat.

From The Hill:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who voted for the chips and science bill, had vowed to block the legislation if Democrats stuck to their plans to pass a reconciliation bill that raised taxes and spent hundreds of billions of dollars on climate-related programs.

Why did McConnell trust a man like Manchin, who consistently folds when the heat is on?

From Twitter:

Absolute scumbag move. Manchin waited until Rs moved CHIPS, giving up their leverage and then reversed course the very minute they passed it.

Should be a lesson for every R not work with Dems. https://t.co/IMagnbiXFF

— Mike Palicz (@Mike_Palicz) July 27, 2022

Absolute scumbag move. Manchin waited until Rs moved CHIPS, giving up their leverage and then reversed course the very minute they passed it.

Should be a lesson for every R not work with Dems.

But where McConnell failed miserably, House Republicans might have a chance to strike back.

From The Hill:

In a memo to all House GOP offices Wednesday night, leadership recommended that Republican lawmakers vote against the CHIPS-Plus bill…

“The partisan Democrat agenda has given us record inflation, and now they are poised to send our country into a crushing recession,” the office added.

After McConnell foolishly voted for the CHIPS bill and was tricked by Manchin, House Republicans are urging its members to vote no on the semiconductor package.

The Republican leadership in the House is compelling members to vote against the package because of how Senate Democrats—namely Manchin—went back on their word.

If Republicans in the House all vote no on the CHIPS bill, it will require every last Democrat to vote yes to pass it.

It’s unclear, as of right now, if Democrats have enough votes. A number of progressive Democrats might not want to pass a bill that hands billions to big companies.

Not to mention the fact that this CHIPS bill is supposed to rival China, a country many Democrats seem to love more than America.

If House Republicans are able to stall the CHIPS bill, they might be able to block the reconciliation package.

Either case, this episode reveals just how untrustworthy both McConnell and Manchin are.

McConnell should have stuck to his guns and waited for the reconciliation bill to fail, before voting on the CHIPS bill.

He trusted Manchin, a Democrat who is easily pressured by his radical party to do what they demand.

Manchin might come from a conservative state but, at the end of the day, he’s going to do what Schumer wants.

This might cost him support back home, but keep him in the good graces of the D.C. swamp.

And it’s another lesson to Republican lawmakers: don’t trust the left.

Key Takeaways:

• Joe Manchin tricked McConnell and is supporting Biden’s massive spending bill.
• McConnell voted for the CHIPS bill, paving the way for “BBB.”
• House Republicans are now trying to block the CHIPS bill.

SOURCE: The Patriot Journal

Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and resident Joe Biden’s administration are being accused of threatening government meals provided to low-income students attending Christian schools if the institutions do not adhere to radical ideological principles being peddled by the left. (RELATED: Chronically Ignored Public School Problem Deserves Your Attention)

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According to a lawsuit filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of Faith Action Ministry Alliance and Grant Park Christian Academy, a school that serves low-income and minority families in Tampa, Florida, Biden officials are threatening to take away the meals unless the school adheres to new Title IX interpretations on gender ideology.

“That choice that they are giving us [is] either to comply with this ideology and alter the course of our operations and to violate our own core principles and beliefs, or lose out on the nutrition for the children, lose out on the meals,” Pastor Alfred Johnson, the founder of Faith Action Ministry Alliance, said in a Wednesday phone interview with The Daily Wire.

“This is not just pertaining to Grant Park Christian Academy,” Johnson added. “You’re dealing with tens of thousands of students who are going to be impacted by this. Some of these schools are not even aware of how Title IX has been reinterpreted. And so many of them are going to be in violation, probably without even knowing about it.”

The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida against both the Biden administration and Fried, who is running for governor. Ironically, Fried claims to be dedicated to fighting hunger and food insecurity in the Sunshine State but remains poised to block Grant Park’s funding for school meals.

“Under my administration, we will implement universal free school breakfast and lunch,” says Fried’s gubernatorial campaign. “Kids can’t concentrate on school work with empty bellies. This is an investment in the health and education of Florida’s students.” (RELATED: DeSantis’ Former Gubernatorial Opponent Charged With 21 Felonies)

The lawsuit also addresses the larger ramifications of the administration’s coordinated effort with the agriculture commissioner’s office to force schools into adhering to dangerous and confusing new Title IX rules.

“If Grant Park Christian Academy complies with the new school lunch mandate, it will suffer harm to its educational mission, free speech, and religious exercise,” the lawsuit says.

“It will no longer be able to maintain sex-separated restrooms for boys and girls based on their biological differences; to maintain sex-specific dress code and uniform policies, where, for example, only female students are permitted to wear skorts; to draw its workforce from among those who share and live out its religious convictions; and to refrain from using pronouns that do not correspond to biological sex,” the suit adds.

“In short,” the suit said, “the Biden Administration and Commissioner Fried’s push to redefine sex in federal law has now reached the point where they will deny school lunches to underprivileged students, just because their school will not violate their religious beliefs.”

Grant Park Christian Academy has asked Fried’s office for an exemption to the rule arguing the school should not be forced to violate its religious beliefs for an arbitrary rule. Fried’s office has maintained the school must comply with the new Title IX rules or choose to forgo the lunch program.

READ NEXT: Supreme Court Rules Parents Can Send Their Children To Religious Schools With Public Funds >>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. economy contracted again in the second quarter amid aggressive monetary policy tightening from the Federal Reserve to combat high inflation, which could fan financial market fears that the economy was already in recession.

Gross domestic product fell at a 0.9% annualized rate last quarter, the Commerce Department said in its advance estimate of GDP on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast GDP rebounding at a 0.5% rate.

Estimates ranged from as low as a 2.1% rate of contraction to as high as a 2.0% growth pace. The economy contracted at a 1.6% pace in the first quarter.

The second straight quarterly decline in GDP meets the standard definition of a recession.

But the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of recessions in the United States, defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators.”

Job growth averaged 456,700 per month in the first half of the year, which is generating strong wage gains. Still, the risks of a downturn have increased. Homebuilding and house sales have weakened while business and consumer sentiment have softened in recent months.

The White House is vigorously pushing back against the recession chatter as it seeks to calm voters ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections that will decide whether resident Joe Biden’s Democratic Party retains control of the U.S. Congress.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is scheduled to hold a news conference on Thursday to “discuss the state of the U.S. economy.” While labor market remains tight, there are signs it is losing steam.

A separate report from the Labor Department on Thursday showed initial claims for state unemployment benefits decreased 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 256,000 for the week ended July 23. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 253,000 applications for the latest week.

Jobless claims remain below the 270,000-350,000 range that economists say would signal an increase in the unemployment rate. Slowing economic growth could, however, encourage the Fed to step back from hefty interest rate increases, though much would depend on the path of inflation, which is way above the U.S. central bank’s 2% target.

The Fed on Wednesday raised its policy rate by another three-quarters of a percentage point, bringing the total interest rate hikes since March to 225 basis points. Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged the softening economic activity as a result of tighter monetary policy.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani. Editing by Chizu Nomiyama.)

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The ‘harm reduction’ clinics allow addicts to use illicit drugs under supervision

The Biden administration is considering federal support for legalized injection sites, according to a report.

Dr. Rahul Gupta, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the White House is “enthusiastically waiting” for the Department of Justice to rule on the legality of clinics that allow people to use illicit drugs with supervision. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Gupta’s “eyes lit up” when asked about injection sites, which are illegal under federal law. The comments came in response to questions about a 2019 Justice Department ruling that shut down a Philadelphia injection site.

Gupta’s reported openness to legalized injection sites is emblematic of the White House’s focus on “harm reduction,” an ideology that aims to make drug use safer for addicts, rather than prevent consumption. The Washington Free Beacon in February reported that the Biden administration was set to fund the distribution of crack pipes through its $30 million harm reduction program. The Times later reported that the Free Beacon story “derailed” the Biden administration’s drug policy in response to public backlash.

New York City in November opened the country’s first injection sites, which the Biden administration allowed to operate. The privately run centers supervise drug users to prevent and treat overdoses. The Justice Department’s forthcoming decision on the Philadelphia injection site could lead to a boost in sites around the country and allow federal funding.

Gupta spoke to the Times in Manchester, N.H., a city that has pushed back against privately run needle exchange programs. Elected city officials criticized the New Hampshire Harm Reduction Coalition for a lack of coordination with its government. The city council last year banned needle exchanges in parks by a 12-1 vote.

Paul Lessard, 58, grew up in Manchester and worked for the New Hampshire Department of Transportation before he retired and later found himself homeless last year. Lessard said he has seen drug addicts on several occasions rush to grab used needles out of the exchange boxes that are intended to be discarded. The city’s drug addicts, he said, have become increasingly violent.

“I was in the alleyway the other day and some girl stripped down totally naked and she was freaking out and going through the motions,” Lessard told the Free Beacon. “I walked by her and said, ‘Please don’t touch me.’ She was fucked up on something.”

Federal support for injection sites would likely face backlash in Congress. Although the Biden administration continues to claim crack pipes are not funded through its harm reduction programs, Congress advanced two bipartisan bills this year that ban federal funding for crack pipes. The Daily Caller in July obtained crack pipes at a harm reduction center in New York City that received funding through the Biden administration’s $30 million harm reduction grant program that launched in May. A Caller journalist was reportedly asked to smoke crack in a supervised room in the New York Harm Reduction Educators center.

Before he joined the Biden administration, Gupta expressed skepticism about harm reduction sites. As West Virginia’s public health commissioner, Gupta supported the decertification of a harm reduction program in Charleston described by the city’s mayor as a “needle mill” that increased crime.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Ivy League law school will force students to write physical messages on a bulletin board after the listserv turned toxic

After a year of high-profile scandals, Yale Law School is retiring an all-student listserv that became a breeding ground for progressive activism and online pile-ons, citing the value of “face-to-face” interaction.

If students want to “debate important questions,” the dean of Yale Law School Heather Gerken announced in an email on Wednesday, they can post on a physical bulletin board in the law school’s hallway.

“Debate and dialogue are the touchstones of an academic institution,” Gerken said. The new forum will force students to “take time to reflect before posting, a habit that lawyers and members of a scholarly community must practice.”

Gerken’s announcement caps an annus horribilis for the Ivy League law school, which has seen near-nonstop scandals since 2021. The listserv played a role in many of those scandals: It facilitated a week-long pressure campaign against the Yale Law Journal over its alleged racism, as well as a public shaming campaign against Trent Colbert, the second-year law student who used the term “trap house” in an email. It also helped gin up outrage about a bipartisan panel on civil liberties hosted in March, which ended up needing police protection after hundreds of protesters disrupted the event.

“The listserv was a cesspool,” said Zach Austin, who served as the president of the Yale Federalist Society this past year. “Dean Gerken’s rhetoric is spot on: I hope students, left and right alike, take it to heart.”

The listserv’s demise comes just weeks after a controversial administrator, Ellen Cosgrove, retired from Yale Law School, prompting speculation that Gerken was taking steps to avoid a repeat of the scandal-filled year. Cosgrove, the law school’s associate dean, sat idly by while protesters disrupted the March panel. A few months earlier, she and another administrator pressured Colbert to apologize for his “trap house” email, an episode the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus likened to Mao’s cultural revolution.

As the scandals piled up, some students took to the listserv to bemoan the bad press—which only generated more of it. “What the actual fuck,” Yale Law’s Asian-American student group posted in response to Marcus’s article, calling her Mao comparison “offensively racist.” The post was one of several statements from the listserv highlighted in the Washington Free Beacon’s coverage of the trap-house saga, which kept the law school in the news for nearly a month.

These online dynamics are not unique to Yale. When the Federalist Society chapter at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law invited the conservative writer Josh Hammer to campus, the law school’s listserv devolved into profanity and public shaming.

“I’d be completely unsurprised (and in fact, willing to bet) that Joshie Hammer fucks (or at least tries to fuck—he probably was rejected repeatedly) we the trannies in his free time,” one student emailed the listerv. “Or—more likely—he just wants (and needs) to get just fucked in the ass . . . Maybe our lovely, idiotic FedSoc board is experiencing a similar dilemma within their own psychosexual selves.”

In the wake of such blowups, some law schools are scrapping their listservs altogether.

“Unsurprisingly, most of our peer schools no longer use listservs like these,” Gerken said. “They deploy other, more focused means to share information on events and opportunities with the community.”

The death of the listserv means the resurrection of an old Yale Law School tradition: In the days before email, students and faculty would post their views on a bulletin board, nicknamed the “Wall,” in the law school’s main hallway. That system, which Yale Law School is bringing back, “provided a healthy reminder that human beings are on the receiving end of the messages people send,” Gerken said. “Indeed, sometimes students would run into the very people with whom they were debating and speak face-to-face.”

The listserv’s death has left Austin cautiously optimistic.

“I wouldn’t call it a square deal yet,” he told the Free Beacon. “But if Gerken keeps leading like she has been this summer, then there’s a glimmer of hope that next year will be better for friends of free speech.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

State this month began an investigation into Michael Willis

Colorado this month started investigating allegations made in 2019 against a powerful Democrat-appointed official after the Denver Post started digging into the allegations, the Post reported Monday.

Colorado director of emergency management Michael Willis, who has played a significant role in the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, was “visibly intoxicated” and “struggled to focus on things” as his department responded to a May 7, 2019, school shooting, a state employee told investigators. A different employee also reported that Willis was “wobbly” that day. While both employees originally made their allegations in 2019, the state did not launch an investigation until this month.

This is far from the only allegation against Willis. In the last 18 months alone, the state has twice suspended Willis for “berating female staffers, throwing objects in rage, and intimidating workers to the point they thought it was close to getting physical,” the Post reported. Multiple witnesses told the paper that Willis has repeatedly “been drunk after-hours at industry conferences and nearly fought other attendees.”

Willis “rules by fear,” said the state employee who alleged Willis was drunk on the day of the shooting. “He intimidates. He threatens.”

Willis was appointed in 2017 by then-Colorado governor John Hickenlooper (D.), who made gun violence a cornerstone of his successful 2020 Senate campaign. A state ethics commission found that year that Hickenlooper as governor was guilty of multiple ethics charges. While Hickenlooper is not up for reelection this year, the allegations against Willis may hurt Colorado’s other Democratic senator, Michael Bennet, who is running in November. Colorado is a “top Senate target for Republicans,” Axios reported.

The investigation, which began under Hickenlooper’s successor, Gov. Jared Polis (D.), concluded that the 2019 drunkenness allegations against Willis were unsubstantiated. Willis has denied being drunk on the day of the shooting.

Willis played a “prominent role” in Polis’s COVID-19 response but recently “has been less publicly visible,” Axios reported. Polis’s office declined to respond to Post and Axios inquiries on Willis’s behavior.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Rep. Sanford Bishop considered joining Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic organization

A Democratic congressman running in a competitive House race once praised Nation of Islam leader and infamous anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan as “impressive” and said he considered joining Farrakhan’s organization.

Rep. Sanford Bishop (Ga.), who has served in Congress since 1993, made the comments during a 2005 interview series with the former leader of the NAACP, the Jewish Journal reported this week.

Bishop said he met Farrakhan after graduating from college, while the two were attending an event at Morehouse College in 1968.

“Of course, I had the opportunity for the first time to be acquainted with a man known as Minister Louis Farrakhan, who was so impressive that night that people stopped in mid-stride,” said Bishop during the interview. “I was just so taken by his message and his manner that I rushed out to the mosque the next day to hear him.”

The interview could be an obstacle for Bishop in his closely contested race against Republican challenger and Air Force officer Chris West. Bishop’s remarks drew criticism from Jewish leaders who noted Farrakhan’s history of anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric.

Bishop said he considered joining the Nation of Islam, a group led by Farrakhan that mixes black nationalist ideology with some elements of the Muslim religion. The organization also promotes anti-Semitic, anti-white, and anti-gay conspiracy theories. Bishop said his father opposed the idea and encouraged him to “pause” and reconsider it.

“I had so much exposure, so many influences, and of course when I even mentioned the possibility of joining the Nation, my father, he had a real time with that,” he said.

Bishop, who was raised Christian, said he didn’t end up joining the group and went on to learn about different religions, including Judaism.

The Jewish Journal noted that Bishop declined to denounce Farrakhan when asked by the Daily Caller in 2018.

Bishop told the Jewish Journal that he “denounce[s] anti-Semitism just as I denounce all forms of racism.” The congressman added that he has “been a strong supporter of the State of Israel” and has “the support of the Georgia Jewish community.”

Farrakhan has been dubbed the “most popular anti-Semite in America” by the Anti-Defamation League. Farrakhan preaches that “Satanic Jews” have “infected the whole world with poison and deceit.”

“To my Jewish friends, I shouldn’t use the word ‘friends’ so lightly, you have been a great and master deceiver, but God is going to pull the covers all off of you,” said Farrakhan in one 2017 speech.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Jewish Journal that Bishop’s praise for Farrakhan seems consistent with some of the congressman’s policy positions.

Bishop, who supported the Iran nuclear deal, appears to have “no concerns about a regime that crushes human rights, religious freedoms of its own citizens, executes gays, threatens nuclear Holocaust against [the] Jewish state, and continues to support and deploy terrorist assets from Iraq to South America,” Cooper said. “No surprise then he would have no problem with Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and anti-American rhetoric.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The man accused of conspiring to murder Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh asked the internet for assassination tips weeks before he flew to the nation’s capital loaded with weapons.

Nicholas Roske searched on Google for the “quietest semi auto rifle” and the “most effective place to stab someone” before he arrived outside Kavanaugh’s home in June, according to an FBI warrant obtained by Fox News. The 26-year-old also said in an online chat forum he was going to “remove some people from the supreme court” to “stop roe v wade from being overturned.”

“I could get at least one, which would change the votes for decades to come,” Roske said, “and I am shooting for 3.”

Kavanaugh’s brush with death came amid efforts from congressional Democrats to stall legislation meant to beef up security for Supreme Court justices. Additional protections for the judges were provided promptly after the threat to Kavanaugh’s life.

The High Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June—and the leaked draft preceding it—prompted a wave of left-wing violence and intimidation. At least 60 crisis centers, which counsel women on alternatives to abortion, have been firebombed or vandalized since May.

Threats have also been made to other branches of government. Progressive activists are agitating to shut down Thursday evening’s congressional baseball game due to the government’s alleged lack of action on climate change. In 2017, a former campaign volunteer for socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) shot five people, including Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.), at a Republican practice event for the baseball game.

Roske, who called the police on himself, was apprehended by law enforcement outside Kavanaugh’s home in possession of a handgun, knife, pepper spray, and burglary tools. He has pleaded not guilty to attempted assassination.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Navi Pillay is standing by Miloon Kothari after anti-Semitic comments

The United Nations official in charge of an investigation into Israel is standing by a colleague who came under fire this week for claiming social media platforms are controlled by a “Jewish lobby.”

Navi Pillay, chairwoman of the U.N. investigation into alleged Israeli human rights crimes, says her colleague, Miloon Kothari, is being unfairly accused of anti-Semitism after he stated in an interview this week that social media are controlled by an all-powerful “Jewish lobby” that throws around “a lot of money.”

Pillay defended the remarks, saying in a letter sent Thursday to the president of the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which helms the Israel investigation, that Kothari was “deliberately misquoted.” A copy of the letter, which was written after the UNHRC’s president raised concerns about the comments, was provided to the Washington Free Beacon by U.N. officials.

Kothari was “deliberately misquoted to imply that ‘social media’ was controlled by the Jewish lobby,” Pillay says in the letter, though she does not specify how Kothari was misquoted. Pillay also said that those critical of Kothari’s comments are attempting to discredit the U.N. investigation into Israel, which has been dogged by accusations it is biased and fueled by animosity toward the Jewish state.

“The commission takes great exception to personal attacks against individual commissioners appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Such attacks have been continuously directed against all three commissioners throughout our tenure, and it is to this that Commissioner Kothari was making reference,” Pillay wrote.

Kothari in an interview with the anti-Zionist website Mondoweiss said the “Jewish lobby” is behind social media efforts attempting to discredit the ongoing probe into Israel.

“We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by whether it’s the Jewish lobby or it’s the specific [nonprofit groups],” Kothari said. “A lot of money is being thrown into trying to discredit us.”

Kothari also questioned Israel’s membership in the United Nations.

“I would go as far as to raise the question of why [Israel is] even a member of the United Nations,” he said. “The Israeli government does not respect its own obligations as a U.N. member state. They, in fact, consistently, either directly or through the United States, try to undermine U.N. mechanisms.”

Kothari’s comments were labeled anti-Semitic by pro-Israel groups, the Free Beacon reported on Wednesday.

Pillay in her letter launched attacks on the Israeli government for its refusal to cooperate with the investigation, which Israel is boycotting due to concerns the commission is trying to demonize the Jewish state.

“The commission continues to highlight the refusal of Israel to cooperate with the Commission of Inquiry as well as abide by its international obligations to end the occupation and fulfill the right of Palestinians to self-determination,” Pillay wrote.

“Commissioner Kothari’s comments reflect the commission’s disappointment with the continued lack of cooperation and address the issue that as a member of the United Nations, Israel is under an obligation to abide by the international legal framework, as well as independent bodies set up by the United Nations,” Pillay wrote.

Pillay also defended Commissioner Christopher Sidoti, who came under fire in recent weeks for comments that Israeli officials called anti-Semitic.

A U.N. Human Rights Council spokesman told the Free Beacon that it has a zero-tolerance policy on anti-Semitism.

“The Human Rights Council takes a vigilant stance against anti-Semitism, including any comments or actions seen as stigmatizing the Jewish people,” the official said. “The council has a long track record speaking out against all forms of discrimination and racism and vehemently condemns such abhorrent acts.”

U.S. officials at the United Nations, including Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Deborah Lipstadt, said on Thursday that Kothari’s comments represent a “persistent venom” that has “poisoned” the international body.

“Anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias are a persistent venom that for far too long has poisoned international discourse and polluted international organizations, including the United Nations,” Lipstadt said in a joint statement with Michèle Taylor, the U.S. permanent representative to the U.N. Human Rights Council.  “The United States condemns it unequivocally.”

Kothari’s comments, Lipstadt and Taylor said, echo “age-old anti-Semitic tropes” and are “outrageous, inappropriate, and corrosive.”

Anne Bayefsky, president of Human Rights Voices and director of Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, which combats anti-Semitism, said Pillay’s letter demonstrates the entire Israel commission is biased.

“The letter of Navi Pillay defending the clearly outrageous anti-Semitic remarks of her colleague on the U.N. Human Rights Council inquiry makes one thing abundantly clear: The problem isn’t just Kothari,” Bayefsky said. “The problem is the inquiry itself and all three of its members starting with Pillay herself. The very reason that Pillay, Kothari, and Chris Sidoti were chosen for the job was because they are all well-known wildly anti-Israel militants. Their appointments were totally at odds with U.N. requirements of impartiality and objectivity.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

SHE’S THE HEAD OF U.S. GOVERNMENT BIOETHICS.

Anthony Fauci’s wife – who is also head of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center – authored a paper detailing how to enroll children in COVID-19 vaccine trials.

The study – “Enrolling Minors in COVID-19 Vaccine Trials” – was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center and was published in the journal Pediatrics. Christine Grady, wife to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci, and four co-authors collaborated on the paper to “propose recommendations for when and how to enroll minors in vaccine trials for the coronavirus disease 2019.”

“The costs that delay poses to children, their families, and society provide strong reasons to consider enrolling minors in vaccine trials for COVID-19 before safety and efficacy have been established in adults,” claimed Grady in the paper.

The paper proceeds to assess the benefits and drawbacks surrounding the timing of enrolling children in COVID-19 vaccine trials along with the ideal selection criteria for participants.

“A different way to address this concern is to enroll minors after there are sufficient safety data in adults, but before there is evidence of efficacy. To pursue this strategy, enrollment of minors should begin with those who are most similar to the adults from whom safety data were collected,” explains researchers.

The paper was published in March of 2021, is roughly one year before public health officials would authorize and urge the vaccination of children against COVID-19.

The unearthed paper comes amidst controversy over Fauci’s decision to fund research on “killer” bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Additionally, Grady’s prominent role in supervising the ethics of NIH research and policy appear to present a conflict of interest given her husband’s role in shaping America’s COVID-19 response and vaccination guidelines.

MUST READ: 40% of Women With The COVID Vaccine Have Reported Significant Effects on their Periods.

It also follows documents revealing Fauci’s frantically increasing investments and net worth amidst COVID-19.

**** THIS HAS TO STOP !!!! ****

Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health agency has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to China-based laboratories with deep ties to the regime’s military, including facilities that have worked with the Wuhan Institue of Virology on bat coronavirus research, The National Pulse can reveal.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant database shows two studies that have received funds from Fauci’s agency in 2022 so far: “Antigen discovery for transmission-blocking vaccines in Plasmodium vivax” and “Impacts of Urbanization on Vector Biology and Transmission of Dengue in China.”

The first study, which focuses on research into “transmission-blocking vaccines” for malaria-endemic nations, has received $135,000 from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 2022.

“This project seeks to use a comprehensive antigen discovery pathway, including antigen identification through genome-wide immunological screening, validation in rodent malaria model, and further evaluation in P. vivax, to identify new transmission-blocking vaccine candidates for vivax malaria,” explains a project summary.

The grant was distributed to China Medical University, which is entirely controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, and formerly known as the Peasants Red Army Military Medical School. It is the only medical institution to have participated in the “Long March” in 1934 with the Red Army of the Chinese Communist Party.

Similarly, the second study, which focuses on the spread of Dengue fever in China, counts $132,912 going to China’s Southern Medical University (SMU).

Formerly known as First Military Medical University, SMU falls under the jurisdiction of the Military Committee of PLA, according to its own website. Professors, as well as entire institutes, have received awards from various branches of the PLA including its General Logistics Department.

MUST READ: As Washington Wakes Up to TikTok Threats, The Democrats Launch Their Official Account.

The school also runs a variety of labs, including an Institute for Genetic Engineering Research, which is described as an “arm of the PLA Key Biochip Lab” and “one of the top 20 labs of the Army.”

The school’s biomechanics lab operates under the control of the PLA and counts support from China’s 863 program, which has seen Chinese scientists affiliated with the effort get convicted for stealing trade secrets from American companies.

The school has previously collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology – believed by many to be the source of COVID-19 – on bat coronavirus research also funded by Anthony Fauci. SMU provided human blood samples to the Wuhan lab for its controversial work with EcoHealth Alliance, appearing to represent “gain-of-function” research.

So this will be how they rig the next election: Mail-in ballots due to pandemic. [US Patriot]

Two retired U.S. generals, MG Paul Vallely, U.S. Army, and Thomas McInerney, USAF, raised concerns over the World Health Organization’s recent declaration of monkeypox as a global health emergency, alleging potential ulterior motives.

“Each of us should not be alarmed by this alert as the credibility of WHO is in great question based on their actions and notices on COVID-19,” Vallely told The Epoch Times.

“The rare designation means the WHO now views the outbreak as a significant enough threat to global health that a coordinated international response is needed to prevent the virus from spreading further and potentially escalating into a pandemic,” Vallely said.

“Beware of this politically driven global organization that is funded by the global elite.”

Monkeypox

Monkeypox is a disease primarily transmitted through the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men.

“I have decided that the global monkeypox outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a July 23 statement.

Ghebreyesus said that his decision was due to an increase of monkeypox cases in the world, now having been reported in over 75 countries and territories, with over 16,000 infections and five deaths.

A report published on July 23 lays out the reasons that the committee members had for and against declaring monkeypox a global emergency.

“Although the declaration does not impose requirements on national governments, it serves as an urgent call for action. The WHO can only issue guidance and recommendations to its member states, not mandates. Member states are required to report events that pose a threat to global health,” Vallely said.

“WHO Director Tedros is not a medical doctor, he is a Marxist from Ethiopia, totally supported by the Chinese Communist Party. He lied about C-19 from the beginning to cover for China,” Vallely added.

McInerney says that they predicted that the declaration of another pandemic would happen around this time of the year.

“They are right on our predicted schedule,” McInerney said.

“We shall not conform to their guidelines, we must resist lockdowns,” he further stated, “now is the time for America and the world and we the people to say no!”

“Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me!” the general exclaimed.

The Epoch Times reached out to the WHO for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci claimed Monday that he never recommended “locking anything down” when pressed about what he would do differently regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

“First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” Fauci replied during an interview published by The Hill’s “Rising” program on Monday, suggesting it had been a recommendation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Go back and look at my statements,” he added, “that we need to do everything we can to keep the schools open and safe.”

Although it’s unclear exactly what Fauci meant by lockdowns, in October 2020, Fauci had publicly recommended that former President Donald Trump “shut the whole country down,” although it’s not clear what he meant as presidents don’t have the authority to hand down sweeping lockdowns.

“When it became clear that we had community spread in the country … I recommended to the president that we shut the country down,” he said in an event with students at the College of the Holy Cross in October 2020.

If the United States didn’t “shut down completely the way China did,” then the spread of COVID-19 wouldn’t be stopped, Fauci continued to say at the time. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since early 2020 has pursued a “zero COVID” strategy that some analysts say is tantamount to economic suicide.

Closing Schools and Bars

In August 2020, Fauci said that public schools should remain closed across the country to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Fauci also publicly suggested multiple times in 2020 that bars and restaurants should remain closed, then arguing that there was a binary choice between opening schools or bars.

“You have a choice—either close the bars or close the schools. Because, if you have people congregating in bars, it’s likely you’re going to stay red,” the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said in November 2020.

Also during the interview with The Hill, Fauci said there should have been “much more stringent restrictions” imposed on asymptomatic people in 2020.

“We know now, two and a half years later, that anywhere from 50 to 60 percent of the transmission occur from someone without symptoms, either someone who never will get symptoms or someone who is in the pre-symptomatic stage,” he said.

It’s not clear how Fauci came to this conclusion about asymptomatic spread. Physician Aaron Kheriaty wrote for the Brownstone Institute that “no respiratory virus in history” has been known to spread asymptomatically.

“Had we known that then, the insidious nature of spread in the community would have been much more of an alarm and there would have been much, much more stringent restrictions in the sense of very, very heavy, encouraging people to wear masks, physical distancing or what have you,” added Fauci, who again called for mask-wearing in schools, workplaces, and “anything that brings people together in a closed environment” in some areas.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Resident Joe Biden held a phone call with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping on July 28. The call was the fifth of its kind between Biden and Xi and lasted more than two hours.

The call comes amid a myriad of tensions that have caused Sino–U.S. relations to fall to their lowest point in decades. Despite a decreasing willingness by the CCP to negotiate on most issues, the White House stated that it was important to keep the lines of communication open between the two powers.

“The President wants to make sure that the lines of communication with President Xi remain open, because they need to,” said White House national security spokesperson John Kirby. “There’s issues where we can cooperate with China on, and then there’s issues where, obviously, there’s friction and tension.

“This is one of the most consequential bilateral relationships in the world today, with ramifications well beyond both individual countries. The president clearly understands that, and we’re going to continue to work on that relationship.”

Chinese state-owned media outlets stated that the exchange was “candid and in-depth” and that the two leaders promised to stay in communication.

Xi reportedly told Biden that it was the duty of “the two major powers” to manage global security and urged Biden to not view the CCP through the lens of “strategic competition.”

Biden is currently contending with the need to adequately address China’s status as a rising power while simultaneously mitigating the regime’s increasingly hostile behavior.

To that end, Xi’s conversation with Biden focused heavily on Taiwan.

“Playing with fire will set you on fire,” Xi told Biden. “I hope the U.S. can see this clearly.”

The CCP maintains that Taiwan is a breakaway province of China. Xi has vowed to unite the island with the mainland and hasn’t ruled out the use of force to do so. For its part, Taiwan has been self-governed since 1949, has never been under CCP control, and boasts a thriving democracy and market economy.

The United States doesn’t have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan but is bound by a treaty to provide it with the arms necessary for its self-defense. The government also maintains a doctrine of “strategic ambiguity” in which it will neither confirm nor deny whether it would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.

The issue came to the fore over the past week as rumors emerged that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was planning a personal visit to Taiwan.

The CCP subsequently threatened “forceful measures” against the United States and Taiwan should the trip take place.

Following the remarks from the CCP, Biden publicly said such a trip was “not a good idea” and suggested that the military was against it.

Biden’s statements raised eyebrows from legislators and experts alike, who believed that they overstepped the bounds of both the president and the military in attempting to control the personal travel of a sitting member of Congress.

Pelosi said the administration may have believed that China would shoot down her plane if she visited Taiwan.

The back and forth was just one incident in a growing line of bellicose and, at times, hostile rhetoric emanating from the highest echelons of the CCP.

In May, China’s defense minister said the CCP would “not hesitate to start a war no matter the cost” to prevent Taiwan’s de facto independence from being recognized internationally.

The White House hadn’t released a readout of the call by press time.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Only 43 percent of adults have a job, as inflation soars above 60 percent

Protests have erupted in Buenos Aires over the past 90 days and continue to build inside the capital as residents battle with their center-left government over sizeable amendments to social programs.

Cuts to subsidies in the energy sector based on household income already began in June.

Other subsidies, including the country’s notorious welfare program, are also on the chopping block, triggering thousands of angry residents to take to the streets.

State-sponsored aid for civilians has soared in the past 20 years, leaving 22 million Argentinians dependent on some form of government assistance.

In the first quarter of 2022, the national employment rate was 43 percent, according to government figures.

The country’s state funded programs extend to nearly every aspect of the economy, from wages to utilities, education, and health care.

Argentina already spends an estimated 800 million pesos per day—a sum of more than US$6 million—on state benefit programs.

Concurrently, inflation in the South American nation hit 58 percent in May and soared above 60 percent in July. By comparison, national inflation was just over 14 percent in 2015.

Harry Lorenzo, chief finance officer of Income Based Research, told The Epoch Times the spending habits of Argentina’s government are at the root of the escalating problem.

“The Argentine government has been grappling with a collapsing economy for some time now. The main reason for this is the government’s unsustainable spending, which has been funded in part by generous welfare programs,” Lorenzo explained.

Deeper Into Economic Chaos

Cries for more state money, freedom from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and for President Alberto Fernandez to step down echoed within the angry crowds gathered near the president’s office—Casa Rosada —during the nation’s independence day celebration on July 9.

Since then, scheduled demonstrations have continued, led by professional protest organizers or “piqueteros” demanding the abolition of the proposed subsidy cuts and a wage increase.

“This is madness. What the piqueteros are asking for is madness,” Alvaro Gomez told The Epoch Times.

Gomez has lived and worked in Buenos Aires for more than 15 years and currently is a taxi driver. As the years have passed, he’s watched his country dive deeper into economic chaos.

“I’ve seen five presidents come and go in that time; nothing has improved. Half of our country doesn’t want a job, and the ones that do, don’t want to pay the taxes for the others,” he said.

Argentina’s minister of the economy and close ally of Fernandez, Martin Guzman, resigned from office on July 2 amid complaints that internal conflicts prevented him from doing his job.

Guzman was the driving force behind a critical new IMF deal. He also reportedly clashed with the current vice president and former two-term president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner over the handling of Argentina’s spiraling economic crisis.

Kirchner is a vehement subsidy supporter and has previously denounced Argentina’s dependence on the IMF.

In summary, half of the ruling coalition wants more foreign bailouts as a solution to bankrupted coffers and inflation.

The other half wants to maintain the existing social programs and be independent of foreign aid while raising taxes on an increasingly impoverished population.

Presently, some parts of Argentina have more than 40 percent of its population living below the poverty line.

Low Investor Confidence

Kirchner called the sudden resignation of Guzman “an immense act of political irresponsibility” during a press conference in the province of Santa Cruz.

Fernandez quickly appointed Silvina Batakis on July 3 to fill the gap in the pivotal office.

Wasting no time, Batakis met with IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva on July 25 to discuss a potential new deal for the country’s outstanding $44 billion debt.

Robert Donnelly, the finance manager at Marketplace Fairness, told The Epoch Times that Argentina’s reliance on foreign bailouts isn’t a solution but more of a short-term economic pressure valve release.

“While this has been somewhat successful, it has not solved the underlying problem,” Donnelly said.

He explained that Fernandez’s administration could do several things to alleviate the country’s dependence on outside loans, like increasing exports and attracting more foreign investment.

Though with the collapse of the peso, high inflation, and no clear strategy for a path forward from the government, outside investor confidence remains very low.

Lorenzo maintains reeling in government spending is paramount. “This would involve scaling back the welfare programs, which have been a major contributor to the country’s debt.”

However, for the 1.2 million members dependent on the social program Empower Work, which is an income subsidy that provides a living wage for an indefinite period of time, working a regular job is out of the question.

“The government expects us to work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. for the same amount of money,” an outraged female Buenos Aires resident and piquetero lamented to reporters during a live news broadcast.

When asked where how she’d been earning income for her household, the woman replied, “the government.”

Anger at Having to Work

Another protester, an adult male, also decried the proposed welfare program changes telling local reporters, “Cristina [Kirchner] told us we have to go to work instead of receiving social benefits. Going to work, that’s the policy of a right winger.”

Protesters continue to ask for more subsidy money or for Fernandez to step down from office.

Meanwhile, the embattled head of state called for unity in the economically devastated nation during the 206th anniversary of the country’s independence. In the same speech, Fernandez lashed out at groups who were attacking the government and wanted to “keep all the income.”

Regarding the nation’s deepening economic crisis and resultant instability, Fernandez said, “Unity is always the fruit of the willingness of those involved to consolidate it.

“History teaches us that it’s a value that we must preserve in the most difficult moments.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Two more Texas counties confirmed they have declared an invasion at the U.S.–Mexico border in recent days amid historically high illegal immigration.

The Parker County Commissioners Court unanimously voted this week to invoke a law to say that the United States and Texas are under invasion, local media reported.

Because of the significant presence of illegal immigration and drug trafficking, the declaration says it is “an invasion of Parker County, Texas, as the term ‘invasion’ is used in Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution and in Article 4, Section 7 of the Texas Constitution.”

“I think we all know the border is a mess,” Parker County Sheriff Russ Authier told commissioners during the meeting ahead of the vote. “We see different aspects of it other than our partners who are on the border seeing the human side of the smuggling, trafficking of people. A lot of what we’re seeing here is the drug smuggling.”

The Atascosa County Commissioners Court also separately declared the surge of illegal immigration an invasion on Monday. Judge Russell Wilson signed a disaster declaration affirming the invasion at the border.

Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told The Center Square that with the declarations from Parker and Atascosa counties, “the significance … cannot be overstated.” Kinney County and several other Texas counties issued a similar declaration earlier in July.

Goliad, Edwards, Jeff Davis, Terrell, and Presidio counties also declared an invasion this month.

More Details

“It clearly establishes that the border crisis impacts every county in the state and is not limited to those communities near the Rio Grande,” Smith also told the outlet. “The safety and security of every Texan is threatened by the federal government’s abandonment of its constitutional duty. I encourage every county in the state to acknowledge the crisis is an invasion. If Texans don’t save Texas, no one will.”

Earlier in July, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed an order authorizing the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety to apprehend illegal immigrants who cross the Mexican border into Texas and return them back to the border. Unlike the counties, the Republican governor didn’t declare an invasion.

“While resident Biden refuses to do his job and enforce the immigration laws enacted by Congress, the State of Texas is once again stepping up and taking unprecedented action to protect Americans and secure our southern border,” he said at the time.

A section of the Texas Constitution allows the governor to declare an invasion to protect the state.

“He shall be Commander-in-Chief of the military forces of the State, except when they are called into actual service of the United States. He shall have power to call forth the militia to execute the laws of the State, to suppress insurrections, and to repel invasions,” the state Constitution says.

Along the border, apprehensions have surged past 1.7 million so far in the fiscal year—with three months to go, July data shows. Border Patrol agents between Brownsville, Texas, and San Diego, California, apprehended 232,628 illegal border crossers in May, the highest monthly total in 23 years, officials have said.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Conflicting timeline reports and identical language used by numerous officers in separate reports raise questions

A 104-page report issued three months after the events at the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021, said the Capitol Police’s Civil Disturbance Unit (CDU) was ordered by supervisors not to use “heavier, less-lethal weapons,” like flash bangs. However, video evidence—along with Capitol Police Use of Force Reports obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times—exposes conflicts in timelines, the brutality of the unprovoked attacks against Jan. 6 protesters, and how leadership ordered the deployment of munitions on a peaceful crowd.

The Video Evidence

Victoria White

According to Police1, the “#1 resource for law enforcement online,” which promotes “the highest standards of business ethics,” police are trained to target large muscle groups like legs, chest, abdomen, and arms with batons. Intentionally striking areas like the head, sternum, and spine are considered to be the same act of deadly force as firing a gun.

However, a video shows Jan. 6 defendant Victoria White being beaten over the head 35 times with a metal baton and punched in the face by an officer of the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia. White, seen wearing a Trump hat, is unarmed and posed no threat to the officer. She raises her hands in defense during the brutal attack, collapsing more than once, only to be stood up by other officers to be maced and beaten again.

According to a Use of Force report filed 1/7/21 by Officer Dante Price, obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times, “approved strike areas” for use of a baton “include arms, legs and large muscle groups.” Injuries suffered by Dante’s victim required hospital transport. Another report of an injury caused by use of a baton, filed 1/8/21 by Officer Ryan Kendall, states “approved target areas” include the “upper abdomen.”

“To add insult to injury,” her legal team said at a Jan. 6, 2022 press conference, “she was indicted for being pushed into the tunnel entrance and for daring to put her hands up in a defensive posture while getting beaten by the police.”

White has filed a $1 million lawsuit against D.C. Police Chief Robert Contree and seven unnamed officers, including one known as “Officer Whiteshirt,” given the moniker as it is believed his clothing identified him as an officer in a position of authority.

Roseanne Boyland

Another video obtained by The Epoch Times shows D.C. Metro Police Officer Lila Morris beating an unconscious 34-year-old Roseanne Boyland of Kennesaw, Georgia with a steel baton and then with a large wooden walking stick. According to witnesses, Boyland lost consciousness and stopped breathing after being crushed beneath the weight of other fallen protesters. Being unconscious, Boyland was no threat to the officer.

A DC medical examiner claims Boyland died of an accidental overdose of Adderall, a suspicious ruling that sparked outrage from Boyland’s friends and family. Her father, Bret Boyland, said his daughter had been taking Adderall for about 10 years to treat an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The Epoch Times reported on Feb. 10, an investigation by the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau cleared Morris of any wrongdoing and deemed her beating of the unconscious Boyland as “objectively reasonable.”

A separate report describes how Morris first used the wooden stick while beating Boyland to strike 41-year-old filmmaker Luke Coffee on the left elbow. A second swing missed before she sprayed him in the face with pepper gel. “Morris then inexplicably turned her fury on the motionless Boyland, striking her in the ribs once and twice in the head,” the report said.

Ashli Babbitt

Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old unarmed Air Force veteran and ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump was shot and killed by U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd. While news media has labeled Babbitt as a violent “insurrectionist” who was trying to breach the Speaker’s Lobby, a frame-by-frame analysis of the video from The Epoch Times shows Babbitt tried to stop the violence against the Speaker’s Lobby at least four times before she was fatally shot.

Two reports, filed by two officers who were with Byrd at the moment he shot Babbitt, were also obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times.

According to a report by Paul McKenna of the United States Capitol Police (USCP) Uniformed Service Bureau, as protesters “began pounding” on the “East door of the lobby” and breaking the glass, he drew his weapon along with Byrd and Officer Reggie Tyson. He “yelled ‘stay back’ ‘get back’ several times during the incident.”

“A woman climbed through the far left window pane, which had been broken out by the group,” McKenna attested. “Lt. Byrd fired one shot hitting the woman. She fell back out of the window and I continued yelling at the group to get back and away from the doors.”

McKenna claims the incident happened between 1430 and 1500 hours (2:30 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.). The report was signed by McKenna on June 9, 2021. It was signed by his supervisor five months earlier, on Jan. 7, 2021.

In the second report, filed Jan. 7, 2021, Tyson said he heard “shots fired” over his radio some time after 1440 (2:40 p.m.). In an attempt to protect himself, Tyson said he withdrew his weapon and made his way to the lobby east side of the capitol along with Byrd and McKenna. “A protester tried to climb through the broken window where she was shot one time as she fell back.” Tyson claims the time of the incident was around 1500 hours (3:00 p.m.).

In another report, USCP Officer Tyler Stoyle claims he responded to “a shots fired” call over their his radio at “1400 hours” (2:00 p.m.), 40 minutes earlier than Tyson claimed to have heard the call of “shots fired.”

A separate report filed by USCP Officer Jason McGinnis, said he “responded to the North side of Crypt” at “approximately 1400 hours” and drew his baton to “hold the line of unscreened individuals that were trespassing.”

However, it wasn’t until “after the initial surge had ended” and McGinnis “was moving trespassers out of the South Door” that he claimed “there were reports of shots fired in the Speaker’s Lobby Stairs to the second floor.”

During an interview with NBC, Byrd also claimed to hear “shots fired.”

However, Byrd was the only one to fire a weapon on Jan. 6, 2021. This, and the conflicts in times reported by police regarding when they heard “shots fired,” raises questions.

According to a July 25 report by The Epoch Times, Stan Kephart—a 42-year law enforcement veteran and former director of security for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics who has testified in court more than 350 times as an expert witness on policing issues—said Babbitt was “murdered … under the color of authority.”

However, a review of the reports filed by Tyson and McKenna, the Bureau Commander found “the circumstances support the Use of Force” and did not recommend any further investigation.

Byrd also told NBC he yelled verbal warnings so hard that his throat hurt for days after. Neither of the reports filed by Tyson or McKenna corroborate his claim. Byrd cannot be heard shouting anything on the video either.

Byrd insisted he opened fire on an unarmed Babbitt only as a “last resort.”

“I know that day I saved countless lives,” Byrd said.

In August 2021, the U.S. Capitol Police investigation cleared Byrd of any wrongdoing.

Use of Force Reports

According to a report released March 7 by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), “the January 6th attack on the Capitol raised concerns” about the preparedness of USCP “to respond to violent demonstrations.”

Key findings from the report:

• Eighty officers “identified concerns related to use of force, including that they felt discouraged or hesitant to use force because of a fear of disciplinary actions.”
• Approximately 150 Capitol Police officers reported 293 use of force incidents on Jan. 6. All were deemed justified by the department.
• These incidents involved pushing (91), batons (83), withdrawing a firearm from its holster (37), chemical spray (34), other physical tactics (22), pointing a firearm at a person (17), less-lethal munitions (7), a diversionary device (1) and firing a firearm (1).

Of the 293 Use of Force (UOF) reports filed, The Epoch Times has obtained 161 of them, including the ones filed by Tyson and McKenna regarding the shooting of Babbitt by Byrd.

‘Less Than Lethal Munitions’ UOF Reports

According to one UOF report, dated 1/7/21, Officer Adam Descamp said he was ordered by Deputy Chief Eric Waldow “to deploy less than lethal munitions on an overwhelming number of rioters at the U.S. Capitol.

“I deployed multiple FN303 projectiles from the FN303 launcher, administered strikes with the PR-24 baton and utilized the Sabre red pepper spray to gain compliance from the rioters that were aggressively attacking officers on the police line and throughout the Capitol complex,” Descamp wrote of his actions at “approximately 1215 hours” (12:15 p.m.).

Waldow was incident commander of the Civil Disturbance Unit on Jan. 6, which was reported to be highly disorganized and woefully unprepared.

At “approximately 1215 hours,” Officer Melissa Lee also reported on 1/7/21 that she “was ordered to the scene by Deputy Chief Waldow to deploy less than lethal munitions on an overwhelming number of rioters at the U.S. Capitol Building,” using nearly the same, identical verbiage as Descamp.

“I deployed multiple FN303 projectiles from the FN303 launcher to gain compliance from the rioters that were aggressively attacking officers on the police line and throughout the Capitol complex,” she wrote.

A report filed by Officer Matthew Flood, also “at approximately 1215 hours,” also states he was ordered by Deputy Chief Waldow “to deploy less than lethal munitions on an overwhelming number of rioters at the U.S. Capitol.”

“I deployed multiple projectiles from the FN303 launcher, and chemical agent spray,” he wrote, using language remarkably similar to that of Descamp and Lee, “to gain compliance from the rioters that were aggressively attacking officers on the police line and throughout the Capitol complex,” he wrote on his report, also date 1/7/21.

“At approximately 1215 hours,” Officer Tina Cobert also reported on 1/7/21 that she “was ordered to deploy less than lethal munitions on an overwhelming number of rioters at the U.S. Capitol by Deputy Chief Waldow.

“I deployed multiple projectiles from the FN 303 Launcher to gain compliance from the rioters that were aggressively attacking officers on the police line and throughout the Capitol complex,” she also wrote.

Also “at approximately 1215 hours,” Officer Christopher Sprifke reported he “was ordered to deploy less than lethal munitions on an overwhelming number of rioters at the U.S. Capitol by Deputy Chief Waldow.

“I deployed multiple PepperBall projectiles to gain compliance from the rioters that were aggressively attacking officers on the police line and throughout the Capitol building,” he wrote in his 1/7/21 report.

“At approximately 1215 hours,” Officer Shauni Kerkhoff said she was also “ordered by Deputy Chief Waldow, Eric to deploy less than lethal munitions on an overwhelming number of rioters at the U.S. Capitol.

“I deployed multiple projectiles from the PepperBall launcher to gain compliance from the rioters that were aggressively attacking officers on the police line and throughout the Capitol complex,” she wrote in his report, also dated 1/7/21.

In February 2021, the U.S. Capitol police union issued an overwhelming no-confidence vote for a half-dozen of the force’s top leaders, including Waldow.

Instead of leading his team of officers, Waldow chose to physically engage rioters, a move many of his fellow officers saw as wrong. In October 2021, Waldow submitted paperwork for his resignation.

At “approximately 1400hrs,” Officer Patrick Kahl reported that he “discharged multiple 40mm baton rounds after individuals began and continued fighting with USP Officers while trying to gain unlawful access to the United States Capitol Building through the Rotunda Door.”

At 1500 hours, Officer Justin Green reported launching a flash bang “to disperse the crowd” in an effort to “rescue” one of the department’s sergeants who was “pinned in the center of the crowd.” He fired a second flash bang as demonstrators were “breaching the Rotunda door.”

Conflicting Reports

These UOF reports contradict the report issued by then-Capitol Police Inspector General Michael Bolton, who said the CDU was ordered by supervisors not to use less than lethal munitions and that “heavier, less-lethal weapons,” including flash bangs, “were not used that day because of orders from leadership.”

In addition, every report filed by police regarding the deployment of munitions claims there were no injuries. However, a witness said 55-year-old Kevin Greeson, an unarmed pro-Trump protester who died of a heart attack on Jan. 6, was struck by a projectile fired by Capitol Hill police just prior to his death.

Despite claims that munitions were launched to “gain compliance from rioters that were aggressively attacking officers,” numerous videos show tear gas and flash bangs were launched into a peaceful crowd, even into an area where women, children, and elderly people were standing behind police barriers. Several reports, including one by The Epoch Times, suggested the use of munitions was an intentional effort to incite violence, not to “gain compliance.”

Video footage, analyzed by Ray Dietrich of Red Voice Media, shows the violence began on Jan. 6, 2021 “the moment either stun grenades or tear gas canisters were deployed into the crowd of protestors.”

“The question I have, after a 20-year career in law enforcement, is why were these munitions deployed?” Dietrich asked rhetorically, saying he had “picked this video apart” and “cannot see why the USCP used this force against the crowd.”

“There is no fighting and no violence, so why did they target these people with less-lethal weapons?” He asked, noting that “what happened next” was “chaos” and “violence” as “the crowd fought back” and “the Capitol was breached.”

EpochTV’s documentary “The Real Story of Jan. 6” contains a number of new videos showing that munitions were used on a primarily peaceful crowd, injuring many people.

Contradictions between videos and police UOF reports regarding munitions also raise questions.

None of the officers involved in these UOF attacks, some of which resulted in hospital transport or death, faced any charges.

Considering the evidence, The Epoch Times reached out to the GAO, asking how the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) could determine that every use of force was justified.

Gretta Goodwin, a director in GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice team, told The Epoch Times they “reviewed Capitol Police use of force and crowd control policies, procedures, and training materials,” and “analyzed officer use of force reports for January 6, 2021, which describe the types of force used, as well as supervisors’ determinations on whether the force was justified.”

“As you noted, and as we reported, Capitol Police determined that each the 293 use of force incidents reported from January 6, 2021 were justified,” Goodwin explained. “According to Capitol Police policy, officers are required to complete a use of force report for any incident that meets one or more of three criteria: (1) unintentional firearm discharge; (2) the withdrawal of a weapon from its holster or pointing a weapon, including a firearm, at an individual or animal; or (3) any use of force greater than, and including, empty hand control techniques. Further, its policy requires officers to complete the use of force report, if possible, prior to the end of the officer’s tour of duty (i.e., the day of the incident).”

None of the reports were completed and submitted on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Capitol Police policy calls for use of force reports to be reviewed by the reporting officer’s supervisor for accuracy and completeness,” Goodwin stated further. “The supervisor is required to indicate whether the use of force was supported by the circumstances, or whether more investigation is needed. For either designation, the supervisor is to forward the report to the Office of Professional Responsibility for final investigative review. According to the Capitol Police, Office of Professional Responsibility investigations that identify wrongdoing can result in disciplinary actions and criminal investigations. Of the 293 use of force incidents reported, one incident required more investigation by the supervisor. This incident was the sole use of force incident involving the firing of a firearm, which the Capitol Police determined to be justified after additional investigation.”

This was the shooting of an unarmed Babbitt by Byrd. No explanation was provided for why the actions of Officer Morris and “Officer Whiteshirt” were deemed justified.

“We made five recommendations in our report,” Goodwin said, “some of which focus on ensuring that the Capitol Police take actions to better understand officers’ comprehension of the department’s expectations and policies related to the use of force, and as appropriate, make changes to policy, guidance, and training. Capitol Police agreed with all five of our recommendations, and when we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to our recommendations, we will provide updated information on our website.”

The Epoch Times also reached out to the USCP’s OPR but received no response.

Joe Hanneman contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Midwest landowners fighting the construction of a 2,000-mile web of carbon-capture pipelines are upset to learn that the company seeking easements on their lands is funded by foreign investors, including at least one with a troubling history.

Summit Carbon Solutions aims to build a pipeline through hundreds of farms and other private properties in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

The pipelines will take carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by more than 30 ethanol plants, liquify it, and send it to North Dakota to be buried in rock about a mile underground.

It is new technology and not everyone is convinced the plan will be beneficial, especially in the longer term.

“God is in charge of the wind and the rain and the sun and—whatever amount of carbon they pump in the ground—it’s not going to change the climate. Nature can adapt,” Colin Hoffman, a third-generation cattle rancher in Leola, South Dakota, told The Epoch Times.

“Land landowners respect each other’s land in South Dakota. We know a fence line is a property line. We don’t go into our neighbor’s property without their permission. We don’t go digging in our neighbor’s property. Property lines mean something to us.”

But Summit is asking to cross a section of Hoffman’s 3,000 acre ranch with a permanent easement for a “carbon capture, utilization, and storage” project meant to save the earth from global warming.

Troubled Past

In May, South Korea-based energy company SK E&S announced it will invest $110 million to acquire a 10 percent stake in Summit Carbon Solutions as part of its strategy of transitioning to more supposedly environmentally friendly forms of energy.

SK E&S joined a consortium of investors, including Summit Agricultural Group and Texas Pacific Group, in this recent round of funding for Summit, a statement from SK E&S said.

SK E&S is a subsidiary of SK Inc., along with SK Engineering & Construction Co. Ltd., which pleaded guilty in June 2020 to wire fraud, in a scheme to obtain U.S. Army contracts through payments to a U.S. Department of Defense contracting official, and the submission of false claims to the U.S. government.

According to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice, SK was sentenced to pay $60.6 million in criminal fines; $2.6 million in restitution to the U.S. Army; and serve three years of probation, during which time SK agreed not to pursue U.S. federal government contracts.

The Army suspended SK in 2017 from future contracting throughout the executive branch of the U.S. Government.

In 2008, SK got a U.S. Army construction contract at Camp Humphreys, South Korea, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the DOJ, SK paid millions of dollars to a fake Korean construction company named S & Teoul, which then paid that money to a contracting official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Then, to hide approximately $2.6 million in payments to S & Teoul, and ultimately to the contracting official, SK submitted false documents to the U.S. Army.

SK admitted that in April 2015, its employees burned many documents related to the contracts to hamper investigators. And the company admitted that in the fall of 2017, its employees obstructed a federal criminal proceeding by attempting to persuade an individual not to cooperate with U.S. authorities, a DOJ statement said.

SK did not respond to The Epoch Times’s request for comment.

In a different case, another SK subsidiary, SK Energy Co. Ltd., along with two other South Korean companies, GS Caltex Corporation and Hanjin Transportation Co. Ltd., plead guilty to criminal charges and paid a total of approximately $82 million in criminal fines for their involvement in a decade-long bid-rigging conspiracy that targeted contracts to supply fuel to the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force bases in South Korea, a 2018 DOJ statement said, adding that, in separate civil resolutions, SK Energy and the other two companies agreed to pay a combined total of approximately $154 million. Of that, SK paid more than $90 million. 

Ed Fischbach is a farmer near Mellette, South Dakota, with a cow-calf and crop operation. Summit wants an easement on Fischbach’s land, who is skeptical of the company.

“I haven’t trusted this company before we found out they had foreign investors—just the way they’ve acted towards landowners from the very beginning. There’s no trust whatsoever,” Fischbach told The Epoch Times. Knowing SK’s background had made him feel even more skeptical.

The Epoch Times asked Summit what it had to say about landowners’ concerns about SK E&S.

“A wide range of individuals and organizations have invested in Summit Carbon Solutions because they share our view that there are significant opportunities to economically decarbonize the agricultural and ethanol industries, which will enhance their long-term sustainability,” Jesse Harris, a Summit spokesman, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“The company will continue to meet or exceed all federal, state, and local regulatory requirements, including financial requirements, as we work to open new economic opportunities for ethanol producers, strengthen the agricultural marketplace for farmers, and generating new revenues for local communities to support schools, hospitals, roads and more.”

For the project to go forward, hundreds of landowners in the five-state project would either have to agree to an easement or potentially face eminent domain.

“I don’t like it,” Kathy Stockdale, a crop farmer in Hardin County, Iowa, told The Epoch Times.

Her family is facing pressure from two companies, Summit and Navigator CO2 Ventures, seeking easements on their farm.

“As a Christian, I believe I’m a steward of my land and can take care of it. We’ve worked very hard at that. And to have some out-of-country investors in Iowa farmland … As a Republican, our platform says that we do not support foreign investment or eminent domain used by private companies. So it goes against everything that is Iowa and [myself as a] farmer.”

Financial Incentive

Summit’s pipeline project, and similar projects in works across the country, are being encouraged through the federal Carbon Capture and Sequestration tax credit, also called the 45Q, which pays up to $50 per ton for CO2 that’s captured and sequestered.

Construction on new carbon capture projects must begin before Jan. 1, 2026, to be eligible, so there’s an urgency for carbon capture companies to get their projects started.

The more CO2 captured, the more federal tax credits earned.

Once complete, Summit’s project will be the largest carbon capture and storage project in the world, the company’s website says. It will have the capacity to capture and permanently store up to 12 million tons of CO2 every year.

At that rate, Summit would get $600 million per year in tax credits that can use by the company and its investors to offset their tax bills, or sold to others for profit. There has been chatter in Congress about making these tax credits direct payments to further encourage such projects.

“Carbon capture and storage solutions are an important technology that can directly reduce carbon dioxide generated in the process of employing various energy sources, including biofuels and natural gas,” SK Group Vice Chairman and SK E&S CEO Jeong Joon Yu said in a statement.

“SK E&S is committed to actively supporting low-carbon energy projects in the U.S. to meaningfully contribute to the U.S. government’s goal of significantly reducing CO2 emissions by 2030.”

But the landowners who are being asked for easements through their properties don’t believe the tax credits should go to foreign investors.

“That’s the other issue that’s angering people,” Hoffman said. “Why do foreign people get to come in and take advantage of our federal 45Q tax credit at the expense of us taxpayers? We don’t believe they should be allowed use eminent domain on this because it doesn’t serve a public purpose … We don’t think that eminent domain should be used for a private company, and we don’t think that it’s a safe material to have in a pipeline.”

Stockdale says the project isn’t needed.

“They are wanting to use our taxpayer money to fund this pipeline, and those profits, if it is built, will not go back to the taxpayers,” Stockdale said. “It will be going to foreign investors. I mean, all the money that they’re making, it doesn’t help us as farmers at all.

“It’s all built on a false premise. It’s only for money.”

Brian Jorde, managing lawyer at Domina Law Group based in Omaha, Nebraska, is working in the involved states, with more than 500 landowners who don’t wish to allow an easement on their land. The cases aim to prevent easements through eminent domain abuse.

“It’s one thing if the government is doing it and, the theory is, that it’s for the greater good. But here, this is purely for financial enrichment of a private corporation,” Jorde told The Epoch Times.

“Our laws have moved away from public use. The trigger for eminent domain has to be a public use. Some guys just woke up one day and said, ‘Wow, there’s tax credits. Yeehaw! Let’s reverse engineer a business to grab those tax credits. And we take people’s land in the meantime if they don’t want to give it to us. What a great plan.’ I mean, it’s just absolutely outrageous.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times .html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-07-28-1&utm_medium=email&est=Mg0LWflNpRzcL07JqofckHLbO%2FewpWp%2FiiOKVTad9sYllIwNsNx2p5WYgLykA4M8CA%3D%3D

Agents at the FBI are being pressured by superior officers to massage reports and pad the resulting data on the number of incidents involving Domestic Violent Extremists (DVE), according to information provided by agency whistleblowers to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

Jordan is presently the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and likely to become chairman of the panel if the GOP retakes the majority in the lower chamber of Congress in the November elections.

The Ohio Republican made public late Wednesday his letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray explaining that Republicans on the judiciary panel “continue to hear from brave whistleblowers about disturbing conduct at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“From recent protected disclosures, we have learned that FBI officials are pressuring agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’ even if the cases do not meet the criteria for such a classification,” the letter reads (pdf).

“Given the narrative pushed by the Biden Administration that domestic violent extremism is the ‘greatest threat’ facing our country, the revelation that the FBI may be artificially padding domestic terrorism data is scandalous.”

Jordan noted that the FBI’s definition of DVE’s is “an individual based and operating primarily within the United States or its territories without direction or inspiration from a foreign terrorist group or other foreign power who seeks to further political or social goals wholly or in part through unlawful acts of force or violence.”

Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland have repeatedly claimed that violence perpetrated by DVE’s, including the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, represent the greatest domestic security threat facing the United States.

Timeline of Events in DC on Jan. 6

Wray told Congress last year, according to Jordan, that the FBI has established a “very, very active domestic terrorism investigation program” and “doubled the amount of domestic terrorism investigations,” while Garland has said the “number of open FBI domestic terrorism investigations this year has increased significantly.”

Jordan said the whistleblowers are FBI employees concerned about improper pressures being brought to bear against field agents to misrepresent what they are seeing.

“We have received accusations that FBI agents are bolstering the number of cases of DVEs to satisfy their superiors. For example, one whistleblower explained that because agents are not finding enough DVE cases, they are encouraged and incentivized to reclassify cases as DVE cases even though there is minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification,” Jordan told Wray.

“Another whistleblower—who led at least one high profile domestic terrorism investigation—stated that a field office Counterterrorism Assistant Special Agent in Charge and the FBI’s Director of the Counterterrorism Division have pressured agents to move cases into the DVE category to hit self-created performance metrics,” Jordan added.

The artificial performance metrics are being used to determine which agents receive promotions and bonuses, according to the information the whistleblowers have given to Jordan.

Jordan pointed out to Wray that the allegations from the whistleblowers confirm concerns that the congressman has repeatedly expressed to the FBI chief.

“These whistleblower allegations that the FBI is padding its domestic violent extremist data cheapens actual examples of violent extremism. This information also reinforces our concerns—about which we have written to you several times—regarding the FBI’s politicization under your leadership,” Jordan explained in the letter.

“As we have detailed, multiple whistleblowers have disclosed how the Biden FBI is conducting a ‘purge’ of FBI employees holding conservative views. You have ignored these concerns. It appears instead that the FBI is more focused on classifying investigations to meet a woke left-wing agenda,” he continued.

Jordan requested that by Aug. 10, Wray provide copies of “all documents and communications” concerning all “preliminary investigations, and full investigations classified as domestic violent extremism” since January 2020.

In addition, Jordan told Wray he wants copies of all documents and communications between or among employees of the FBI and Department of Justice, with anybody in the Executive Office of the President. Jordan also wants the total number of Confidential Human Sources working for the FBI who have reported incidents alleged to involve DVEs since January 2020.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which works closely with the FBI on domestic security issues, published a June 7 advisory that warned “as the United States enters mid-term election season this year, we assess that calls for violence by domestic violent extremists directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers will likely increase.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A recent filing by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shows that her financier husband Paul Pelosi offloaded nearly $5 million worth of graphics card giant Nvidia shares just days before House lawmakers are set to consider legislation that would provide billions in government subsidies for U.S. semiconductor production.

In a periodic transaction report signed on Tuesday, Pelosi disclosed (pdf) that her husband sold 25,000 shares of Nvidia at an average price of $165.05 with a total loss of $341,365.

In total, the shares are worth between $1 million and $5 million.

According to an earlier filing this month (pdf), Paul Pelosi exercised 200 call options, or 20,000 shares, of Nvidia at a strike price of $100 and expiration of June 17, 2022, worth between $1 million and $5 million.

At the same time, Paul Pelosi also sold portions of his Apple and Visa holdings, according to the speaker’s disclosure.

Paul Pelosi owns and operates a San Francisco-based real estate and consulting firm.

The move to purchase Nvidia stock in June raised questions about whether the financier had insider knowledge about the legislation, while Pelosi has drawn scrutiny in recent months over her husband’s moves in the stock market.

However, Pelosi’s spokesman Drew Hammill told media outlets at the time that the speaker “has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions,” while adding that she also “does not own any stocks.”

“To be clear, insider trading is already a serious federal criminal and civil violation and the Speaker strongly supports robust enforcement of the relevant statutes by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission,” Hammill also said.

Senate Approves CHIPS

A Business Insider analysis from 2021 found that Pelosi is the 14th wealthiest member of Congress, with an estimated net worth of at least $46 million.

The latest regulatory filing came just one day before the Senate approved the CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America) Act of 2022, a measure designed to bolster the U.S. semiconductor industry and encourage companies to build semiconductor plants in the United States.

The legislation, which passed in a 64–33 vote on July 27, provides $280 billion in funding to aid domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research. Roughly $52 billion of that is set to go to microchip manufacturers.

The legislation would also allocate more than $170 billion provided over five years to bolster U.S. scientific research to compete with China.

The bill now heads to the House for debate.

When asked about Paul Pelosi’s offloading of shares around the same time the Senate prepared to vote on the latest measure, Hammill said in a statement to The Hill, “Mr. Pelosi bought options to buy stock in this company more than a year ago and exercised them on June 17, 2022.”

“As always, he does not discuss these matters with the Speaker until trades have been made and required disclosures must be prepared and filed. Mr. Pelosi decided to sell the shares at a loss rather than allow the misinformation in the press regarding this trade to continue,” he added.

The Epoch Times has contacted Pelosi’s office for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

After a video published by the White House made its way online Monday, Twitter users noticed some strange things about the video’s editing and resident Joe Biden’s appearance.

In the 11-minute video, multiple cuts interrupted Biden’s speech, giving the impression he must have messed up repeatedly during the recording. Additionally, Biden rarely blinked and his voice sounded hoarse the longer he continued talking.

Delivered virtual, pre-recorded remarks to the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives Conference, the president discussed his administration’s efforts to support police officers and ban assault weapons.

“To me, it’s simple. If you can’t support banning weapons of war on American streets, you’re not on the side of police,” Biden said.

Many cuts were used to stitch the White House video together, an editing choice of which conservatives gladly made fun.

More jump-cuts than an Edgar Wright film https://t.co/EBR7noCOqY

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) July 27, 2022

The Daily Wire’s official Twitter account also mocked the president’s lack of blinking, while one of the outlet’s hosts suggested Biden could have consumed a stimulant drug before the recording.

White House: If you don’t blink for the whole video, we’ll give you ice cream
Biden:pic.twitter.com/5v8n4t5PBC

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) July 26, 2022

Joe Biden would not be the first Democrat president to be injected with uppers in the White House. And it would make sense considering Biden was already 21 years old when it was happening to this guy: pic.twitter.com/e39mwAYI4Z

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) July 27, 2022

Another user posted two back-to-back clips of Biden, contrasting his physical appearance and voice. The first showed the president supposedly looking normal, while the aforementioned second video looked off.

Here’s the two videos back and forth. Pay attention to his physical appearance and his voice. Again, both supposedly from today, both only a few hours apart. What the hell is happening here? 🧐 pic.twitter.com/VjB2pjJZPn

— Five Times August (@FiveTimesAugust) July 27, 2022

US GDP Shrinks Again – Unofficial Definition Indicates Recession Just 2 Years After the Last One

In the video addressed to the NOBLE conference, Biden bragged about his 2021 American Rescue Plan, which provided upwards of $350 billion to cities and states struggling economically after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

The stimulus package bill cost a total of $1.9 trillion, according to SmartAsset.

“Over $10 billion of that money, of that funding, is being used to keep cops on the job, build new training facilities, enhance gun investigations and prosecutions and violence intervention programs,” Biden said.

He also used his praise for the police as a political opportunity to double down on Democratic criticism of Donald Trump’s alleged role on Jan. 6, saying the former president “lacked the courage to act.”

“The Capitol police, the D.C. metropolitan police, other law enforcement agencies were attacked and assaulted before our very eyes, speared, sprayed, stomped on, brutalized and lives were lost,” Biden said. “And for three hours, the defeated former president of the United States watched it all happen as he sat in the comfort of the private dining room next to the Oval Office.”

“You can’t be pro insurrection and pro cop. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro democracy. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro American.”

When you hear that students at Grace Church School in New York City are required to attend chapel for one hour every other week, you may assume that it’s a devout religious institution.

You may think differently, however, when you hear that the prestigious, expensive school recently turned over its chapel to an LGBT “pride” event featuring a star drag queen who goes by the stage name “Brita Filter.”

According to a report in The Post Millennial, the event included “twerking” students in the chapel and people handing out “pride flag” stickers, telling students that if they didn’t take one, they were homophobic.

(Here at The Western Journal, we’re hardly surprised at this turn of events, as we’ve seen plenty of schools bring in drag performers under various guises as part of LGBT “pride” education. We’re opposed to this kind of grooming and will continue to oppose it at every turn. If you do, too, please consider supporting our work by subscribing.)

The Post Millennial article, published Tuesday, indicated the event happened on April 27. The author was Paul Rossi, a former math teacher at the school from 2012 to 2021. He was “relieved of his teaching duties” after blowing the whistle about critical race theory infiltrating the school’s curriculum.

It was the sixth annual “pride” event in the chapel — again, mandatory for students in grades 9-12 to attend — and the main attraction was the aforementioned “Brita Filter.” (Driver’s license name: Jesse Havea.) He’s appeared on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” as a contestant and keeps a high profile on social media.

Havea, who identifies as “pansexual,” danced at the event — and students said they were pressured into dancing along, as well, according to Rossi.

WARNING: The following tweet contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.

Students pressured to celebrate “pansexual” drag queen at school chapel as teacher resigns over misuse of pronounshttps://t.co/3zRewBhnwf

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) July 26, 2022

“There was tons of social pressure to dance along and pretend like it was normal for sure,” one anonymous student said, “whether it be people tapping on shoulders and telling them to stand up or just a collective staring contest at whoever wasn’t totally participating.”

“Immediately upon entering there was a person handing out stickers with pride flags on them, unironically saying ‘take one or you’re homophobic.’”

The event was run by Spectrum, the school’s LGBT affinity group. The students forced to attend could only watch in horror as the drag queen’s plans for them were revealed — to be exposed to a tawdry, revolting performance aimed at normalizing bizarre sexual practices.

“I wondered, is this really happening in a chapel?” one student told Rossi.

The school’s website described the event rather tamely.

22 GOP-Led States Band Together, Say No to Rule That Would Force Schools to Accept Biden Admin’s Trans Agenda

“The audience was treated to a surprise guest — world-renowned drag queen, Brita Filter,” it reads.

“After a performance of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ Brita sat with Director of Vocal Music, Andrew Leonard, to answer questions about drag, representation and what pride month symbolizes.

“Student members of Spectrum shared their own stories and experiences of identity and belonging at Grace, before the Grace Notes closed out the chapel with a performance of Rina Sayayama’s ‘Chosen Family.’”

However, as one of the students who talked to the Post Millennial noted, Havea certainly celebrated pride in more ways than one.

The student said that “it’s notable that this person consistently called themselves fabulous and talented and beautiful. Not just once or twice, but over and over this person reassured themselves that way.”

Here’s a Money magazine profile of Havea, tallying up the costs of being so “fabulous.”

“One student reported that as the performer approached the altar, he was joined by more dancing students, some of them ‘twerking,’” Rossi’s report noted.

Despite the fact the Grace Church School hosted this event, the program also featured a teacher who used the occasion to resign because the school allegedly isn’t inclusive enough in pronoun usage for transgenders.

Uyen Nguyen — who self-identifies as “The Gay Agender Teacher Nguyen,” according to Rossi — announced she was resigning over being misgendered. Nguyen, apparently, wants to be referred to as “they” in the third person.

Nguyen, a student told Rossi, told the students “how much they loved the gay kids at school, and how this has been the most inclusive and accepting place they’ve ever been, but it’s the administration she cannot work with.”

“The administration is not supportive of their identity,” the student told Rossi. “They kept just saying that they were getting misgendered and people weren’t using their pronouns.”

In March, Nguyen told a reporter for the school paper, the Grace Gazette, that pronoun usage had been a “stressor” for her, since faculty had been “slower” to adopt to non-binary pronouns. (She conceded, however, that “almost everyone is trying” and were “well-intentioned.”)

The school’s environment, Nguyen said, “needs work … It has a ways to go before it is a fully safe and inclusive environment for nonbinary or trans people. … I don’t want the students to be feeling those things cause we’re supposed to be creating a safe space for them.”

The school — where tuition runs $46,000 a year — created a safe-enough space that it was willing to do all this in what’s ostensibly supposed to be a religious venue.

One student who attended told Rossi there was “tons of social pressure to dance along and pretend that this was normal for church.”

Even Havea apparently expressed surprise he was there, noting it was the first time he had performed in a church.

Sadly, with the way things are going, it won’t be the last, either.

Criminal exchange [US Patriot]

CORRECTION, July 28, 2022: The Western Journal has changed the headline of this article to include the fact that Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine held by Russia since 2018 on espionage charges, is also part of the proposed trade and not only Brittney Griner. We also removed the reference to Viktor Bout as a “known Russian terrorist,” an error for which we apologize; Bout was convicted on four terror-related conspiracy charges, but has not been found guilty of any actual acts of terror. We have also added a link to the original DOJ statement regarding Bout’s conviction in 2011, which we originally omitted, as well as including the full text of that statement at the bottom of the article for context, and included some additional information about Whelan’s history for context.

Resident Joe Biden is offering to exchange a Russian known as the “Merchant of Death” for WNBA star Brittney Griner and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.

In February, Griner was detained by Russian authorities in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport after vape canisters containing cannabis oil were found in her belongings.

Months later on July 7, Griner pleaded guilty to drug possession and smuggling in a Russian court. In Russia, the penalty for such a crime is up to 10 years in prison.

Whelan was arrested in 2018 on espionage charges and has been in Russian custody since. He has consistently denied the charges, but was convicted in 2020 and received a 16-year sentence.

According to an exclusive report from CNN, the Biden administration has been debating how to handle the situation for “months” and has finally come to a solution.

Three anonymous sources claim that the Biden administration is offering to exchange Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout for the two-time Olympic gold medalist and Phoenix Mercury star.

The Department of Justice is reportedly opposed to Biden’s decision to release Bout but the president’s authority overrules any opposition from the department.

In 2011, Bout was convicted on charges of “conspiring to kill U.S. nationals; conspiring to kill U.S. officers and employees; conspiring to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles; and conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” according to a statement from the DOJ at the time.

“Today, one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers is being held accountable for his sordid past,” then-Attorney General Eric Holder said at the time. “Viktor Bout’s arms trafficking activity and support of armed conflicts have been a source of concern around the globe for decades. Today, he faces the prospect of life in prison for his efforts to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to terrorists for use in killing Americans.”

“As the evidence at trial showed, Viktor Bout was ready to sell a weapons arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries,” Preet Bharara, the then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said after Bout’s conviction. “He aimed to sell those weapons to terrorists for the purpose of killing Americans. With today’s swift verdict, justice has been done and a very dangerous man will be behind bars.”

Despite Bout’s many crimes, one senior administration official told CNN that negotiations for the exchange were ongoing. The official said a “substantial offer” was first communicated in June.

It remained unclear whether the deal would go through, the official then noted.

“It takes two to tango. We start all negotiations to bring home Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained with a bad actor on the other side. We start all of these with somebody who has taken a human being American and treated them as a bargaining chip,” the official said.

“So in some ways, it’s not surprising, even if it’s disheartening, when those same actors don’t necessarily respond directly to our offers, don’t engage constructively in negotiations.”

Experts: Hunter Biden Could Be Thrown in Jail After Failing to Register as Foreign Agent

The entire text of the DOJ’s 2011 news release regarding Bout’s conviction follows:

International arms dealer Viktor Bout was found guilty today of conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) – a designated foreign terrorist organization based in Colombia – to be used to kill Americans in Colombia, announced the Department of Justice.

“Today, one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers is being held accountable for his sordid past,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “Viktor Bout’s arms trafficking activity and support of armed conflicts have been a source of concern around the globe for decades. Today, he faces the prospect of life in prison for his efforts to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to terrorists for use in killing Americans.”

“ As the evidence at trial showed, Viktor Bout was ready to sell a weapons arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries,” said U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara. “He aimed to sell those weapons to terrorists for the purpose of killing Americans. With today’s swift verdict, justice has been done and a very dangerous man will be behind bars. I would like to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who investigated this case on three different continents and helped to bring Viktor Bout to justice.”

Bout was arrested in Thailand in March 2008 based on a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court. He was subsequently charged in a four-count indictment in May 2008 and extradited to the Southern District of New York in November 2010. Bout was convicted today of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals; conspiring to kill U.S. officers and employees; conspiring to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles; and conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. The three-week jury trial was presided over by U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin.

According to the indictment and evidence presented at the trial:

Since the 1990s, Bout has been an international weapons trafficker. As a result of his weapons trafficking activities in Liberia, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control within the Department of Treasury placed him on the Specially Designated nationals list in 2004. The designation prohibits any transactions between Bout and U.S. nationals, and freezes any of his assets that are within the jurisdiction of the United States.

Between November 2007 and March 2008, Bout agreed to sell to the FARC millions of dollars’ worth of weapons – including 800 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), 30,000 AK-47 firearms, 10 million rounds of ammunition, five tons of C-4 plastic explosives, “ultralight” airplanes outfitted with grenade launchers and unmanned aerial vehicles. Bout agreed to sell the weapons to two confidential sources working with the DEA (the “CSs”), who represented that they were acquiring them for the FARC, with the specific understanding that the weapons were to be used to attack U.S. helicopters in Colombia.

During a covertly recorded meeting in Thailand on March 6, 2008, Bout stated to the CSs that he could arrange to airdrop the arms to the FARC in Colombia, and offered to sell two cargo planes to the FARC that could be used for arms deliveries. He also provided a map of South America and asked the CSs to show him American radar locations in Colombia. Bout said that he understood that the CSs wanted the arms to use against American personnel in Colombia, and advised that, “we have the same enemy,” referring to the United States. He also stated that the FARC’s fight against the United States was also his fight and that he had been “fighting the United States…for 10 to 15 years.” During the meeting, he also offered to provide people to train the FARC in the use of the arms.

The evidence presented at trial included a recording of the March 6, 2008 meeting between Bout, the CSs, his former associate Andrew Smulian, and others. Smulian was charged along with Bout in the government’s March 2008 complaint and pleaded guilty in May 2008 to the four conspiracy counts of which Bout was just convicted. Smulian cooperated with the government and, along with the two CSs, provided testimony at the trial.

Bout faces a maximum sentence of life in prison on counts one through three, including a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison for count three. He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison on count four.

Bout is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Scheindlin on Feb. 8, 2012.

The case was investigated by the DEA, with assistance from the Royal Thai Police; the Romanian National Police; the Romanian Prosecutor’s Office Attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice; the Korps Politie Curacao of the Netherlands Antilles; and the Danish National Police Security Services.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Anjan Sahni and Brendan R. Mcguire from the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs provided assistance.

An entire fleet of electric buses in Connecticut is being pulled off the road.

Various Democratic lawmakers in the state promoted the fleet as a step forward in green energy.

However, on Saturday, those green energy plans went up in flames, literally.

An entire fleet of Democrat-approved electric buses has been pulled from service.

Why? Well, turns out lithium batteries aren’t always the safest. pic.twitter.com/6qVuMZRSJ0

— Michael Austin (@mikeswriting) July 27, 2022

After the lithium battery of one CT transit bus caught fire, destroying the entire vehicle, the rest of the fleet was pulled from service as a precaution according to CT Insider.  The bus had no occupants inside at the time of the incident.

“Lithium-ion battery fires are difficult to extinguish due to the thermal chemical process that produces great heat and continually reignites,” Hamden fire officials said.

For safety purposes, the entire fleet has been pulled.

Now, in its stead, diesel-powered buses are rolling through Connecticut once again.

“The importance of rider safety is demonstrated by taking these buses out of service and ensuring a thorough investigation is completed prior to any redeployment of the fleet,” CT transit spokesperson Josh Rickman said.

“We have deployed diesel buses to make sure people get to where they need to be.”

In a hilariously ironic twist, only one day prior to the Saturday fire, state officials gathered together in New Haven, Connecticut, to “boost the success of the Clean Air Act that would restrict diesel vehicles and increase electric cars in the state.”

“There are approximately 800 buses that we are responsible for at the DOT that are being replaced with no-emissions electric models. They’re quieter, they emit no emissions and they last longer,” state DOT Commissioner Joe Giulietti said at the event.

Despite Saturday’s setback, Democrats in the state are still set to transition public vehicles away from diesel.

If You Thought Electric Vehicles Were Bad, Wait Until You See What Klaus Schwab Has Planned for Drivers Next

“In addition to the electric state-run buses, public school buses will also shift to electric models, according to the governor’s statement,” CT Insider reported.

“The Clean Air Act will also prohibit the procurement of diesel-powered buses after 2023.”

Time after time, green energy production and electric-powered vehicles have failed to stack up to their fossil fuel counterparts.

Nevertheless, Democrats at every level are pushing to make such energies the new standard.

Even at the cost of Americans’ living standards, finances and personal safety.

After a long week of constant violence, the Portland, Oregon, police chief took to Twitter with what amounted to a plea to criminals in the community to stop their behavior.

“The violence shown last night toward officers and over the weekend is shocking and reprehensible. In the last four days, officers have been shot at, had suspects fight with them, run over by a vehicle and another almost run over,” Chief of Portland Police Chuck Lovell posted to Twitter on Tuesday.

Several violent acts overwhelmed the city’s police department last week, Fox News reported.

One such incident involved a suspect hitting two police cruisers with his truck and almost running over a cop. The suspect, who was confronted by police for reports of gunshots nearby, escaped in his vehicle.

A separate incident saw an officer get hit by a vehicle during a stolen vehicle investigation. The officer was rushed to the hospital for their wounds, according to KGW-TV.

Portland cops were also involved in an altercation with a domestic violence suspect, resulting in the criminal’s death after he pulled out a gun.

Lovell continued his Twitter post by trying to remind the city — including its criminals — that his officers “deserve to go home at night” alive. Law-abiding citizens don’t need to be told that.

Officers are answering 911 emergency calls trying to help people. They deserve to go home at night to their loved ones. They deserve and need the community’s support as they continue to help make a difference in this city.

— Chief Chuck Lovell (@ChiefCLovell) July 26, 2022

Rank-and-file members of the department aren’t happy either.

“It’s beginning to get frustrating for the officers and hopefully members of the community are getting frustrated, as well,” Portland police Officer Derek Carmon told KGW.

Crime in the liberal city has gotten worse over the past two years, especially after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. Because of this, Portland has seen its fair share of “defund the police” and other social justice movements.

The coronavirus pandemic did not help matters either as citizens were told by the federal and state governments to coop up inside their homes for several weeks.

Despite the City Council’s attempt to appease activists by cutting funding for the Portland Police Bureau in 2020, the city did not see a decrease in violence.

In fact, continued violence forced the city council to add $5.2 million worth of funds back into the police department in November 2021, PBS reported.

Just a month ago, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling led riotous protesters to damage local businesses.

Worst Rioter of 2020 Busted After Leaving the Price Tag on His Own Botched Molotov Cocktail

Last week’s incidents only added to this ongoing issue for the Oregonian city.

A network of progressive prosecutors boosted by the left-wing billionaire George Soros is rushing to defend a Virginia prosecutor who lied to reduce a career criminal’s prison sentence.

The Soros-funded group slammed circuit court judge James Plowman for removing Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney Buta Biberaj (D.) from a robbery case. Plowman took the unprecedented step of throwing the progressive prosecutor and her team off the case after discovering she had withheld information about a 19-year-old burglar’s criminal record in order to “sell” a lenient prison sentence. In an amicus brief to the Virginia Supreme Court, Fair and Just Prosecution said the judge trampled on the prosecutorial discretion of Biberaj, whom voters elected “to reverse the course of mass incarceration.”

The missive is the latest instance in which Fair and Just Prosecution has waved off attacks on its left-wing prosecutors. Biberaj in 2020 signed on to defend Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) after a circuit judge demanded she submit written justification for the charging, dismissing, or settling of cases. Biberaj last December also joined dozens of progressive prosecutors to support Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón (D.), who is facing a recall and a lawsuit from his deputies over his radical sentencing policies. Gascón and Dehghani-Tafti returned the favor and this month signed on to Biberaj’s appeal.

Soros has donated more than $40 million since 2014 to help elect liberal prosecutors who have moved to lighten bail and sentencing guidelines in half of America’s largest jurisdictions. But voters are turning on progressive prosecutors as crime rates skyrocket across the country. Biberaj, who ran with nearly a million dollars of aid from Soros, has come under fire for her handling of child endangerment and domestic abuse cases, freeing offenders who are a danger to the public. Her prosecutorial approach has generated a recall effort.

Kevin Enrique Valle was initially charged in Loudoun in May 2021 with two felony burglaries, a crime that carries a minimum five-year prison sentence in Virginia. But he had been arrested the same month for 10 other burglaries. Given the charges and his past convictions as a minor, Valle could have faced decades in prison. But those charges were not written up, and Valle entered into a plea agreement with Biberaj’s office, which sentenced him to just six months in prison. Plowman called the plea deal “an overt misrepresentation by omission.”

In its amicus brief, Fair and Just Prosecution painted Plowman’s court order as political retaliation, since he had formerly held Biberaj’s office as commonwealth’s attorney in Loudoun County. Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares (R.) said in a letter that the Loudoun County Court “has rightfully lost confidence in Ms. Biberaj, her deputies, and her office’s ability and willingness to effectively seek justice in this matter.” Biberaj responded by telling Miyares to “stay in your lane.”

In addition to campaign support, Soros has thrown tens of millions of dollars at justice reform groups that provide professional development to progressive prosecutors. The Tides Center, a criminal justice reform group, since 2016 has received more than $30 million from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, funneling its donations to third-party entities like Fair and Just Prosecution.

Biberaj has participated in three Fair and Just Prosecution-sponsored trips since her election. She joined Dehghani-Tafti and Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) at the group’s annual convention in Durham, N.C., shortly after the three progressive Virginia prosecutors won their elections in 2019. One year later, she traveled with the group to New York City along with Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.). Many of the same prosecutors, including recently recalled San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin (D.), attended a symposium months later in Los Angeles, though Biberaj was not present. This May, she attended a Fair and Just Prosecution junket in Washington, D.C.

Virginians for Safe Communities told the Washington Free Beacon it is “fast approaching the signature threshold” to trigger a recall election for Biberaj.

“We expect to file with the court by Labor Day and put Buta Biberaj on trial for her negligence, misuse of office, and incompetence in her duties,” said Sean Kennedy, the group’s president. “Buta Biberaj has alienated everyone in Loudoun County, including law enforcement, Democratic Party officials, and even her own staff, so she has to rely on her Soros-funded travel buddies to defend her.”

Top Democrats in Loudoun County have signaled they are ready to back a prosecutor other than Biberaj in the next election, whether through a recall or during the next commonwealth’s attorney election in 2023, the Free Beacon reported in June.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Miloon Kothari is part of a commission to investigate alleged Israeli crimes

A United Nations official investigating alleged Israeli crimes said in an interview that social media platforms are controlled by an all-powerful “Jewish lobby.”

Miloon Kothari, a member of a U.N. Commission of Inquiry that is leading what critics say is a biased investigation against Israel, made the comments during an interview this week with Mondoweiss, an anti-Zionist blog that has been dogged by accusations it amplifies anti-Semitic hatred of Israel and Jews.

“We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by whether it’s the Jewish lobby or it’s the specific [nonprofit groups],” Kothari said. “A lot of money is being thrown into trying to discredit us.”

Pro-Israel organizations say the investigation into Israel is biased due to its broad mandate and open-ended nature and that Kothari’s comments are another sign the investigation will be unfair to Israel. The commission is tasked with identifying the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It already has concluded in one report that “Israel has no intention of ending the occupation”—language that critics of the probe say reveals the inquiry’s implicit bias against the Jewish state.

“There really is no way to avoid describing this outburst by Mr. Kothari as anything but a grotesque display of anti-Semitism,” Anne Bayefsky, president of Human Rights Voices and director of Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, which combats anti-Semitism, told the Washington Free Beacon. “The legitimacy of this U.N inquiry is shot. It is an ‘inquiry’ supposedly about ‘systematic discrimination’ whose purpose and practice is to engage in systematic discrimination—against the Jewish state and Jews.”

Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights attorney and CEO of the pro-Israel International Legal Forum, said the comments mark “a despicable new low, even for the U.N. Kothari’s accusations, which are replete with age-old antisemitic tropes and unhinged Jew hatred, only underscore the gross illegitimacy and bias of this one-sided Commission of Inquiry assault on Israel.”

Ostrovsky’s legal group issued an independent report in May highlighting what it said is prevalent anti-Israel bias in the U.N. investigation of Israel.

Kothari in the interview indicated that he views Israel as an apartheid state but said that term is “not sufficient” to characterize the whole situation.

“We don’t think it’s sufficient to capture the enormity of what has happened in the area,” Kothari said when asked about the subject. The commission “will get to the apartheid question, at some point in the future, because we will be looking at discrimination in general, from the River to the Sea.” The term “from the river to the sea” is often employed by Palestinian leaders who believe Israel has no right to exist and that a Palestinian nation should extend through all parts of the modern-day Jewish state.

Israel’s claim on disputed areas has “been illegal from the beginning,” according to Kothari, who also said Israel does not deserve to be a member of the United Nations.

“I would go as far as to raise the question of why [Israel is] even a member of the United Nations,” he said. “The Israeli government does not respect its own obligations as a U.N. member state. They, in fact, consistently, either directly or through the United States, try to undermine U.N. mechanisms.”

The U.N. commission on which Kothari serves was established in the wake of Israel’s 2021 war with Palestinian terror groups, including Hamas. The inquiry was ordered by the U.N. Human Rights Council, a hotbed for anti-Israel activity. The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the council as a result of this bias, but resident Joe Biden rejoined soon after taking office. The Israel commission, which the Biden administration helps to fund, is scheduled in the next several months to report its finding to the organization’s General Assembly.

Kothari disclosed that members of the Israeli inquiry are planning travel to the United States so that they can rally support for their cause with members of Congress. They also are hoping to persuade the Biden administration to drop its opposition to the probe.

Bayefsky, who has been closely tracking the commission’s investigation, said it is unprecedented for members of a U.N. probe to lobby U.S. lawmakers on the issue.

“It needs to be asked who authorized this visit, and in light of this outrageous statement, such authorization needs to be immediately rescinded,” she said. “The official mandate of this U.N. inquiry does not include becoming congressional lobbyists. No member of a U.N. country-specific inquiry on official business can waltz into the United States without permission.”

In light of Kothari’s comment, Bayefsky said, “The right thing to do is to defund and disband a mission that brings the U.N. and its top human rights body into deep disrepute.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The number of Americans who say universities are leading America in a positive direction has dropped 14 points in the last two years, according to a survey released Tuesday.

Varying Degrees, an annual survey released by the left-leaning New America think tank, found just over half of Americans, 55 percent, say higher education has a positive influence on the United States, down from 69 percent in 2020. While Republicans showed the greatest drop, plummeting from 61 percent in 2020 to 37 percent in 2022, self-identified Democrats’ confidence in colleges also declined 7 points.

Elite universities have been the subject of numerous controversies related to their ideological posturing. Georgetown sanctioned law professor Ilya Shapiro following his criticism of resident Joe Biden for appointing a Supreme Court justice on the basis of race. Princeton University ousted a renowned conservative professor who had received tenure, and Yale Law School has been rocked by calls from liberal students to harass conservatives on campus.

Many U.S. colleges are home to self-described liberal professors. At Harvard, for instance, 82 percent of professors surveyed this year called themselves either “liberal” or “very liberal,” compared with just 1 percent who identified as conservative.

Fewer Americans believe the government should fund higher education, declining by 6 percentage points over the past two years.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) admitted Thursday that she does not have the votes to pass a public-safety bill, a blow to vulnerable Democrats who are trying to run against accusations that the party wants to defund the police.

Pelosi canceled a planned vote this week on a bill that would fund grant programs for local police departments to hire additional police officers.

The policies were introduced by two vulnerable Democrats, Reps. Abigail Spanberger (Va.) and Josh Gottheimer (N.J.). But other Democrats and left-wing activist groups bristled at the proposals. The Congressional Black Caucus opposed extra funding for police departments, citing alleged shootings of unarmed black men. Other interest groups, such as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, chaired by “defund the police” proponent Maya Wiley, called the proposals part of a “discriminatory criminalization-first approach to public safety.” Those disagreements led Pelosi to cancel a vote because she lacked enough Democratic “yeas.”

The bill’s failure presents a critical blow to vulnerable Democrats fighting back against accusations that their party is anti-law enforcement. Spanberger’s proposal was introduced with Rep. Tom Rice (R., S.C.) in a rare act of bipartisanship on the sensitive issue of policing. Although Democratic leadership says the House will revisit the bill in August, congressional insiders say a vote is unlikely given the high number of legislative priorities.

Republicans intend to take advantage of Pelosi’s decision by painting Democrats as weak on crime. Republican campaign ads across the country include clips of their opponents and Democratic leaders calling for cuts to police departments.

“Democrats never miss an opportunity to remind voters they hate the police,” a National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon.

Polling shows that the “Defund the Police” slogan, adopted by many Democrats after the death of George Floyd in 2020, damaged the party’s reputation with voters. An April Gallup poll found Americans more concerned with violent crime than at any time in the last six years, prompted by historic spikes in shootings and homicide in 2020 and 2021.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Disney confirmed in a statement to Axios it will change Hulu’s advertising policies to allow political advertising. The decision comes only two days after the company denied ads created by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Governors Association. The denial had sparked online outrage among Democrats.

The ads that prompted internet outcry depict congressional Republicans and former president Donald Trump as unfeeling about gun violence toward children and accuses them of a “coordinated Republican attack” on abortion.

This is the latest political controversy in which Disney has caved to Democratic pressure. Last March, Disney opposed Governor Ron DeSantis’s (R., Fla.) Florida Parental Rights in Education bill after the Democrats characterized it as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill.”

“Hulu’s censorship of the truth is outrageous, offensive, and another step down a dangerous path for our country,” the directors of three Democratic committees responsible for the ads said in a statement to the Washington Post. “Voters have the right to know the facts about MAGA Republicans’ agenda on issues like abortion—and Hulu is doing a huge disservice to the American people by blocking voters from learning the truth about the GOP record or denying these issues from even being discussed.”

Hulu’s policy used to allow candidate ads but not issue ads. Political ads were permitted on a case-by-case basis. Now, Hulu will allow a large variety of political ads and reserves the right to request edits.

Disney said the change is motivated by the desire for their streaming platforms to be consistent in advertising rules, with the exception of Disney+, which will offer a plan with “family-friendly” ads later this year. ESPN+, another of Disney’s subscription-streaming services, already allows political ads.

Disney has come under fire recently for promoting a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” in its children’s programming and parks and expressing opposition for Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill.

Netflix, Hulu’s chief competitor in streaming, has suffered major subscriber and market blows following the release of Cuties, a film sexualizing young girls, and other political messaging that has failed to strike a chord among consumers.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The Department of Justice’s third-ranking official has a history of calling crisis pregnancy centers “fake clinics,” a false, inflammatory description employed by terrorist groups that have recently attacked the pro-life organizations.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta deployed the rhetoric in a 2020 letter urging senators to vote against a Trump judicial nominee. Nearly 60 crisis centers, which counsel women on alternatives to abortion, have been firebombed or vandalized over the past two months. An anarchist group that has claimed responsibility for many of the attacks, Jane’s Revenge, has used the same “fake clinic” rhetoric as Gupta.

The Biden administration has repeatedly accused Republicans of causing acts of violence through their rhetoric. The White House baselessly claimed a GOP-backed bill in Florida to restrict teaching about sexual orientation to young children “encourages bullying and threatens students’ mental health, physical safety, and well-being.” Democrats tried to link Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) to a mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., in May that left 10 people dead. They claimed that Stefanik’s opposition to mass illegal immigration echoed the Buffalo shooter’s writings about “great replacement theory.”

Gupta’s remarks carry new significance after she was appointed this month to lead the Justice Department’s reproductive rights task force, formed to protect access to abortions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Gupta also supervises the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which prosecutes attacks against reproductive health facilities, a classification that includes crisis pregnancy centers.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), who introduced a bill this month to expand criminal penalties for attacks on the centers, said Gupta’s remarks are “no surprise” given the Justice Department’s “disregard” for the assaults on pro-life organizations.

“It’s shameful that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice—responsible for enforcing our laws—is ignoring the epidemic of violent attacks against organizations that are just trying to provide health care to women in need,” Hawley told the Washington Free Beacon.

While it has moved to protect abortion clinics, the Justice Department has largely ignored the violence against pro-life centers. Gupta and other DOJ leaders met with civil rights and pro-abortion groups this week to update them on the task force’s work. The Justice Department does not appear to have met with pro-life groups that have sought meetings with the agency over the firebombing.

Gupta slammed crisis pregnancy centers while opposing the nomination of Judge David Dugan because of his affiliation with a center in Illinois. At the time, Gupta led the civil rights group Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

The head of one pro-life group that has sought a DOJ meeting says Gupta’s remarks make her “unfit” to lead the task force.

“Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta’s attacks on pregnancy resource centers which help pregnant women in need are shameful and utterly irresponsible,” said CatholicVote president Brian Burch.

“Ms. Gupta should be investigating and prosecuting the radical criminals who are vandalizing and firebombing pregnancy resource centers nationwide,” Burch told the Free Beacon, adding that Attorney General Merrick Garland should “immediately rescind” Gupta’s appointment.

Gupta is not the only high-ranking DOJ official to attack crisis pregnancy centers. Kristen Clarke, the head of the agency’s civil rights division and a task force member, called the centers “harmful” and “predatory” after a 2018 Supreme Court ruling in favor of the facilities in 2018, the Free Beacon reported.

As part of its work, the task force is centralizing information about the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a federal statute that makes it a crime to threaten or attack reproductive health centers. The Justice Department has brought multiple cases against activists who blocked the entrances of abortion clinics, but none so far against people who firebombed pro-life organizations.

The Justice Department did not address questions about Gupta’s comments. The agency provided comment from the FBI, which said it is investigating “a series of attacks and threats targeting pregnancy resource centers, faith-based organizations, and reproductive health clinics across the country, as well as to judicial buildings, including the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“The incidents are being investigated as potential acts of domestic violent extremism, FACE Act violations, or violent crime matters, depending on the facts of each case,” an FBI representative told the Free Beacon.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coordinated with social media companies and Google to censor users who expressed skepticism or criticism of COVID-19 vaccines, according to a trove of internal communications obtained by America First Legal and shared exclusively with the Washington Free Beacon.

Over the course of at least six months, starting in December 2020, CDC officials regularly communicated with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google over “vaccine misinformation.” At various times, CDC officials would flag specific posts by users on social media platforms such as Twitter as “example posts.”

In one email to a CDC staffer, a Twitter employee said he is “looking forward to setting up regular chats” with the agency. Other emails show the scheduling of meetings with the CDC over how to best police alleged misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

Although many of the posts flagged by the CDC contained false information about the COVID-19 vaccines, the efforts to police misinformation also resulted in mistaken acts of censorship. An April 2021 email from a CDC staffer to Facebook states that the “algorithms that Facebook and other social media networks are apparently using to screen out posting by sources of vaccine misinformation are also apparently screening out valid public health messaging, including [Wyoming] Health communications.”

The communications reveal a high level of coordination between the government and tech industry during the pandemic and raise questions about the extent to which other private companies are working with the federal government to censor the public. The Biden administration has faced criticism for engaging in what some have called “Orwellian” practices, such as the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board. The Free Beacon reported that the now-shuttered disinformation board arranged a meeting with a Twitter executive who blocked users from sharing stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The CDC’s effort to police alleged disinformation expanded to other federal agencies as well. An internal March 2021 email from a senior CDC staffer states “we are working on [sic] project with Census to leverage their infrastructure to identify and monitor social media for vaccine misinformation.”

One email shows a senior CDC official appeared at Google’s 2020 “Trusted Media Summit.” The conference, according to its website, was “for journalists, fact-checkers, educators, researchers and others who work in the area of fact-checking, verification, media literacy, and otherwise fighting misinformation.”

One of the organizers of the conference asked the senior CDC official for permission to post her remarks on YouTube. That official declined, saying she was not authorized to speak publicly.

In the same email chain with a senior CDC official, a Google staffer offers to promote an initiative from the World Health Organization about “addressing the COVID-19 infodemic and strengthen community resilience against misinformation.” That same Google staffer offers to introduce the CDC official to a Google colleague who is “working on programs to counter immunization misinfo.”

Facebook also awarded the CDC with $15 million in ad credits for the company’s platforms in April 2021, according to several emails.

“This gift will be used by CDC’s COVID-19 response to support the agency’s messages on Facebook, and extend the reach of COVID-19-related Facebook content, including messages on vaccines, social distancing, travel, and other priority communication messages,” an internal CDC memo reads.

A Facebook official says the platform has been transparent about its work with public health organizations “to address health misinformation.” The platform also says it has asked its internal oversight board to assess whether its “current COVID-19 misinformation policy is still appropriate now that the pandemic has evolved.”

Twitter and Google declined to comment. The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.

Tensions between the CDC’s powers and protecting the public’s civil liberties have arisen since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci called a judge overruling the CDC’s mask mandate “disturbing.”

Concerns about the CDC’s judgment has also led the Democratic-controlled cities of New York and San Francisco to ignore the agency’s guidance on monkeypox vaccinations.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Peach State Democrat forced to go out of state to find a sheriff surrogate for a new ad

Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams is out with a new ad that uses a “former deputy sheriff” to argue that Abrams’s opponent is making the state “less safe.” There’s just one problem: That officer never served in Georgia. 

In a July 12 ad titled “Dangerous,” Abrams’s leadership PAC, One Georgia, employs a “former deputy sheriff”—who is identified only as “Dennis”—to claim that Republican governor Brian Kemp “may talk tough” but “makes us less safe.” But “Dennis” never patrolled the mean streets of Atlanta—or any Georgia street, for that matter. “Dennis” is LGBT attorney and Democratic activist Dennis Collard, a Florida native who worked as a police officer in the Sunshine State from 1994-1999, his LinkedIn shows. Collard—who, according to his LinkedIn, uses pronouns he/him—went on to join an Atlanta-based law firm in 2003, roughly 13 years before he founded his own divorce firm in Atlanta.

This is far from the first time Abrams has been forced to go out of state in search of political support. Just 14 percent of the $50 million she’s raised for her campaign against Kemp came from Georgia residents. Nearly half of that money, meanwhile, came from Washington, D.C., California, New York, and Delaware. Abrams in May called Georgia “the worst state in the country to live.”

Jackson County sheriff Janis Mangum, who is one of more than 100 Georgia sheriffs to endorse Kemp, said she was “not surprised at all” to hear that Abrams struggled to recruit a police officer who served in the Peach State.

“I’m not surprised by that at all when you’ve got someone who talks about defunding the police. Defunding the police would be the worst thing for anybody to do in our state—it’s just absolutely ridiculous,” Mangum told the Washington Free Beacon. “And for somebody to think like that, I don’t know that you’re going to have any law enforcement officers get behind you.”

Abrams, who did not return a request for comment, has faced criticism over her role as a board member of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which supports defunding police. Shortly after Abrams joined that board in May 2021, the foundation launched its “Answer the Uprising” initiative, which funds groups working to “transform, defund, [and] abolish police.” The foundation has, for example, funneled $200,000 to the Louisville Community Bail Fund, which later paid $100,000 to free an anti-police activist charged with the attempted murder of a Jewish mayoral candidate. 

Abrams has attempted to distance herself from the foundation by claiming she does not agree with its position on defunding police. According to the foundation’s website, however, the group’s “Answer the Uprising” initiative was “fully supported by Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Board of Directors, which recently named seven new changemakers to the Board, including Stacey Abrams.”

Prior to her political career, Abrams authored eight romance novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery. CBS in 2019 reached an agreement to turn one of those novels, Never Tell, into a TV drama. The 2004 romantic fiction book is heavy on both sex and sexual misconduct, a Free Beacon analysis found.

Abrams went on to serve as a state legislator and ran a failed campaign against Kemp in 2018. The Democrat lost by 2 points but never conceded defeat, instead calling the election “stolen” due to “voter suppression.” Collard also filmed an ad for Abrams four years ago, filed a campaign finance complaint against Kemp in 2019, and contributed $500 to Abrams’s campaign in March.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced on July 27 that he has reached a deal with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on energy, taxes, and health care to advance what appears to be a revised, alternate version to the Build Back Better (BBB) bill.

The new spending package (pdf), now dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” will “address record inflation by paying down our national debt, lowering energy costs, and lowering healthcare costs,” Manchin said in a lengthy statement.

“For too long, the reconciliation debate in Washington has been defined by how it can help advance Democrats political agenda called Build Back Better. Build Back Better is dead, and instead, we have the opportunity to make our country stronger by bringing Americans together,” he added.

Manchin, a crucial swing vote in the 50–50 split Senate, had for months refused to support the BBB pushed by fellow Democrats that at one point had asked for over $3 trillion in funding. In mid-July, he reportedly killed any hope for a scaled down version of the BBB, telling party leadership he would not support new climate spending or raise taxes from their post-2017 levels.

“The revised legislative text will be submitted to the Parliamentarian for review this evening and the full Senate will consider it next week,” Manchin and Schumer said in a joint statement on July 27.

Schumer seeks to pass the measure through a procedural tool that allows a bill related to taxes, spending, and debt to be passed in the chamber by a simple 51-vote majority rather than having to pass the 60 vote filibuster threshold. The process also limits debate on the bill to 20 hours. That could allow the bill to be passed with only Democratic votes, if necessary—if every Democrat is on board.

Hours after Manchin announced the deal, a spokesperson for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a moderate Democrat, told news outlets that her office does not have a comment on the proposed legislation and that she will need to review the text.

Bill Claims to Reduce Federal Deficits by $300 Billion

The two senators said the bill “will make a historic down payment on deficit reduction to fight inflation, invest in domestic energy production and manufacturing, and reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030.” It will also allow Medicare to negotiate for prescription drugs and lower health care costs for Americans, they added.

A one-page summary (pdf) from Manchin’s office show that the deal will see a total of $433 billion in investments: about $369.75 billion in energy security and climate change programs over 10 years, and $64 billion to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act program for federal subsidies of health insurance, for three years through 2025.

The deal seeks to generate an estimated $739 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years. A large portion of the money—an estimated $313 billion—is expected to be generated by increasing the corporate minimum tax to 15 percent. The remaining amounts include $288 billion in prescription drug pricing reform; $124 billion in Internal Revenue Service tax enforcement; and $14 billion in closing the carried interest loophole.

That would leave over $300 billion to reduce federal deficits over the next 10 years to fight inflation, according to the Democratic senators. The government is projected to rack up trillions in cumulative deficits over the next 10 years.

“It is past time for America to begin paying down our $30 trillion national debt and get serious about the record inflation that is crushing the wages of American workers,” Manchin said in his statement. He said the proposed legislation “would dedicate hundreds of billions of dollars to deficit reduction by adopting a tax policy that protects small businesses and working-class Americans while ensuring that large corporations and the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.”

Resident Joe Biden said in a statement that the proposed legislation “will reduce the deficit beyond the record setting $1.7 trillion in deficit reduction we have already achieved this year, which will help fight inflation as well.”

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“And we will pay for all of this by requiring big corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, with no tax increases at all for families making under $400,000 a year,” he said. “This is the action the American people have been waiting for.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) criticized the measure on Twitter.

“Democrats have already crushed American families with historic inflation. Now they want to pile on giant tax hikes that will hammer workers and kill many thousands of American jobs,” he wrote. “First they killed your family’s budget. Now they want to kill your job too.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Biden administration has sold nearly 6 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to an entity tied to the Chinese Communist Party, records show.

From September 2021 to July, the Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded three crude oil contracts with a combined value of roughly $464 million to Unipec America, the U.S. trading arm of Chinese state-owned oil company Sinopec, according to a review by The Epoch Times of the DOE documents. A Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden had invested in the national oil giant.

The sale would tap 5.9 million barrels in total from the strategic reserve (SPR) to export to the Chinese firm. The latest contract, revealed on July 10, was for 950,000 barrels sold for around $113.5 million.

The two most recent sales to Unipec came out of an emergency drawdown of the U.S. oil stockpile, initiated under resident Joe Biden on March 31 in what he said would offset the loss of Russian oil in global markets and tame rising fuel costs at home.

The Unipec contracts have been subject to heavy criticism in recent weeks, especially because of the firm’s connections to the president’s son. With Americans nationwide still reeling from elevated gas prices, the selling of oil reserves to foreign adversaries such as China is at odds with U.S. energy and security needs, Republican lawmakers and analysts have said.

“Biden is draining our strategic reserves at an unprecedented rate. This is an abuse of the SPR, far beyond its intended purpose. Sending U.S. petroleum reserves to foreign adversaries is wrong, and it undermines our national security,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) told The Epoch Times.

What the United States should do, he says, is to “unleash American energy production and ensure that our strategic reserves are stocked and able to meet the demands of a national emergency.”

Unipec’s Bids

The oil auction is price-competitive, meaning contracts are awarded to the highest bidder. Unipec, a consistent participant in previous U.S. crude oil sales, secured 1.9 million barrels over the past three months through two contracts it won on April 21 and July 10.

The DOE also sold 4 million barrels to Unipec last fall during a congressionally mandated sale.

Sales to Unipec appear to fall in the lower price range among the successful buyers, a review of DOE contracts by The Epoch Times shows. For the 2021 contract, Unipec paid about $63 for each barrel, about $7 lower than the trading price at the time, and more than $2 short of the highest price from other buyers in the sale.

The April and July purchases cost Unipec $103.30 and $119.50 per barrel, respectively. The highest prices offered, by comparison, were $111.25 and $125.10.

Unprecedented Drawdown

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil, with four storage sites in Texas and Louisiana designed to alleviate significant oil supply shortages in times of major geopolitical events or natural disasters.

The amount of oil in the SPR has seen a steep decline over the past year, more notably since Biden, blaming Russia’s Ukraine war for the “price hike at the pump,” in March ordered a withdrawal at a rate of 1 million barrels per day for six months to curb gas prices. The planned sale of about 180 million barrels marked the biggest drawdown in the reserve’s more-than-four-decade history and is set to cut the U.S. backup oil supply by about a third.

The inventory stood at 474.5 million barrels as of July 22, marking a 34 percent drop from its peak of 726.6 million, and some 90 million lower than the level in late March.

The DOE on May 5 announced a “long-term buyback plan” to repurchase 60 million barrels in fall through “a competitive, fixed-price bid process.” The delivery date, the DOE said, will take place “in future years when prices are anticipated to be significantly lower,” likely after fiscal year 2023. More buybacks would follow after this first tranche of purchases, it added.

But releasing oil reserves at this magnitude carries risks, according to Abhi Rajendran and Robert Johnston, two research scholars on global energy policy at Columbia University. For one, there’s no guarantee that oil prices will fall when the government moves to refill the stock. Further, the diminution of oil supply may cause the market to price in a greater premium for wars and other supply shocks, resulting in higher prices for longer, they said in a Q&A on April 1.

Scrutiny

On Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers have been watching the oil sales with growing alarm. A total of 206 House Republicans voted on July 20 in support of a legislative amendment aimed at preventing the Biden administration from exporting petroleum to entities with Chinese Communist Party ties.

“It does not make sense that we are using our already depleted energy supplies to help China build up their own strategic reserves,” Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) said in a speech rallying support for the proposal.

China is the world’s largest importer of oil. As the West turns away from Russian oil due to the Ukraine war, China has been quietly snapping up Russian resources at steep discounts. From March through June, it spent more than $25 billion on Russian oil, gas, and coal, nearly doubling the amount from the year-earlier period, the latest customs data show. The sales volume propelled Russia to become China’s top oil supplier for two straight months from May, displacing Saudi Arabia.

The GOP-led measure was overruled after 219 Democrats in the House unanimously voted against it.

The same day, 20 Republican members on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote (pdf) to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm requesting an immediate briefing and all documents related to the administration’s decision to sell U.S. oil reserves. They noted that Sinopec, the parent organization of Unipec, has been linked to the president’s son Hunter Biden, through the state-backed Chinese private equity firm BHR Partners, which became a stakeholder of Sinopec in 2014.

Hunter served as a founding board member of BHR from 2013 through April 2020. His firm Skaneateles also held a 10 percent stake in BHR, which his lawyer said has been divested as of November 2021. On BHR’s 2021 annual report released in June, however, Skaneateles was still listed as a shareholder.

Hunter’s lawyer hasn’t responded to The Epoch Times’ questions regarding Skaneateles.

“As if Biden couldn’t have bundled this energy crisis anymore, this latest development of sending our strategic petroleum reserves to a Chinese oil firm connected to Hunter Biden reaches a new low,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who signed on the letter, told The Epoch Times.

“For one, this administration should have never tapped into these reserves. Second, these reserves should have never left U.S. shores, and third, the U.S. shouldn’t be doing deals with firms connected to the president’s son,” he said, adding that the Biden family’s “continued compromising actions require strict oversight from Congress.”

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking GOP member of the House Oversight Committee who spearheaded the letter, noted that previous inquiries by Republicans to the DOE about the oil sale had gone unanswered.

“Under no circumstances should the Department of Energy be making decisions which financially benefit Hunter Biden or any of the Biden family’s business partners,” he told The Epoch Times.

“If Administration officials continue to ignore meaningful oversight,” Republicans will “use the gavel to get answers in January,” Comer said, in reference to the expected swing to a Republican majority in the House in the November midterm elections, which would hand GOP lawmakers subpoena power as chairpersons of the chamber’s various committees.

“The American people need answers to determine if this is another attempt by the Biden family to peddle access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves.”

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who also backed the Oversight Committee request, said the sale demonstrates the current administration’s “rank incompetence.”

“The Biden White House obviously didn’t see a problem with loading millions of barrels from our strategic reserves onto tankers bound for foreign countries, which likely explains why they don’t see a problem selling our emergency crude oil to a Chinese gas company with ties to Hunter Biden’s investment firm,” he told The Epoch Times.

White House Pushes Back

Ian Sams, a special assistant to Biden and spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, responded to the Republican claims on July 22, calling them “ridiculous and false.”

The DOE is “required by law to sell it ‘in a competitive auction to the highest bidder,’ regardless of whether that bidder is a foreign company,” he told Fox News, noting that the Trump administration, in 2017, also sold a half-million barrels of crude oil from the reserve to China’s state-run PetroChina International through the same “competitive bidding process.”

Sams also stressed that Biden “had no personal involvement in this process whatsoever.”

But Sams’s statement may not have presented the full picture, according to Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of Power the Future, a nonprofit group advocating for energy workers.

“The White House has pushed back as saying we have sold in the past to the communist Chinese. And that is true. We sold when our SPR was nearly full and oil was not at record highest and the world was at relative peace,” he told The Epoch Times. “Times change, and thanks to this president, they have not just changed but become worse, and our policies must change with them.”

DOE officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times about its buyback plan and Republican lawmakers’ concerns.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by another 0.75 percentage point on July 27 during the July Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policy meeting. This is in line with market expectations and similar to the historic move the central bank made in June.

The FOMC’s three-quarter-point boost lifted the benchmark fed funds rate to the range of 2.25 to 2.5 percent. It was a unanimous decision among central bank officials.

The Fed’s balance-sheet reduction efforts will continue in September, as expected. The monthly runoff caps will rise to $35 billion for mortgage-backed securities and $60 billion for U.S. Treasurys.

While the labor market has remained strong, “recent indicators of spending and production have softened,” the FOMC said in a revised statement.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine is causing tremendous human and economic hardship,” the statement reads. “The war and related events are creating additional upward pressure on inflation and are weighing on global economic activity. The Committee is highly attentive to inflation risks.”

The institution is committed to lowering inflation to its 2 percent target. But the FOMC noted that it’s quite concerned about broad-based inflationary threats.

Following the latest move, the fed funds rate futures forecast stands at 3.4 percent in December as more than 100 basis points of tightening is expected for the rest of 2022.

The leading benchmark stock market indexes held onto their gains on July 27, with the Nasdaq Composite Index rallying about 4 percent and the S&P 500 adding about 2.6 percent.

Powell: US Not in a Recession

In his post-FOMC press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the economy is resilient and the central bank is acting quickly to fight “disappointing” inflation, noting that it’s an essential task.

He said another exceptionally high rate increase could be appropriate, but it would depend on what the data are showing as officials search for evidence that inflation is coming down. Powell also revealed that the central bank could slow the pace of rate hikes.

According to Powell, the central bank has currently achieved its neutrality goal–a rate that neither spurs economic growth nor hinders an expansion. But he noted that the full effects of these large rate moves haven’t been felt yet.

He said the Federal Reserve isn’t trying to initiate a recession, but the path to a soft landing has become narrower.

“We’re not trying to have a recession, and we don’t think we have to,” Powell said. “We know the path has narrowed due to events outside of our control.”

When asked if the country is in the middle of an economic downturn, Powell rejected the suggestion that the United States is in a recession, alluding to “too many areas of the economy that are performing too well,” mainly the labor market.

Still, it can be challenging to predict the state of the economy in the next six to 12 months with any certainty, he said.

The Path of Interest Rates

After the June annual inflation rate climbed to 9.1 percent, it was anticipated that the U.S. central bank would turn ultra-hawkish and raise rates by a full point. This expectation dwindled in the days following the red-hot Consumer Price Index (CPI), with most overwhelmingly penciling in a 75-basis-point increase.

The next meeting of the Federal Reserve’s policy-making arm, the FOMC, will take place in September. According to the CME FedWatch Tool, investors are anticipating a raise of 50 to 75 basis points (bps). But much can happen before then, as plenty of key economic reports will come out, including two CPI and two job reports.

Looking ahead, some market analysts believe that there will be a total of 125 basis points worth of rate increases by the end of 2022.

“It’s clear that the Fed is not going to stop there. They’ve accepted that supply-side improvements will not come to their rescue to get inflation lower—hence, the dropping of the ‘transitory’ narrative—and they’ve recognized the onus is on them to hit the brakes on demand via higher interest rates,” economists at the Dutch bank ING wrote in a research note.

With investors pricing in the FOMC raising rates at each policy meeting for the rest of the year, experts are beginning to consider the Fed’s potential pivot next year. As economic slowdown fears intensify, economists believe the institution will begin easing monetary policy, beginning with a rate cut in the summer of 2023.

“Moreover, interest rates don’t stay high for long in the U.S.,” the bank stated. “Over the past 50 years, the average period of time between the last Fed rate hike in a cycle and the first rate cut has only been six months. This suggests the door could be open to rate cuts as soon as next summer.”

In a recent note to clients, Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West, thinks the Fed’s tightening campaign “will remain on auto-pilot” until the labor market weakens.

Is the Fed Beating Inflation?

A chorus of economists and strategists say inflation is showing signs of peaking, alluding to the sharp drop in energy prices. But while inflation could finally start to ease, it’s unlikely to reach the Fed’s target of 2 to 3 percent anytime soon, according to Jeff Klingelhofer, co-head of investment and portfolio manager at Thornburg Investment Management.

“Inflation continues to smolder, and the Fed is throwing as much cold water on it as they can to limit further economic damage,” Klingelhofer wrote in a note. “When inflation finally tumbles, it’s unlikely to fall to 2–3%. To the Fed’s chagrin, it will land in the 5–6% range.”

Economist Mohamed El-Erian recently wrote on Twitter that food and energy prices will come down over the next three months, “but now that the drivers of inflation have been allowed to broaden, core [inflation] is likely to remain stubbornly high.”

Robert Johnson, chairman and CEO at Economic Index Associates, thinks that the Fed is beginning to tamp down rampant price inflation, as well as inflation expectations.

The University of Michigan’s one-year consumer inflation expectations dipped to 5.2 percent, while the five-year outlook eased to 2.8 percent.

“This Fed is very data-driven, so if we see significant signs of inflation weakening, the Fed would likely pause rate hikes and even consider easing rates. In fact, if you look out over a longer-term period, the market is expecting that interest-rate hikes will pause and could even decline,” Johnson told The Epoch Times.

A Looming Recession

More economists believe the Fed’s inflation-busting initiative will manufacture a recession, a new poll found.

CNBC’s Fed survey revealed that 63 percent of economists, fund managers, and analysts think the central bank’s tightening efforts will trigger a recession, with 55 percent expecting a downturn in the next 12 months.

The survey found that fewer experts have confidence that Powell can navigate a soft landing.

“A path to a soft landing certainly exists, but it’s narrow, hidden, and very hard to find,″ Roberto Perli, head of global policy research at Piper Sandler, wrote in the survey. “In fact, some indicators suggest the U.S. economy may either already be in recession, or close to it.”

Jack Bouroudjian, chairman of Global Smart Commodity Group, thinks that the market is penciling in a recession based on the inversion of the yield curve (2- and 10-year). The spread has expanded to about minus 25 basis points.

“Surveys tell us that the economy is slowing down in all regions. The rate velocity of rate hikes to curb inflation has also cooled the housing market across the country,” Bouroudjian told The Epoch Times, noting that the employment picture remains strong.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis will publish the second-quarter gross domestic product numbers on July 28. The market consensus is a growth rate of 0.5 percent, up from the minus 1.6 percent headline reading in the previous quarter.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Biden administration is being slammed for attempting to change the definition of an economic recession, just ahead of the upcoming second-quarter GDP data that are expected to show contraction.

An economy is usually considered to be in a recession if it registers two consecutive quarters of GDP declines. A July 21 White House statement insisted that this “is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.” In an interview with Fox News, Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, called out the White House attempt to change the definition of a recession as “ridiculous.”

“They have to say ridiculous things like that, even have an argument with a dictionary… Sitting around the table with Biden are all the interest groups in the modern Democratic Party,” Norquist said, pointing to “big city political machines,” labor unions, and environmental activists as the “interest groups.”

He also blamed progressive ideologues for having policy agendas that are “disassociated from reality.”

The White House statement argues that recession is to be defined based on a “holistic look” at the data, including such factors as incomes, business spending, consumer spending, and the labor market. Based on these data, “it is unlikely” that a second-quarter economic contraction following the first-quarter decline indicates a recession, the White House said.

U.S. GDP already contracted in the first quarter, with the Atlanta Fed expecting second-quarter GDP to contract once more. The second-quarter GDP data are due on July 28.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House.

Norquist also raised concerns about the plan by 15 states to hand out inflation relief checks to citizens as a way to combat the financial pressure of rising prices.

Pointing to 10 states run by Republican governors that are aiming to phase their income taxes to zero, he said that sending a check is “just spending” and “not a tax cut.”

US Recession

A Reuters poll of economists, conducted between July 14 and 20, found that median predictions point to a 40 percent probability of a recession in the United States in the coming year, with a 50 percent chance of it happening within two years.

This is a big jump from the 25 percent probability this year and 40 percent within two years as reported in June. More than 90 percent said that any recession would be mild or very mild. Four respondents expect the recession to be severe.

In a July 22 tweet, Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, warned that the American economy is contracting at a rate “not seen since the global financial crisis in 2009.”

It is not just the United States that is at risk of recession but the entire global economy. In an interview with Reuters, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said that the agency will soon downgrade its 2022 global economic growth forecast for the third time this year.

“The outlook since our last update in April has darkened significantly,” she said. “We are in very choppy waters … The risk [of recession] has gone up. So, we cannot rule it out … It’s going to be a tough ’22, but maybe even a tougher 2023.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A U.S. senator is asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to clear up conflicting statements on whether a specific method of COVID-19 vaccine safety research is being conducted.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) asked CDC Director Rochelle Walensky for details after The Epoch Times reported that Dr. John Su, a CDC doctor, claimed that the CDC has been performing Proportional Reporting Ratio analyses on data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System since February 2021.

That conflicted with the CDC telling the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense that it not only did not conduct the analyses but that the method “is outside of th[e] agency’s purview.”

“CDC’s assertion and Dr. Su’s statement cannot both be true,” Johnson told Walensky in a new letter, released on July 26 and dated July 25.

“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,” Johnson wrote.

He asked for Walensky to immediately respond to a letter he sent before requesting information on the CDC’s vaccine safety research. He also requested she confirm whether Dr. Su’s statement is true and if it is, why the CDC claimed it had not conducted the analyses.

And if Dr. Su’s statement is accurate, Johnson wants all of the Proportional Reporting Ratio analyses that the CDC has performed since February 2021.

Finally, Johnson asked for Dr. Su to be made available for an interview with his office concerning the data examinations.

The CDC and Walensky did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Background

The CDC said in an operating procedures document dated Jan. 29, 2021, that it “will perform” Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR), a type of data mining analysis that compares the counts of adverse event reports following vaccination with one vaccine to those that have been reported after receipt of another vaccine or vaccines.

The same language was included in an updated document released in February.

But in a recent response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Children’s Health Defense, CDC records officer Roger Andoh said he spoke with the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office, which informed him “that no PRRs were conducted by the CDC.”

“Furthermore, data mining is outside of th[e] agency’s purview,” Andoh added.

Dr. Su heads the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office.

A CDC spokesperson defended the agency’s vaccine safety monitoring efforts in an earlier email to The Epoch Times, noting that the agencies detected post-vaccination heart inflammation and blood clotting in the summer of 2021.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A group of Republican lawmakers are demanding an audit of the Biden administration’s $10 billion “COVID-19 Community Corps” program after reports it may be directing cash to partisan liberal political groups and giving left-wing activists access to Americans’ private information. 

(RELATED: Justice Department Diverting Victims’ Settlement Payments to Radical Liberal Activists)

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In a letter to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General Christin Grimm, the senators and representatives “raise concerns over the involvement of highly partisan organizations in the public education campaign, potentially inappropriate direct or indirect funding to these politically-affiliated groups, and possible access these organizations may have to personally identifiable information of Americans.”

The letter was signed by Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), and Representatives Cathy McMorris Rogers (Wash.), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Morgan Griffith (Va.), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and Brett Guthrie (Ky.), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health.

“It is incredible that HHS and the Biden administration would partner with partisan political organizations and Democrat-affiliated campaign consultants on a $10 billion taxpayer funded vaccine confidence public education campaign, ostensibly intended to appeal to all Americans. It is not clear from publicly available information exactly what these groups do and what benefits they may derive from being a ‘founding member’ of the COVID-19 Community Corps,” the members write.

“First, we are concerned that some of these ‘founding members’ may inappropriately receive direct or indirect funding and support from HHS for partisan activities,” the members continue. “Second, HHS’s agencies contain or have access to vast amounts of personally identifiable information on hundreds of millions of Americans.”

Among those listed as members of the COVID-19 Community Corps are:

• “Nurses for Biden Harris,” a reelect Biden organization
• Planned Parenthood
• “Protect Our Care,” which lobbies and campaigns for socialized medicine
• “Never Trump” TV figure Ana Navarro
• “Latinx” political campaign organizations like “Voto Latino”
• Americans United for the Separation of Church of State
• “Blue Future,” which trains Democrat candidates
• Democracy Partners, a Democrat political campaign firm

The groups would be showered in billions of dollars in barely-tracked cash during a do-or-die election year for Biden.

The members demand Grimm investigate the program and provide a full accounting of its spending.

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, Congress has passed five bipartisan COVID-19 relief bills totaling $3.496 trillion,” write the members. “Recently, it has been reported that the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats are pursuing yet another partisan spending bill, despite record levels of inflation and billions of unspent dollars in COVID-19 relief funds. To date, the Biden administration’s accounting of how it spent trillions of dollars in past COVID-19 relief funding has been inadequate.”

The members continue, “As part of Congress’s effort to understand exactly how the Biden administration spent COVID-19 relief money, we request an audit of a $10 billion COVID-19 vaccine public education campaign launched by the Biden administration and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).”

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

READ NEXT: CDC Spied on 20 Million Cell Phones in National COVID Surveillance Program >>

Amir Handjani in hot water over his role as top adviser to repressive Gulf monarch

A federal court has ordered a Quincy Institute fellow and Atlantic Council donor to turn over records relating to his potential role in an alleged hack-and-leak operation that targeted an American businessman.

Amir Handjani, a vocal media advocate for the Iran nuclear deal, has been ordered to produce documents and communications related to the alleged hacking victim, Farhad Azima, as well as documents related to entities involved in the attack, including Ras al-Khaimah, a kingdom in the United Arab Emirates. Handjani served as a top adviser to the kingdom’s authoritarian ruler, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al Qasimi.

The order, issued on July 15 by a U.S. Southern District of New York judge, could bring to light new details about the alleged international spy-for-hire plot, which the lawsuit claims was carried out on behalf of Handjani’s boss.

The ruling comes three years after a lawyer for Ras al-Khaimah’s investment fund, Dechert’s Andrew Levander, threatened to sue the Washington Free Beacon for defamation over its coverage of Handjani’s role as an adviser to the kingdom’s ruler. A British judge in May found “shocking” malpractice at the firm as part of an unrelated case.

Handjani has been fighting requests to produce his records for over a year as part of a lawsuit brought against him by Azima, who is seeking the records for a counterclaim in an ongoing British civil case.

In court filings, Azima claims that private hackers working for Ras al-Khaimah in 2016 illegally obtained his emails and other records and leaked them to the public. He alleges that Handjani and the law firm Dechert, which served as advisers to Ras al-Khaimah, helped oversee the operation.

Handjani has denied any involvement in the hacking. But court records show he was included on email correspondence with other kingdom advisers about targeting Azima and discussions about the hacked documents.

A British private investigator hired by Ras al-Khaimah told the court earlier this year that Handjani personally “instructed” him to investigate a Jordanian businessman who in 2020 accused the kingdom of kidnapping and torture. The private eye said he later enlisted an Israeli hacker to handle the case.

Handjani is still listed as a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute, a non-interventionist think tank staffed by Iranian regime supporters and anti-Israel activists. The Atlantic Council said Handjani left the group’s board last year. His last disclosed contribution to the think tank was between $50,000 and $99,999 in 2020.

Update July 27, 2022 3:11 p.m.: A previous version of this article stated that Handjani remains a donor to the Atlantic Council. Handjani is no longer a donor to the organization.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

‘My greatest fears came true,’ local Democrat said of congressional hopeful Greg Landsman’s taxpayer-funded program

On the campaign trail, Ohio Democrat Greg Landsman touts a taxpayer-funded program he spearheaded to raise preschool teachers’ pay. A year into that program’s existence, however, teacher wages lagged behind as executives raked in six-figure salaries.

Landsman in May boasted that he “led the charge to pass the Cincinnati Preschool Promise,” a program that raised property taxes in part to “create better-paying jobs for preschool teachers.” But one year into that program, participating teachers were not making the $15 an hour that Landsman and other Preschool Promise organizers advertised—even as three of the program’s executives raked in six-figure, taxpayer-funded salaries, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported in 2017. 

Despite the program’s early shortcomings, Landsman is using his former role as a Preschool Promise “strategic adviser” to propel a run for Congress, arguing that his work on the program proves he’ll “never stop fighting for our children.” But not everyone is convinced. Buckeye Institute research fellow Greg Lawson told the Washington Free Beacon that while competitive executive pay is important, voters are justified in questioning an organization that fails to prioritize its “frontline workers.”

“This is one of the concerns we always have when we’re talking about new programs. … You want to limit those kinds of administrative costs,” Lawson said. “Perception matters. It’s going to be hard to justify spending more money if people are going to look back and say, ‘Well, why did you spend this over here?'”

Landsman’s campaign did not return a request for comment. Preschool Promise defended its decision to prioritize executive salaries—a board member in 2017 told the Enquirer that the lucrative wages were “needed to attract quality employees” and that the program did not have the funds to “responsibly” pay teachers $15 an hour. The explanation did not suffice for Democratic city council candidate Michelle Dillingham, who voted for the program and now works as an organizer for the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers.

“We are not where we’d like to be a year into this. My greatest fears came true,” Dillingham said one year after voters approved the tax hike required to create Preschool Promise in November 2016. “You can’t pay their workers 15 bucks an hour? That’s offensive to me. We were promised a living wage.”

Following his work as a Preschool Promise adviser, Landsman joined the Cincinnati city council in January 2018. He went on to support a number of controversial proposals. As homicides reached an unprecedented high in Cincinnati in the summer of 2020, for example, Landsman penned a motion to pull $200,000 from the city’s police budget, a proposal that a local NBC affiliate described as “basically the definition of defunding.” Around the same time, the Democrat signed onto another motion that endorsed ending cash bail, a policy he said he supported because George Floyd’s death “changed something” in him.

Landsman is running for Congress after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recruited him to challenge Rep. Steve Chabot (R.) in Ohio’s First Congressional District. He did not face an opponent in the state’s May primary and will square off against Chabot, who is a top target for Democrats as they look to retain control of the House, in November. Chabot has a slight financial advantage in the race—he’s raised $1.3 million to Landsman’s $1.1 million.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

‘This Book Is Antiracist’ is key element of curriculum at Lower Manhattan Community Middle School

A New York City public school encouraged students as young as 10 years old to keep a list of all the “microaggressions” they witnessed, both at school and in their own families, according to materials from the school’s curriculum reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The same students were also asked to list their gender identity—”cisgender,” “nonbinary,” or “trans”—as well as their sexual orientation on a graded worksheet.

The sixth-grade humanities curriculum from Lower Manhattan Community Middle School, where just 31 percent of students are white, required students to read Tiffany Jewell’s This Book Is Anti-Racist, one of only five books assigned for the 2021-2022 year. The book contains 20 lessons on “how to wake up, take action, and do the work”—including the work of confronting the police, which Jewell suggests white students can do without ending up “in jail or harmed.”

“If you are a Black, Brown, or Indigenous Person of the Global Majority, you will need to decide how each outcome could end for you,” Jewell writes in a chapter called “Choosing My Path.” “White people, this is not something you need to do because you are at the center of the system.”

From Tiffany Jewell’s ‘This Book Is Anti-Racist’

The book also asks students to surveil their friends and family for racist behavior. “Grab your notebook,” one “activity” instructs readers. “Look and listen for the microaggressions around you. Write them down and note your observations.” Another activity asks students how “folx” in their families “resisted” or “contributed to racism,” defined as the “systemic misuse and abuse of power by institutions.”

The curriculum, which went into effect August 2021, came as parents across New York City were mobilizing against critical race theory in public schools—and as education officials across the country were denying that there was any such thing.

“Critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, asserted in July 2021. Parents “are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”

One month earlier, New York Regents chancellor Lester Young stated that critical race theory “is not our theory of action” and assured parents that “we are not preparing young people to be activists.”

Jewell’s book belies that assurance. “We will work together, in solidarity, to disrupt racism and become anti-racist accomplices,” the preface reads. “There are many moments to pause in this book so you can check in with yourself and grow into your activism.”

The curriculum could spell legal trouble for the school, which is already under investigation for separating seventh and eight-graders into racial affinity groups. That practice prompted a civil rights complaint in December from the watchdog group Parents Defending Education; on July 13, the Department of Education announced it would investigate the middle school over the complaint.

“It’s astonishing that administrators at Lower Manhattan Community seem determined to create a racially hostile educational environment on top of the civil rights investigation that was just opened,” said Nicole Neily, the president of Parents Defending Education. “Parents who were once proud of the school’s academic performance compared to other New York City public schools are now concerned—justifiably so—about the school’s increasing fixation on race.”

Those concerns come amid steep enrollment declines—and budget cuts—in New York City’s public schools. With enrollment down 8 percent since 2020, schools have lost $215 million in funding this year alone, forcing widespread layoffs and larger class sizes.

Divisive curricula like the one at Lower Manhattan Community School have exacerbated that exodus. One parent told the Free Beacon that their child would not be returning to the middle school this fall on account of an assignment that required sixth-graders to disclose their “social identities”—including their sexual orientation—on a worksheet. Though students did not have to “write something for every category,” instructors collected the worksheet for a grade.

Such lessons aren’t the product of a few school administrators run amok but reflect the race-conscious worldview of the New York City Department of Education. In June 2020, then-executive superintendent of Manhattan public schools Marisol Rosales hosted a panel on dismantling “systemic racism in our schools,” which held up Lower Manhattan Community School’s “mission statement on race” as a model for the entire school system.

“To undo the legacy of racism and oppression in this country that impacts our school community,” the mission statement reads, Lower Manhattan Community Schools works to instill “anti-racist beliefs and practices.”

The school’s sixth-grade humanities curriculum is a microcosm of what that education looks like in practice. Three of its five units concern “identity,” with Jewell’s book listed as a “key text” for unit one. The “social identities” worksheet was part of a broader lesson on “the dominant culture,” which consists of “people who are white, middle class, Christian and cisgender.”

Whoever does not fit into this “box,” Jewell writes, is “part of what’s called the ‘subordinate culture.’” Her description of that culture is exhaustive, albeit studded with solecisms: “Folx included in the ‘subordinate culture,’ include Black, Brown, indegenous People of Color of the Global Majority, queer, transgender, and nonbinary folx, and cisgender women, youth, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, and non-Christian folx, neurodiverse folx, folx living with disabilities, those living in poverty, and more.”

“The people who want to talk about racism all the time are the racists,” said Maud Maron, who served as an elected representative for parents in the district where Lower Manhattan Community School is located. “The people who suffer are the kids who get cheated out of a wholesome school experience and hours of learning that should be focused on academics instead of race indoctrination.”

Lower Manhattan Community School did not respond to a request for comment.

The focus on race extended to the seventh-grade social studies curriculum—ostensibly devoted to early American history—which used “anti-racist” guru Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning as its main textbook, according to a syllabus for the 2021-2022 school year reviewed by the Free Beacon.

These curricula do not seem to have soothed racial tensions at Lower Manhattan Community School, which is 41 percent Asian, 15 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent black.

A group of parents and administrators in April began planning a “restorative justice circle” to address alleged incidents of racism that had taken place over the school year, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon. The incidents included a black student calling a South Asian student “Indian Boy,” an Asian student touching a black student’s hair, and a “rumor” that a white student “used the N-word.”

The school eventually canceled the circle after a parent objected that it would “violate students’ privacy” and “possibly put current students at risk”—and after parents started to litigate the incidents over email, replicating the racial catfighting that had consumed the classroom.

One parent questioned the wisdom of discussing the transgressions of Asian students at a time when anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise. It didn’t go over well.

“African Americans have been facing race-based violence for 500 years in this country, and still face it every day,” another parent responded. “So I’d ask you to please be sensitive to that fact during discussions and emails with our group.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Former Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser, retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, said he would back former President Donald Trump in a hypothetical 2024 matchup with his former boss.

“Sometimes, you have to pick the lane you’re gonna run with,” Kellogg told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday when asked about a possible contest between Trump and Pence. “I’ve always been a Trump guy.”

Of the relationship between Trump and Pence, “We tried to bring him in tight,” Kellogg said in reference to Pence. “It’s not because we haven’t reached out to him.” Pence advisers “like Marc Short,” Kellogg added in the interview, “have pulled away from the Trump team,” referring to the former vice president’s chief of staff.

Neither Pence nor Trump have declared their candidacies for president. While Trump has strongly suggested that he might run again, there is growing speculation about a Pence 2024 candidacy as he continues to deliver speeches, including one to a conference of young conservatives in Washington on Tuesday.

“If I was putting money in Las Vegas down on the table as to whether he is going to run or not, I think he is running,” Kellogg said of Trump, “but I don’t know.” The retired general said he spoke with the former president several weeks ago.

Dual Speeches

Trump also returned to Washington to speak for the first time in more than a year, telling a crowd that the United States needs to place more emphasis on public safety amid rising crime, drug use, and homelessness.

Americans “don’t have safety” and “don’t have freedom” right now, Trump said during a speech at the America First Policy Institute’s America First Agenda Summit on Tuesday.

“Our country is now a cesspool of crime,” the former commander-in-chief said. “We have blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable because of the Democrat Party’s effort to destroy and dismantle law enforcement.”

Trump added: “We’re living in such a different country for one primary reason … there is no longer respect for the law and there certainly is no order.”

Pence, meanwhile, told an audience on Tuesday that conservatives should look toward the future.

“In order to win, conservatives need to do more than criticize and complain,” Pence said. “We must unite our movement behind a bold, optimistic agenda that offers a clear and compelling choice to the American people.”

During the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump issued a rare critical comment about Pence for taking part in the congressional certification of the 2020 election.

Trump wrote on his now-deleted Twitter account that the former vice president—before the breach of the Capitol—did not “do what should have been done to protect” the United States and Constitution.

The Epoch Times has contacted Pence’s Advancing American Freedom PAC for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Jill Biden’s longtime press secretary Michael LaRosa is leaving the White House, he confirmed Tuesday.

“For a kid from Easton, Pennsylvania, who only ever dreamed of stepping foot into this history-rich residence for a tour, working for First Lady Jill Biden in the White House has been the proudest and most rewarding experience of my life,” LaRosa said in a statement to The Washington Post about his departure. His last day is Friday.

LaRosa, a former MSNBC producer, joined Joe Biden’s campaign in 2019 as Jill Biden’s spokesman before he was named press secretary to the first lady in January of last year.

“I am forever grateful to her for taking a chance on me nearly three years ago, bringing me on this journey with her around the country, and the privilege of being a small part of the history,” he added to the paper.

Reports say LaRosa is planning to join Hamilton Place Strategies, a Washington-based public affairs company. It’s not clear who will be named to replace him as the first lady’s spokesperson.

“For nearly three years, from the campaign to the White House, Michael has brought an encyclopedic knowledge of politics and media to my team as my spokesperson and adviser,” Jill Biden told CNN. “On a small team, loyalty and friendship are lifelong—we will miss Michael. However, we are excited for him to begin a new chapter in his career.”

Other Departures

In recent months, the White House has seen a number of top communications officials leave. Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki left earlier this year before she was replaced by current press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s chief spokesperson Symone Sanders left her position in late 2021. And later, top Harris aides Tina Flournoy, Ashley Etienne, and Vincent Evans quickly followed Sanders.

Earlier in July, it was confirmed that White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield would be stepping down from her position. In confirming her exit, White House chief of staff Ron Klan said that Bedingfield “played a huge role” at the White House but will now “spend more time with her husband and young children.”

Before that, Cedric Richmond, a former congressman from Louisiana, had led Biden’s Office of Public Engagement but recently departed to work with the Democratic National Committee. Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms replaced him in the administration.

LaRosa’s departure comes several weeks after Jill Biden drew controversy for comparing Hispanic voters to breakfast tacos and mispronouncing the word bodega at an event in San Antonio, Texas. LaRosa later apologized on her behalf.

“The First Lady apologizes that her words conveyed anything but pure admiration and love for the Latino community,” he wrote on Twitter on July 12.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

BUT REMEMBER: IT’S ALL A “CONSPIRACY THEORY,” ACCORDING TO THE BIG PHARMA SALESPEOPLE LIKE FAUCI.

Nearly half of women receiving a COVID-19 vaccine reported heavier menstrual bleeding, according to new research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The figures come from a survey of over 35,000 women who were fully vaccinated, with the majority of the cohort receiving a Pfizer jab followed by Moderna.

“In this sample, 42% of people with regular menstrual cycles bled more heavily than usual, while 44% reported no change after being vaccinated,” summarized researchers, which counted funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the study.

“Respondents reported noticing changes to their period 1 to 7 days after vaccines (dose 1: 31.4%; dose 2: 37.0%), 8 to 14 days after vaccines (dose 1: 25.9%; dose 2: 23.6%), or more than 14 days after receiving their vaccines (dose 1: 29.9%; dose 2: 26.8%), with the rest of respondents reporting that they were menstruating when they received the vaccine (dose 1: 12.7%; dose 2: 12.5%),” explained the study.

In sum, 42.1 percent of women reported experiencing a heavier menstrual flow after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, 14.3 percent reported a mix of lighter or no change, and 43.6 percent reported no change in flow.

The new study, “Investigating Trends in Those who Experience Menstrual Bleeding Changes After SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination,” was published in the journal Science Advances. Another study funded by the NIH found that COVID-19 vaccines had the potential to lengthen women’s menstrual cycles, as well.

The side effects of the “vaccines” – which have been dismissed by mainstream media outlets and social media fact-checkers as untrue – follows lobbying efforts on behalf of pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna reaching record-high levels of spending and overall personnel hired. The massive lobbying campaigns are likely responsible for nationwide vaccine mandates, which have subsequently been struck down by district courts.

MUST READ: Bill Gates-Funded Lab, Less Than 2 Miles From Wuhan Institute, Reports Cholera Case.

Similarly, posing another conflict of interest, the chairman and former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Thomson Reuters Foundation – James C. Smith – is a top investor and board member for pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer.

At the time of publication, Reuters has not covered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study.

The outlet, however, has run stories titled “Vaccines not linked to menstrual changes; COVID, flu shots can go together” and “No link found between menstrual changes and COVID vaccines.”

The study also follows researchers concluding that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine resulted in a sustained loss in sperm count and could pose a risk to heart health, especially among young men, despite mockery by mainstream media outlets over the concerns.

House lawmakers will be offered up to $10,000 to strengthen their home security amid increasing threats of violence against lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

The stipend, announced by House Sergeant-at-Arms William Walker, would offer to cover up to $10,000 worth of expenses for upgrading home security systems, cameras and video recorders, locks, and motion sensors at the homes of lawmakers.

In addition to the stipend, Walker announced that the program, set to begin on Aug. 15, would furnish up to $150 per month to helping lawmakers pay fees and maintain the new equipment.

“The Sergeant at Arms (SAA) will assume the cost of and oversee certain future residential security upgrades, maintenance, and monthly monitoring fees. This program will strengthen the security of Members of the House of Representatives and their families,” Walker wrote in a letter to lawmakers announcing the stipend.

Increasing Threats

The move comes as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle face increasing threats. In recent months, members of the controversial Jan. 6 Committee have been increasingly targeted, leading many to strengthen their security details on their own dime.

However, lawmakers who do not plan to seek reelection or who do not win their congressional race in November will not be eligible for the program. This means that several members on the Jan. 6 Committee, including Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who have both announced that they will not seek reelection, will not be eligible to receive the stipend.

Kinzinger, one of only two Republicans on the Jan. 6 panel, shared images last month showing a threat that he had received, in which the congressman’s wife and son were threatened with death.

“Adam’s activities have not only hurt this country, but countless patriotic and God-fearing families,” the note said. “Therefore, although it might take time, he will be executed. But don’t worry! You and Christian will be joining Adam in hell too!”

Other lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have faced similar threats.

In one instance, an anonymous video was sent to Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.) showing her vehicle being followed. A 9-millimeter handgun is shown in the video, with the perpetrator saying, “I see you. I got something for you.”

In June 2022, another man was charged with “terroristic threats” against Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.). The suspect left a dead rat with a noose around its neck on the congressman’s doorstep, in addition to a brick with one of Reed’s family member’s names scrawled across it.

Threats More Than Doubled: USCP

In May 2021, the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) said in a report that threats against lawmakers had more than doubled that year, and were on track to rise even further.

“The number of threats made against Congress has increased significantly,” the report said. “This year alone, there has been a 107% increase in threats against Members compared to 2020. Provided the unique threat environment we currently live in, the Department is confident the number of cases will continue to increase.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), by contrast, derided the stipend initiative in a July 25 tweet.

“It’s being reported that the House Sergeant at Arms is creating a new residential security program where Members of Congress will receive $10k to secure their residences,” Boebert wrote. “So, can I buy more AR-15s to secure my residence with this?”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Farmers warn new restrictions will affect food production

Canada and Ireland are rolling out policies to force their farmers to cut carbon emissions to a point that the farmers say would affect food production. Despite the potential negative consequences, the policies would seem to only achieve minute results for the “decarbonization” agenda.

Some Canadian provincial officials recently criticized their federal government for setting a goal of cutting emissions from synthetic fertilizer use by 30 percent by 2030 without first consulting the provinces “on what is achievable or attainable.”

“Provinces pushed the federal government to discuss this important topic, but were disappointed to learn that the target is already set,” Saskatchewan and Alberta ministers of agriculture said in a July 22 statement.

“This has been the most expensive crop anyone has put in, following a very difficult year on the prairies,” Alberta Minister of Agriculture Nate Horner said in the release.

“The world is looking for Canada to increase production and be a solution to global food shortages. The Federal government needs to display that they understand this.”

Slashing fertilizer use by 20 percent could cost Canadian farmers more than $48 billion in lost sales due to lower yields by 2030, according to a 2021 study commissioned by Fertilizer Canada, an industry group (pdf).

Synthetic fertilizer use is responsible for less than 2 percent of Canada’s carbon emissions, according to Canadian government data. Canada, in turn, is responsible for about 1.4 percent of global emissions.

Meanwhile, the Canadian fertilizer industry already has a program called 4R Nutrient Stewardship that would, if rolled out across the major farming areas, cut emissions by 15 to 22 percent while also boosting profits by using fertilizers more efficiently. The government’s insistence on the 30 percent figure thus translates to a reduction of about 0.1–0.2 percent of Canada’s 2019 emissions and about 0.002–0.005 percent of world emissions beyond what the industry works to achieve on its own.

Ireland is in a similar situation. Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue is reportedly about to agree to a 27 or 28 percent carbon emission reduction goal for his sector.

Agriculture accounts for more than a third of the country’s carbon-equivalent emissions, notably due to its robust cattle farming that feeds not just its domestic market, but also significant beef and dairy exports.

The Irish government’s climate plan calls for a cut of 22 to 30 percent. At the top end of the range, the plan would cause “significantly reduced production” and potentially “devastate the farming sector in Ireland,” Irish Farmers Association President Tim Cullinan previously said.

Ireland’s agriculture emissions add up to about 21 megatons of CO2 a year. Cutting it by 28 percent would lead to global emissions dropping by 0.05 percent.

Cullinan has questioned what good it would do if other countries don’t follow suit.

“We have to question what it is for,” he said at a November demonstration, The Irish Times reported.

He pointed out that Ireland already runs “one of the most efficient” farming operations in the world.

Regulations that in effect downsize farming have recently prompted large protests in the Netherlands and led to the economic collapse of Sri Lanka.

The last round of carbon emission targets was pledged by governments at the COP26 climate summit last year. Many climate scientists predict that growing emissions will cause more severe weather events, such as storms and droughts, though historically the more catastrophic predictions haven’t materialized.

Critics have pointed out the “decarbonization” agenda would undercut living standards without achieving meaningful change in the climate. For one thing, China, the world’s largest carbon emitter by far, and India don’t intend to constrict their economies toward carbon reductions.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield rejected White House adviser Anthony Fauci’s claims that it’s more likely COVID-19 originated naturally.

In a recent interview, Fauci said he has an “open mind” but still believes that the virus occurred naturally after previously dismissing the theory that it emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in late 2019. “It looks very much like this was a natural occurrence, but you keep an open mind,” Fauci said.

When asked about Fauci’s recent comments on Monday, Redfield told Fox News that he still suspects COVID-19 emerged “from the laboratory” and “had to be educated in the laboratory to gain the efficient human-to-human transmission capability that it has.”

“There’s very little evidence, if you really want to be critical, to support” the natural emergence theory, he said. The former Trump administration official then compared COVID-19 to prior coronaviruses such as Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that emerged about 10 years ago, saying that neither virus had the same transmission capacity as COVID-19.

“So it’s really exceptional that this virus is one of the most infectious viruses for man. And I still argue that’s because it was educated how to infect human tissue,” Redfield told Fox News.

Laboratory

The same Wuhan laboratory, he added, was the subject of a 2014 report amid claims that researchers performed research on bat-borne viruses that could impact humans.

“I’m disappointed in the [National Institutes of Health] for not leading an objective evaluation from the beginning,” Redfield told the outlet. “I think it really is antithetical to the science where they took a very strong position that people like myself who are somehow conspiratorial just because we have a different scientific hypothesis.”

A reason why the Wuhan lab leak theory has not been fully recognized, Redfield argued, is due to the politicization of the pandemic response and the pressure that was heaped on scientists who sought objective approaches while studying the origins of COVID-19.

“I’ve been very disappointed in the scientific community led by [National Institutes of Health] that has really dug their heels in from the beginning to try to minimize any of us that have a different hypothesis,” he said.

Both the NIH and Fauci have come under scrutiny over the agency’s decision to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars to a third-party group to assist in researching bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.

After spending years working at the NIH, Redfield was named by former President Donald Trump to head the CDC in March 2018. He stepped down at the end of Trump’s term in January 2021.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Chinese intelligence has a systematic and well-funded campaign that successfully recruits U.S. Federal Reserve System economists and others to provide sensitive financial information and data in exchange for money and other benefits, according to Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).

“This investigation makes clear that China’s malign efforts at influence and information theft are not limited to science and technology fields. American economic and monetary policy is also being targeted by the Chinese government,” Portman, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC), said in a statement in conjunction with the release of a new report by congressional investigators.

The investigative report Portman made public on July 26 was prepared by the Republican staff of the Senate panel. The document updates a report on Chinese subversion in the United States released in 2019, when Portman was the committee’s chairman.

“As our investigation reveals, the Chinese government is using every tool at its disposal to infiltrate and steal valuable information,” Portman said. “We cannot let the American taxpayer continue to unwittingly fund China’s military and economic rise, which is why our report makes strong recommendations to enhance and protect our Federal Reserve.

“This report shows that we cannot make any American taxpayer-funded investment in science, technology, or economic policy without including safeguarding and security protections like my proposed ‘Safeguarding American Innovation Act.‘”

While Portman’s proposal has 17 co-sponsors, including a dozen Republicans and five Democrats, the Democratic-controlled HSGAC hasn’t held a hearing or otherwise moved to consider the proposal. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) succeeded Portman as committee chairman in 2021.

“This investigation of the U.S. Federal Reserve shows how China has used a variety of tactics to recruit U.S.-based economists to provide China with knowledge and intellectual capital in exchange for monetary gain and other benefits,” the report says.

The report says Fed investigators have identified at least 13 individuals within the financial system who represent “stark examples of the ways in which the Chinese government has attempted to gain access to sensitive internal information and influence the Federal Reserve.”

The investigators, according to the report, dubbed the 13 individuals as the “P-Network,” and noted they work in eight of the central bank’s 12 regional banks.

“One Federal Reserve Bank employee with sensitive access to Federal Reserve Board data provided modeling code to a Chinese university with ties to the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). Another Federal Reserve Bank employee attempted to transfer large volumes of data from the Federal Reserve to an external on at least two occasions,” the report says.

Another Fed employee was forcibly detained while in China on four occasions, and he and his family members were threatened with imprisonment if he didn’t cooperate, the report says.

Yet another Federal Reserve employee, when confronted by investigators with concerns about his activities with Chinese individuals and programs, changed his email addresses and began using an encrypted communication channel, according to the report.

Investigators even found a Fed employee who regularly communicates with officials within China’s Xinhua News Agency, which is notorious for being a tool of the Beijing regime’s international spying efforts.

In addition, the report found that a number of Federal Reserve employees have maintained close ties for years to Chinese academic organizations known to be affiliated with China’s Thousand Talents Program, which is central to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) subversion campaign aimed at the United States and other Western nations.

Investigators also found that another employee working for a Fed bank “had been searching for articles relating to individuals who had been arrested for economic espionage and lying about providing intelligence agents with confidential information in exchange for financial compensation,” the report says. The individual used “xijinping” as a password.

The report says the situation is complicated by the Federal Reserve’s lack of sufficient counter-intelligence resources to deal effectively with the Chinese attack.

“Despite the long-running and brazen acts by Chinese officials and certain Federal Reserve employees, the investigation found the Federal Reserve unable to counter this threat effectively,” the report says. “Compounding this was a lack of internal counter-intelligence competency at the Federal Reserve or sufficient ongoing cooperation with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

After the HSGAC investigation was initiated, Fed officials implemented a new requirement barring employees from accepting any compensation from any country of concern, including China, according to the report.

But there are still serious gaps in the Federal Reserve’s defenses, with a result that China still has “an open avenue to disrupt the integrity of the American financial system and jeopardizing American national security,” the report says.

Despite having an internal program to protect the security of data used in the Federal Reserve’s most significant financial decision making, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) that sets economic policies, the report says only one of the 13 individuals identified as having links to or being influenced by the Chinese subversion effort has had data access withdrawn.

The remaining 12 Federal Reserve employees, including those suspected of sharing sensitive data, are still able to access FOMC information.

“I am concerned by the threat to the Fed and hope our investigation, which is based on the Fed’s own documents and corresponds with assessments and recommendations made by the FBI, wakes the Fed up to the broad threat from China to our monetary policy. The risk is clear, I urge the FBI and the Fed to do more to counter this threat from one of our foremost foreign adversaries,” Portman told a group of journalists given an advance briefing on the report on July 25.

Portman is retiring from the Senate at the end of his current term in January 2023.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) alleged on July 25 that there were “systemic and existential problems” within the Justice Department and the FBI, after “highly credible” whistleblowers informed his office that officials from the bureau labeled evidence against Hunter Biden as disinformation.

“The allegations provided to my office appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation,” Grassley wrote in a letter (pdf) to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Grassley, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the “volume and consistency” of the whistleblowers’ allegations “substantiate their credibility.”

The latest revelation is part of Grassley’s ongoing effort to probe into Hunter Biden’s business activities. In September 2020, he and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) released a report, discovering that there was “potential criminal activity relating to transactions among and between Hunter Biden, his family, and his associates with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, and Chinese nationals,” while Joe Biden was vice president during the Obama administration.

In March, the two senators presented bank records on the Senate floor showing CEFC China Energy, a now-defunct company, made payments to Hunter Biden. Currently, the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware is investigating Biden for possible tax violations.

Whistleblowers

According to whistleblowers, the FBI came into possession of information about Hunter Biden’s “criminal financial and related activity” in 2020, which prompted FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten to open an assessment in August 2020, according to the letter. An FBI headquarters team subsequently used the assessment to “improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation” and caused the bureau’s investigation on Hunter Biden “to cease.”

A month later, the FBI team placed findings by FBI agents involved in Auten’s assessment in “a restricted access sub-file.” Grassley said the decision was “problematic.”

“[I]t does not allow for proper oversight and opens the door to improper influence,” Grassley explained.

Auten was previously known for being under investigation for failing to properly vet the now-discredited Steele dossier, which contained false and fabricated claims accusing former President Donald Trump of colluding with Russia.

In October 2020, “an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” surfaced, and the reporting was “verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants,” whistleblowers told Grassley. However, the FBI did not pursue the reporting after Timothy Thibault, an assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, shut it down.

“Thibault allegedly ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required by FBI,” the letter said. FBI officials, including Thibault, then tried to “improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future.”

In May, Grassley requested an Inspector General investigation into Thibault, expressing concerns about how the agent had demonstrated “a pattern of active public partisanship,” in violation of his “ethical obligation as an FBI employee.” In his letter (pdf) to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz at that time, Grassley documented Thibault’s left-wing social media posts, including retweeting a post from the anti-Trump political-action committee the Lincoln Project.

In response to Grassley’s letter, Horowitz wrote back (pdf) saying that Thibault may have violated the Hatch Act, and asked the Office of Special Counsel to review the case. The Act, passed in 1939, bans federal government officials from taking in certain political activities.

Request

Grassley said Garland and Wray must take the whistleblower allegations seriously.

“If these allegations are true and accurate, the Justice Department and FBI are—and have been—institutionally corrupted to their very core to the point in which the United States Congress and the American people will have no confidence in the equal application of the law,” Grassley wrote in his letter.

Grassley ended his letter by asking Garland and Wray to turn over records and information relating to the Biden family, Austen, and Thibault before Aug. 8.

The senator requested “all leads” that were either “ordered closed” or denied further review by Thibault.

“All records related to derogatory information on Hunter Biden, James Biden, and their foreign business relationships,” Grassley wrote as one of his requests.

The FBI said it has received the letter but declined to comment further.

Eva Fu contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Under the law, a president can’t order domestic deployment of Guard; local officials must request it

A claim by the vice chair of the House Jan. 6 Select Committee that President Donald Trump didn’t order the use of National Guard troops in the District of Columbia on Jan. 6, 2021, is true because that would have been a violation of the law, former Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel says.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told Fox News’ Bret Baier that Trump “never issued any order to deploy the National Guard to protect the Capitol.”

Patel said that Trump authorized up to 20,000 National Guard troops for use in D.C. or elsewhere on Jan. 6, 2021, but the use of those troops was later rejected by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the U.S. Capitol Police.

Under the law, the president can’t order the deployment of the military for use inside the United States, Patel said. At the time of the Jan. 6, 2021, unrest, Patel was chief of staff for Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller.

“She knows the truth—45 [Trump] authorized the National Guard days before Jan. 6, and Pelosi and Bowser rejected it,” Patel told The Epoch Times. “Cheney knows it’s unconstitutional for any president to ever order the military to deploy domestically. He may only authorize their use, then there must be a request.

Read More

The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary

“By her own quote, she has cleared Trump of the very thing she has accused him of from Day 1—an insurrection,” Patel said. “So, yes, Trump never made that illegal order. He followed the law.”

Authorized 20,000 Guard Troops

As Patel explains in the new EpochTV documentary, “The Real Story of Jan. 6,” Trump authorized as many as 20,000 Guard troops for use on Jan. 6, 2021, during a meeting several days earlier. The offer of troops was rejected by Bowser and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), he said.

Under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the U.S. military can’t be used domestically for enforcing laws or keeping order. Part-time citizen-soldiers can only be used under certain conditions.

“The Supreme Court said two things must happen,” said Patel, the host of “Kash’s Corner” on EpochTV. “One: the President of the United States has to authorize, not order, the use of the National Guard.

“Once that happens, step two has to happen as well before they can be deployed,” he said, “and that is a request from the head of state, the governor, or in this case, Mayor Bowser because it’s Washington, D.C. Or federal law enforcement needs to request the National Guard to be deployed.

“If those two things don’t happen, then any issuance of the National Guard would be literally unconstitutional.”

According to the U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General’s report regarding the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the use of National Guard troops was discussed during a White House meeting on Jan. 3, 2021.

In attendance were Miller, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley, presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Patel.

“The President told Mr. Miller that there would be a large number of protestors on January 6, 2021, and Mr. Miller should ensure sufficient National Guard or soldiers would be there to make sure it was a safe event.”

Patel said at the end of the meeting that Trump brought up Jan. 6, 2021.

“President Trump pivoted and said, basically, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing for security’—I’m paraphrasing here—‘for anything that might happen on Jan. 6?’

“He said, ‘If you need up to 20,000 National Guardsmen and women, not just in Washington, D.C., but anywhere in the country, you have my authorization,’” Patel recalled.

The Defense Department then took the presidential authorization to the U.S. Capitol Police and Bowser.

“Mayor Bowser, in writing, pursuant to her own letter that we released from her, sent to the Department of Defense, declined to issue any more National Guardsmen and women,” Patel said.

The same authorization was taken to the Capitol Police, which declined additional National Guard personnel, Patel said.

Official Jan. 6 Timeline

According to the Capitol Police’s official Jan. 6, 2021, timeline, the Pentagon contacted USCP on Jan. 2, 2021, to “determine whether USCP is considering a request for National Guard soldiers for Jan. 6, 2021, event.”

A day later, Capitol Police Deputy Chief Sean Gallagher responded that “a request for National Guard support is not forthcoming at this time after consultation with COP [chief of police] Sund.”

During a June appearance on the Fox News program “Hannity,” Miller recalled the meeting in which the use of the National Guard was discussed.

“The president said while we’re leaving, ‘Hey, one more thing,’ and we all sat back down and discussed what was going on on Jan. 6th,” Miller said.

“The president was doing just what I expect the commander in chief to do, any commander in chief to do. He was looking at the broad threats against the United States and he brought this up on his own. We did not bring it up.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran who was fatally shot outside the U.S. Capitol Speaker’s Lobby by Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on Jan. 6, 2021, was “murdered … under the color of authority,” a use-of-force expert has concluded after reviewing video footage of the incident.

Just before 2:45 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Babbitt began climbing through a side window leading into the Speaker’s Lobby and was shot in the left anterior shoulder by Byrd. She was pronounced dead a half-hour later at MedStar Washington Hospital Center.

Stan Kephart, who has testified in court more than 350 times as an expert witness on policing issues, reviewed the shooting in the new Epoch TV documentary, “The Real Story of Jan. 6,” which is streaming on Epoch TV.

“My conclusion … based on what I saw and observed in the video clips is that Ashli Babbitt was murdered,” said Kephart, a 42-year veteran of law enforcement and former director of security for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. He has testified on topics that include excessive force, police discipline, officer safety, and crowd control.

“She was shot and killed under color of authority by an officer who violated not only the law but his oath and committed an arrestable offense.”

Kephart said he saw nothing in the video evidence to indicate that Byrd should have felt his life was in danger or that he was at risk of serious harm from the 5-foot-2, 110-pound San Diego woman wrapped in a Trump flag.

“In order for lethal force to be authorized, the officer has to be able to articulate that he or she was in fear of losing his life, was about to be killed, or grievously injured,” Kephart said in the documentary. “There is nothing I saw in that film that would indicate that was possible or probable from what unfolded.”

Byrd’s attorney, Mark Schamel, in a statement to The Epoch Times, called Kephart’s conclusion “unsupported and erroneous” and said the lieutenant was justified in the use of force.

“When Ms. Babbitt entered through the broken window and entered the inner protected area, wearing a backpack and refusing the verbal commands of multiple armed federal officers with weapons drawn, the threat she posed was clear and Lt. Byrd, as the first officer in the final line of defense, was absolutely justified in his use of force.”

Aaron Babbitt, Ashli’s husband, said Kephart reached the same conclusion as other law enforcement experts, including former New York City police commissioners Bernard Kerik and Ray Kelly.

“I loved hearing that from him. He’s obviously well-versed in the use of force,” Babbitt told The Epoch Times, referring to Kephart. “He’s clearly a very smart man who has been in that business for a long time. He should be listened to.”

Babbitt disputed Schamel’s claim that his wife “refused” verbal commands from Byrd or anyone else. He questioned why Byrd was wearing a COVID face covering if he hoped to be heard shouting instructions.

“Witness testimony I’ve read, police included, said they heard no warning,” Babbitt said, adding that if they thought the situation was serious enough for deadly force, “the mask should probably come off your face. Complete disregard for human life and not following the use-of-force continuum.”

Video shot by political activist John “Jayden X” Sullivan through the Speaker’s Lobby windows shows Byrd had his finger on the trigger of his Glock pistol before Babbitt ever appeared in the window. He then removed his finger from the trigger for a short time before advancing on the open window and firing as Babbitt began to lean through.

Babbitt’s killing still hangs like a dark cloud over the events of that day. Questions remain about her death, even after the June release of a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report that concluded there was insufficient evidence that Byrd used excessive force when he shot the unarmed Babbitt as she attempted to climb through the broken window.

Kephart said Byrd should have written a firearms discharge report immediately after the incident. Byrd declined to give a statement to Internal Affairs detectives and was never formally interviewed before eventually being cleared of wrongdoing.

According to the June DOJ report, Byrd agreed to a “voluntary debrief and walk-through of the scene” with his attorney in late January 2021, in which he stated if the “mob of rioters” outside the Speaker’s Lobby gained entry, “it wasn’t going to go well.”

‘I Had No Clue’

In a 2021 interview with Lester Holt on NBC, Byrd said he couldn’t see into the Speaker’s Lobby hallway through the glass, didn’t know if the person climbing into the window was male or female, and couldn’t tell if the person had anything in their hands.

“It’s impossible for me to see what’s on the other side because we had created such a barricade, and it was high enough that the visibility was impossible,” Byrd said. He said he didn’t know there were three Capitol Police officers standing with their backs to the entry doors.

Byrd said police “were essentially trapped” in the lobby, and “there was nowhere to retreat” because entrances were barricaded.

“It sounded like hundreds of people outside of that door,” he said.

Byrd said he repeatedly shouted for people to get back—”I was yelling at the top of my lungs”—but added it was possible that he couldn’t be heard in the hallway.

When Holt asked Byrd if he knew whom he had shot, Byrd replied: “I had no clue. I didn’t even know it was a female until hours way later, sometime later on that night.”

He said he only found out later that Babbitt had no weapon.

“There was no way to know that at that time,” Byrd said. “I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions of—

“I know, based on my training and my policy, what I did was appropriate.”

Kephart said the shooting should have been evaluated using a litmus test from the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor: whether force was ever needed and appropriate in the situation, the extent of the injury, and “whether the force was applied in a good-faith manner to maintain and restore discipline, or maliciously and sadistically.”

The DOJ report on the shooting was released in June by Judicial Watch, which sued the DOJ for Jan. 6, 2021, case records.

“After a thorough review of the facts and circumstances in this case, there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lt. Byrd violated Ms. McEntee’s [sic] civil rights by willfully using more force than was reasonably necessary, or was not acting in self-defense or the defense of others,” the undated 14-page document reads. The report referred to Babbitt by her previous married name. She married Aaron Babbitt in 2019.

Kephart said the standard set by the Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor doesn’t refer to “willfully” using more force than necessary.

“They inserted willfully above knowingly, which is at best contradictory, and worst, disingenuous,” Kephart told The Epoch Times in an email.

Although Byrd refused to give a formal statement to investigators, the DOJ concluded that his apparent belief that Babbitt posed an imminent, potentially deadly threat was “reasonable.”

About five hours after the shooting, Byrd met with Internal Affairs detectives from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, which investigated the shooting on behalf of the U.S. Capitol Police; he said he wanted to consult an attorney first. Byrd never made a formal statement to Internal Affairs investigators.

In his statement to The Epoch Times, Schamel, Byrd’s attorney, said that “actual experts who train federal agents and officers in the use of force have described Lt. Byrd’s conduct as exemplary.”

Investigative Reports

A Metropolitan Police Department Internal Affairs investigator who reviewed video footage from Capitol security cameras from just before Babbitt was shot reported, “Ms. Babbitt does not appear to be carrying anything in her hands,” according to an internal police report released by Judicial Watch.

One U.S. Capitol Police sergeant who was in the Speaker’s Lobby when Babbitt was shot told Internal Affairs investigators at the time of the shooting “there was a lot of screaming” and “I heard somebody screaming, ‘Get back, get back,’” an Internal Affairs report said.

A Capitol Police officer who was in the Speaker’s Lobby with Byrd said before Babbitt appeared in the window, various officers were shouting for the crowd to get back. After Byrd fired his weapon, the officer said, Byrd was “shaky” and “teary-eyed.”

“You know, you can just tell, like, I ain’t gonna say when somebody regrets to do something, when somebody just is just nervous, you know, they’ll rub their head, their [sic] pace back and forth,” the officer told an Internal Affairs agent.

However, one of the three officers stationed on the outside of the Speaker’s Lobby doors, where Ashli Babbitt and other protesters were gathered, told an investigator “he did not recall hearing any verbal commands being given from inside the Speaker’s Lobby,” according to a Jan. 6, 2021, police report.

One of the other two officers stationed outside the doors and facing the angry crowd also was asked if he heard anyone inside the Speaker’s Lobby saying anything.

“No, sir,” he replied. When asked if he considered using his firearm on rioters, he said, “So, you’re accountable for every round in, in your service weapon; obviously, you can’t shoot into an empty crowd. That’s so wrong.”

The third officer stationed at the doors also told investigators he didn’t hear any communications from police inside the Speaker’s Lobby, according to a Jan. 6, 2021, Internal Affairs report.

A Metropolitan Police Department Internal Affairs Division summary from Babbitt’s Jan. 7, 2021, autopsy said the medical examiner determined “the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the left anterior shoulder and the manner of death was ruled a homicide.”

Kephart said he was shocked at a photograph from the House floor earlier on Jan. 6, 2021, showing Byrd with his gun drawn and aimed in the direction of Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) and two other men.

“This man [Byrd] should be directed to submit to a fitness-for-duty examination immediately by his chief of police,” Kephart said. “Based on this photo alone, he is not qualified to possess a firearm. He is clearly demonstrating a conscious disregard for where he is. His firearm should be at a ‘low ready’ position until target acquisition.

“Any qualified firearms instructor would be horrified at this photo in view of what transpired after the picture was taken, where he shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, disregarding officers in the backdrop, and did not advance and assess the shot or provide first aid and take control of the crime scene—all of which he has been taught, trained, and certified to do.”

Nehls has spoken repeatedly of his belief that the shooting was murder. Nehls served as sheriff of Fort Bend County, Texas, from 2012 until 2020.

“The video was quite clear,” Nehls told Newsmax in 2021. “It was murder.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The U.S. economy is declining at a pace not seen since the 2008–09 financial crisis, said Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, citing the latest round of Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) readings.

The headline Flash U.S. PMI Composite Output Index fell into contraction territory at 47.5 in July, from 52.3 a month ago, indicating a significant decline in private sector output. The pace of decline was the fastest since the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020, as both manufacturers and service providers reported weak demand conditions.

The services PMI fell short of the market estimate, with a reading of 47, down from 52.7. That was the biggest decline since May 2020, driven by a decrease in new exports, a drop in job creation, a jump in prices, and business confidence being at its lowest level since September 2020.

The manufacturing PMI eased to a two-year low of 52.3 in July, from 52.7 in June—anything above 50 indicates expansion. The market had penciled in a reading of 52.

This month, production levels were flat, new orders fell, employment growth moderated, and business sentiment plummeted to its lowest level since October 2020. More firms noted that they plan to cut personnel and slash costs.

PMIs are crucial economic indicators since they can suggest a general direction of trends in the manufacturing and service sectors.

“The U.S. #economy is contracting at a rate not seen since the global financial crisis in 2009 (excluding the initial pandemic lockdown), as the flash #PMI covering output of manufacturing and services fell sharply in July,” Williamson posted on Twitter.

Worse to Come?

Williamson noted that multiple forward-looking indicators, including the orders-inventory ratio signal, suggest that “worse is to come for U.S. manufacturing in August.”

“This means the #FOMC is hiking interest rates at a time when the U.S. economy is already showing severe signs of stress & recession risks have risen,” he wrote.

This week, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will be holding its two-day July policy meeting. The market widely expects the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates by 75 basis points for the second consecutive month, although there’s a 20 percent chance of a 100-basis-point increase amid skyrocketing inflation, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.

While some market analysts think that this will help trim headline inflation levels, they also fear that these efforts might facilitate a recession.

“As for next year, we strongly suspect rate cuts will be the key theme,” ING economists wrote in a research note. “By delaying their response to high inflation and now having to move policy faster and deeper into restrictive territory, there is clearly the fear of a recession. At the same time, we think inflation could fall sharply from March next year onwards.”

Speaking in an interview with CNBC, economist Mohamed El-Erian said inflation has likely peaked, but it might be at the expense of the economy.

“I think inflation has peaked in the U.S., at least for the next three to four months. We’ve got to see how sticky some elements are,” he said on July 22. “But the problem is not that inflation is going to come down—that’s a really good thing. The problem is that inflation is going to come down with growth probably going into a recession, and that’s not good news.”

Concerns over an economic downturn have dramatically increased over the past month.

In addition to a higher-than-expected 9.1 percent consumer price index (CPI) in June, a broad array of metrics released this month have indicated a slowing economy

Personal spending eased to a 0.2 percent increase month-over-month, while personal income was unchanged at a 0.5 percent increase. The Institute of Supply Management’s (ISM) Manufacturing PMI fell to 53, construction spending tumbled by 0.1 percent, industrial production fell by 0.2 percent, and manufacturing output dropped by 0.5 percent.

Sentiments and expectations have also deteriorated among companies and consumers.

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) Optimism Index slipped to 89.5 (100 was sentiment in 1986), the IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index in the United States remained at an 11-year low, and the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index tumbled to 98.7 (100 was sentiment in 1985).

Despite the strong June jobs report, there have been signs that the labor market could be growing sluggish.

The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits rose to a nine-month high of 251,000 in the week ending on July 16, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (pdf). The four-week average, which removes week-to-week volatility, has steadily climbed every week since the beginning of April.

Job openings and quits took a breather in May, while job cuts swelled in June.

Is the US in Recession?

In the meantime, all eyes will be on the second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) report to determine if the United States has slipped into a technical recession. The market consensus is a growth rate of 0.4 percent, while the Bloomberg GDP estimate range from 55 economists is between minus 0.6 percent and 1.2 percent. But the Atlanta Fed Bank’s GDPNow model estimate shows minus 1.6 percent in the April-to-June period.

Many organizations have lowered their GDP forecasts for the next few years. S&P Global’s latest projections show zero percent in 2022, minus 0.4 percent in 2023, minus 0.2 percent in 2024, and minus 0.2 percent in 2025. The Conference Board downgraded its second-quarter expectation from 1.9 percent to 0.8 percent. For 2022, the Conference Board anticipates 1.7 percent expansion before slowing to 0.5 percent growth next year.

But until there’s considerable weakness in the labor market, the Fed’s tightening cycle will function on auto-pilot, according to Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West Economics.

“It feels a bit like one of those bad horror movies where the creepy music is already playing, but the character continues to walk into the seemingly abandoned house,” Anderson wrote in a note. “You know this isn’t going to end well though you’re not yet sure what is about to happen.”

According to the Fed’s Summary of Economic Projections that was updated from March, the median unemployment rate forecasts were raised to 3.7 percent in 2022, 3.9 percent in 2023, and 4.1 percent in 2024 (pdf).

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A schism characterized by documents on “grace through separation” has brought forth a lawsuit.

In Florida, 106 churches are suing the United Methodist Church (UMC) because it charged them large amounts of money to leave, according to a recently filed lawsuit.

The National Center for Life and Liberty (NCLL) represents these churches.

The departure price varies from church to church, according to Jonathan Bailie, chief operations and financial officer of the NCLL.

Some congregations must pay more than $1 million, while others must pay less than $100,000, Bailie said. But in previous decades, leaving the UMC was free.

“Churches have been transferring to other denominations, like the Free Methodists, for decades,” he said.

Some of the departing churches owned their buildings before the UMC denomination existed and maintained their buildings without UMC help, the lawsuit states. The denomination still demanded money from these churches.

The churches leaving are conservative, and they’re leaving over procedural and theological issues, Bailie said.

Perhaps the most divisive of these issues has been the biblical view of homosexuality.

Winning and Losing

According to the lawsuit, the case rests on two sections of the UMC’s internal laws.

One law, Section 2548.2, allows any UMC church to transfer to a new denomination without paying the UMC money for the church.

The other bylaw, Section 2553, was added in 2019 in response to potential church departures over positions on sexual morality. It states that the church’s regional conference decides what churches must do to leave the UMC for independence. This provision includes the church’s financial obligations.

“The terms and conditions for that disaffiliation shall be established by the board of trustees of the applicable annual conference,” the church’s book of discipline reads.

The church schism began when the UMC was divided between theological conservatives who believed in traditional marriage and theological liberals who believed in an ever-expanding list of sexual orientations.

In 2019, the UMC’s theological conservatives voted to disallow same-sex weddings and non-heterosexual clergy.

With the win, it appeared that theological conservatives would hold the UMC denomination and that theological liberals would leave, according to Bailie.

The church hastily wrote a law into its discipline that allowed UMC churches to leave the denomination and become independent churches, he said.

“For the most part, it looked like progressive churches would be using that paragraph,” Bailie said.

But the progressives found ways to maneuver around the vote. Some church conferences put openly practicing homosexual pastors in “abeyance.”

This category meant that although their actions violated church law, the church wouldn’t discipline them until the next churchwide conference could vote on whether to change church law.

At least one recently ordained UMC pastor is a drag queen, under the name “Penny Cost.”

Bishops appoint UMC pastors to churches without churches getting a vote. Any UMC congregation could get an openly active homosexual pastor if its bishop put the pastor under abeyance.

“You are assigned a pastor. It’s not just that this person is being ordained. He could be assigned to your church,” Bailie said.

Abeyance was originally meant to last until the church’s first “post-separation general conference” in 2020.

But church authorities postponed the 2020 general conference until 2024, citing COVID-19. This decision would put the first “post-separation general conference” in 2028.

Some conservative factions weren’t willing to wait nearly 10 years.

Dollars and Division

Florida Bishop Ken Carter wrote in a statement that he blames departing theological conservatives for refusing a “gracious exit.”

“An abrupt separation creates significant issues that could damage benefits and pensions for retired pastors and their spouses who devoted their lives to service,” the statement reads.

“From the perspective of the Florida Conference of The United Methodist Church, our doctrinal standards have not changed and will not change, even as we continue on a journey to be a church that serves all people.”

Theological conservatives responded that they attempted compromise for decades before church authorities broke their trust.

“For decades we have been in fervent prayer, sought compromise, and desired negotiation—all to no avail. We have patiently endured, only to see promises, vows, and polity broken to suit those in power,” the suing churches said in a statement.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

As more voters across the country turn toward the Republican Party, retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc is closing the margin of an expected Democratic victory in the New Hampshire Senate race.

In the 2020 Republican Senate primary, Bolduc carried almost 60,000 votes as the runner-up. According to a poll taken in April, only one point separated incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Bolduc, one of 11 candidates for the Republican primary scheduled for Sept. 13.

Bolduc says he’s very concerned about the future of the United States.

“Currently, there is a plan for top-down governance and the abandonment of America’s values and principles,” he told The Epoch Times, describing it as a plan to “undermine” the United States.

Bolduc said “America is weak” at the moment, and there are a variety of issues it must continue to confront if the nation ever wants to recover its strength. These include, but aren’t limited to, abortion, gun control, the southern border, and the economy.

Abortion Violence 

On the issue of abortion in the United States, Bolduc said, “The Supreme Court made the right decision by sending it back to the states.”

Regardless of which side of the issue women find themselves on, he said that “[they] have more control at the state level than they would ever have at the federal level.”

As a pro-life candidate, he considers the narrative that many on the left are pushing to be “very dangerous.”

While resident Joe Biden calls upon “pro-choice senators and a pro-choice House to codify Roe as federal law,” Hassan and colleagues are urging the president to “defend Americans’ rights to abortion” by executive order. In a recent 30-second television ad, she also said she would “fight and never back down” to protect the “personal freedoms” of women seeking an abortion.

Bolduc said the position of Biden and Hassan not only devalues life but has also created a climate for violence by claiming the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional. To that end, Heidi Matzke, executive director of the Alternatives Pregnancy Center in Sacramento, shared at a Senate hearing on July 12 that “pregnancy care centers from coast to coast are being targeted for violent assaults of vandalism and hateful attacks online and in the media.”

For example, “fund abortion; abort God” was recently spray-painted on the Pathways Pregnancy Care Center in Littleton, New Hampshire. Police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

According to Bolduc, violent assaults and vandalism are “just indicative of the divisiveness and the disunity promoted by the left.” These issues are “at the heart of why we have the problems that we have here in this country.”

Gun Control Confusion

Bolduc said the number of shootings across the country is also an indicator of an increasingly disgruntled and violent society.

“That’s not a problem with guns,” he said.

For example, Illinois has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, yet Chicago is one of the deadliest U.S. cities.

“It’s less about gun laws, and more about securing vulnerable areas, allowing police to do their jobs and have a good response, and being able to go after people who are the threat,” Bolduc said.

According to Bolduc, the culture of violence can be attributed to the U.S. justice system, which increasingly releases violent criminals back onto the streets while hamstringing and defunding the police. Support for police and community involvement are important to ensuring crime stays low, according to Bolduc. Rather than allowing divisiveness to creep in, people need to be brought together to solve the problem, he said.

The Southern Border

The ability to provide safer communities across the nation extends beyond the local community, Bolduc said. The southern border of the United States is out of control, as the country is currently failing to control the flow of drugs—particularly opioids such as fentanyl—and illegal weapons across the border.

“The southern border is now the most dangerous border in the world, and it’s essentially wide open under the Biden administration—it’s hurting America,” he said.

Bolduc said it has to be ensured that border patrol has what it needs to protect the country, such as adequate personnel, air and technology assets, a border wall, the enforcement of immigration laws, and more. Without these things, “America has vulnerabilities.”

“No country in the world would mimic what the United States is doing right now on its southern border,” he said, calling the Biden administration’s border policies “a disaster.”

“The sheer insecurity of America is frightening.”

The Economy Crunch

In addition to the security issues of the country, Bolduc said, “We are witnessing the worst economy in our nation’s history in terms of inflation, in terms of energy dependence, in terms of how it’s hurting Americans.”

Inflation has caused Americans to spend an extra $5,000 per year, as the cost of fuel, food, and other basic essentials climb to historic levels, he said.

“And while government spending is out of control,” many Americans “are cutting into their medical costs, cutting into their groceries, and just simply trying to make ends meet,” Bolduc said.

“It’s a dangerous place to be, and it has to change.”

Hassan has referred to her Republican challengers as “a group of really extreme opponents.” She didn’t respond to multiple inquiries from The Epoch Times to share her views on the issues facing the country. White House officials also didn’t respond to a request for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A Republican lawmaker is warning that the National Guard’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate will possibly cripple the military reserve component weeks after Army officials announced that some 60,000 troops won’t be allowed to participate in their duties if they aren’t vaccinated.

“June 30 marked Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s arbitrary deadline for members of the National Guard and Reserves to receive the COVID-19 vaccine despite Congress’ mandate that the Department of Defense establish uniform procedures under which service members can be exempted,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a retired Army Green Beret, wrote for Fox News on July 25, saying that if the mandate is ultimately enforced, the guard “will be crippled” due to a lack of staffing.

“To date, approximately 60,000 National Guard and Reserves remain unvaccinated and the pending decision from the Biden administration could punish the very service members who have been on the front lines of fighting this pandemic.”

Combined with poor recruitment efforts, “woke indoctrination,” and mandates, Waltz said that the U.S. military is “being depleted” in the midst of the Chinese regime’s military buildup and the Russia–Ukraine conflict. At the same time, the United States is soon to enter both its hurricane season, which generally starts in August, and its wildfire season, the congressman said.

“Two things have changed since the mandate was implemented. First, the vaccine has shown to not stop the spread but rather reduce symptoms,” Waltz wrote. “Second, tens of thousands of National Guard and reservists have expressed serious reservations about the emergency development of the vaccine.”

He added that “many of these service members have already been exposed to COVID-19 and last year’s defense bill specifically asks the department to consider whether previous exposures induce sustained antibody protection, which may produce similar levels of immunity as the vaccine.”

Earlier this month, the Army confirmed that 40,000 National Guard and 22,000 reserve soldiers who didn’t get the vaccine will be blocked from their duties.

“Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands,” an Army spokesperson said in a statement.

A study published in JAMA found that at least 22 service members have suffered from serious vaccine-related side effects, including heart inflammation. Few service members, meanwhile, have been given religious exemptions, with only 20 being approved in the Army and six National Guard soldiers having their religious exemptions approved.

Several Republican governors have vowed not to remove Guard members who remain unvaccinated. Last year, the governors of Wyoming, Alaska, Iowa, Mississippi, and Nebraska wrote in a letter to the Pentagon that the troops don’t need to follow federal military policy.

Pentagon officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

President Donald Trump denounced resident Joe Biden over his handling of the inflationary wave hammering American households, telling rally-goers in Arizona that the true rate of inflation is far higher than the official rate of 9.1 percent.

Trump made the remarks at a July 22 rally in Prescott Valley, where he was stumping on behalf of former TV anchor Kari Lake in her bid to become Arizona’s next governor for the upcoming GOP primary election.

During his speech, Trump touted his own record on the economy, including high job creation and low inflation.

‘The Worst Inflation’

Trump told rally-goers that under his tenure, “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world with no inflation,” and added that “Biden created the worst inflation in 47 years.”

February 2017, the first full month of Trump in office, saw the headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge at 2.8 percent in annual terms. While the CPI measure fluctuated during his tenure, the highest it ever reached was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent.

Inflation has climbed steadily under Biden, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on July 24 that inflation in the United States has “probably” peaked, while acknowledging that factors “out of our control,” such as another war or pandemic, could once again cause price growth to accelerate.

‘War on American Energy’

While Trump didn’t go into detail as to the Biden policies that he thinks have sent inflation soaring, he did single out what he called “Biden’s war on American energy.”

Soaring energy prices have been one of the key contributing factors to inflation, accounting for around half of the headline inflation figure, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Since taking office, Biden has signed a number of executive orders targeting the oil industry, such as revoking the Keystone XL pipeline permit, freezing new oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands and waters, and ending fossil fuel subsidies by certain agencies.

The price of gasoline is currently around double what it was when Biden took office, with the president variously blaming a lack of refining capacity, global supply shortfalls set against a sharp post-pandemic rebound in demand, the war in Ukraine, and corporate greed.

In a bid to lower gasoline prices, Biden has ordered the release of crude reserves from the national strategic reserve, called on U.S. refineries to boost output, and pushed OPEC to pump more oil.

In his speech in Arizona, Trump criticized Biden for “begging” other countries to pump more crude oil instead of trying to ramp up domestic oil production.

“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and many other countries for oil,” Trump said.

“Yet we have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country in the world. We are a nation that is consumed by the radical left’s Green New Deal, yet everyone knows that the Green New Deal will lead to our destruction.

“Just two years ago, we were energy-independent. We were even energy-dominant. The United States is now a beggar for energy.”

Inflation ‘Much, Much Higher’

Trump also alleged that the true inflation figure is far higher than is being officially reported.

“We’re at 9.1 percent, but the actual number is much, much higher than that,” Trump said, without citing where he received his data. “And it’s going higher and higher all the time. It’s costing families nearly $6,000 a year, bigger than any tax increase ever proposed.”

While the former president didn’t provide his own estimate for the true rate of inflation, an alternative CPI inflation gauge developed by economist John Williams, calculated according to the same methodology used by the U.S. government in the 1980s, puts the figure at 17.3 percent, a 75-year high.

Trump also said he believes that the country is facing a “much bigger problem than recession,” telling rally-goers that Americans now face a combination of high inflation and slow growth, known as stagflation, and that they should brace for a full-blown depression.

“Where we’re going now could be a very bad place,” he said.

“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Houses in the United States are taking longer to sell as bidding wars have decreased and demand has dipped, according to real estate brokerage firm Redfin.

For the four weeks ending on July 17, the typical home was on the market for 19 days before being sold, one day more than the same period in 2021, Redfin said in a July 21 statement. This is the first time in two years that the median time on the market has registered a year-over-year increase.

Despite fewer homes coming onto the market compared to 2021, the total number of homes on sale had the largest increase since August 2019.

“Buyers, who earlier this year had to race to beat the competition, can now take their time touring homes and perhaps even wait to see if sellers drop the price,” Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather said in the statement. “Still, few homes are being listed, so if your dream house hits the market, you should negotiate hard, now that you have the power to.”

Of the home offers written by Redfin agents in June, 49.9 percent had competing offers. This is the lowest measure since May 2020 and the first time the bidding-war rate has slipped lower than 50 percent since then.

The term “bidding war” refers to competition between real estate buyers.

The decline in bidding wars in June was the fifth straight monthly fall. The 49.9 percent rate was also lower than the rate of 65 percent in June 2021, per a July 20 statement.

According to Jenny Dedrick, a Redfin real estate agent in Minneapolis—where the bidding-war rate fell to 45.7 percent in June from 65 percent in June 2021—home showings have “dramatically decreased.”

Homes that had 20 showings in May are now getting just one showing and sometimes none at all, she said.

Home Price Appreciation

The housing market is also caught up in an affordability crisis as rising home prices make it tougher for people to buy a house. According to the National Association of Realtors, affordability fell to its lowest level in 16 years in May.

Although home price appreciation has softened in recent months, William Yu, an economist at the University of California–Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, told The Epoch Times that he doesn’t expect any drastic fall because of the imbalance in supply and demand.

“We probably won’t see a crash like the ones we saw in 2007, 2008, and 2012. Back then, there was an oversupply,” he said. “This time, there is a shortage of housing supply.”

Yu advised buyers who are waiting for prices to plummet further to not expect too much of a decline.

According to a report released in July by nonprofit Up for Growth, there’s a shortage of 3.8 million homes in the United States, which is twice the deficit compared to 2012.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

NILES, Ohio—Tim Ryan’s old street in east Ohio is a progressive oasis in a working-class town suffering from deindustrialization and the opioid crisis. Rather than the American flags seen on lawns just a few streets over, several of the 3,000-square-foot-plus homes on North Rhodes Avenue sport pride banners.

Carl Mymo, a retired forklift driver who lives just two blocks from where Ryan did, said those living on the conspicuously wealthier avenue in Niles don’t care about the same issues as the rest of the town, such as skyrocketing gas prices. “They can afford it,” Mymo said.

“This is all Democrat, this neighborhood,” said Mymo, a lifelong Democrat until this year when he changed his registration, as he pointed to larger homes in the distance. “I was a Democrat but started voting Republican on everything after Trump. I don’t like Ryan at all no more. I used to like him, but to me he’s just a regular politician now.”

Mymo’s description was familiar to others who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon in Niles, where Ryan lived until 2013. Several residents remarked on the town’s golden years when large corporations such as General Electric employed thousands of people in-town or nearby. Those golden years corresponded with overwhelming Democratic Party support, and are the reason Ryan’s seat was safe for decades.

That’s not the case anymore. Many of those companies are now gone, as are the jobs. One out of four jobs in Trumbull County, where Niles sits, disappeared from 2000 to 2016. And Ryan is gone as well. He moved just north to Howland after purchasing a 4,300-square-foot McMansion with his wife. A real estate listing from before the sale describes the home as “beauty on a private cul-de-sac” with a three-car garage and granite countertops in the kitchen. His new town’s median income is roughly 50 percent higher than Niles, according to U.S. Census data.

Ryan’s campaign did not respond to an interview request.

Ryan’s Senate campaign message for voters in Ohio is simple: He’ll bring factory jobs home from abroad. In a video announcing his candidacy for the Senate seat occupied by the retiring Republican senator Rob Portman, Ryan toured an abandoned factory in Niles.

“China is out-manufacturing us left and right and it’s time we fight back,” Ryan says in another ad. “We’ve got to go all in and it starts by investing in Ohio workers.”

But for many voters living in Niles, that line is getting stale. For 20 years Ryan has served in Congress passing no bills except a handful to rename federal buildings. Few of those factory jobs have come back.

“I don’t think he’s done a lot for the area,” said Sarah Smith, a nurse at a hospital in neighboring Warren. “I don’t think he’s ever had a regular job. When General Motors left, he says he did a lot to try and stop that, but it was too late. He gets on the bandwagon too late.”

That Ryan is jumping on the protectionist bandwagon is a criticism often lobbed by his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance. In June, Ryan wrote a letter to resident Joe Biden demanding he not remove tariffs against China. Almost four years earlier, however, he criticized Trump’s anti-free trade agenda “designed to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy, for minimum gain.”

Now Ryan says he always “agreed with Trump on trade.” His massive $9 million campaign war chest, the majority of which has come from out-of-state donors, has funded ad blitzes across Ohio. Almost every ad features references to China and none to the Democratic Party. (Smith said she found Ryan’s commercials the most annoying thing about his campaign. “China, China, China. Come on.”)

Ryan’s attempts to distance himself from the Democratic Party are most obvious when he revels in the occasional compliment from Fox News. Earlier this month, Ryan released an ad featuring years-old clips from Fox hosts noting his opposition to the far left on such issues as open borders.

Yet Ryan’s strategy of cherry-picking praise from conservatives comes with a tremendous caveat: His voting record. Ryan votes with Biden 100 percent of the time in Congress—exceeding his FiveThirtyEight-predicted voting record by more than 30 points.

Why Ryan behaves in Congress the way he does while pitching himself on the campaign trail as a flexible moderate is a bit of a mystery to the voters in Niles. If it were 1998, or even 2008, such a voting record wouldn’t be a surprise. Trumbull County went blue by 22 points in 2008, and again in 2012.

“Basically Niles voted Democrat no matter who ran. It used to be if you were a Republican, you couldn’t get elected around here no matter what,” said Dave Sherman, who works in IT for a nearby steel company and intends to vote for Vance. “I voted Democrat until my early 50s. My dad was a Democrat, he was a union guy. But I think a lot of people here who aren’t talking are going to vote for J.D., there’s just a loud minority for Ryan.”

Trump carried Trumbull County by more than 6 points in 2016 and more than 10 points in 2020. The county’s recent voting history makes it more red than Ohio as a whole, which favored Trump in 2016 and 2020 by around 8 points.

The effect of Trump on northeast Ohio can’t be overstated. Outside of cities, this Ohio region used to be one of the bluest in the country. Trump was the first Republican to win the neighboring Mahoning County since 1972.

Even Ryan’s supporters in Niles such as Carla Dean, a retired school teacher who knows the Ryans personally, say the area’s politics aren’t what they used to be. Speaking with the Free Beacon on her front lawn, Dean sighed and pointed at her neighbor’s home.

“He’s huge. Trump is huge. [My neighbor] flies the [Trump] flag,” she said. “I don’t even speak politics at all with him because I’m afraid.”

How Vance performs in November without Trump on the ticket will be a test for whether Republicans can hold their gains in the rustbelt. A major asset for Vance is that the only politician with a higher name ID in Niles than Ryan may be Biden. The voters unfamiliar with Vance know one thing: They’re unhappy with the president.

Ryan is acutely aware of this fact. When Biden came to Cleveland earlier this month, where some Trumbull County residents commute to for work, Ryan conveniently scheduled campaign stops in the state hundreds of miles away. A Morning Consult poll recently found Biden’s approval rating 23 points underwater in Ohio.

“I don’t know who I’m gonna be voting for,” said Michelle Yuri, a registered Democrat who works as a packer at the printing company Pubco, when asked about Vance. “I don’t agree with our president, let’s just say that.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Republican senators balk at $250 billion CHIPS Act over China concerns

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) removed an anti-China security measure from a bill that invests billions of dollars in the U.S. technology sector, a move Republicans say would allow China to benefit from the spending bill and could kneecap the legislation.

At issue are provisions written by Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) that bar U.S. companies from manufacturing products in China, such as semiconductors, that were developed using federally funded research. Myriad government and private investigations conclude that the Chinese government routinely steals trade secrets from U.S. companies, government agencies, and universities.

Schumer earlier this month removed Portman’s provisions from the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act, throwing a wrench into the vote for Republicans who were under the impression it would be included and planned to vote for the bill, according to multiple interviews and internal documents viewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The reason Schumer removed Portman’s anti-China provision is unclear. Some say he caved to lobbying efforts from various interest groups and the White House. The Senate last year passed a version of Portman’s measure with bipartisan support, but the House never put it up for a vote.

The removal puts a bipartisan bill that appeared to be headed toward approval in jeopardy. Opponents of the CHIPS Act now include several Republican senators who initially supported the funding for the domestic production of semiconductors. Even if it passes, the lack of meaningful guardrails against the Chinese raise grave questions about whether a bill initially meant to counter China may backfire.

Schumer did not respond to a request for comment.

The CHIPS Act puts a staggering $250 billion for domestic science investment and education, making it the largest domestic industrial investment scheme in U.S. history. But Republicans say the act, prompted by concerns that the United States is losing its technological edge to China on such critical goods as semiconductors, could end up benefiting adversaries.

Senior staffers from six Republican offices in the Senate and House spoke to the Free Beacon on the condition of anonymity to criticize Schumer’s decision. In interviews, several expressed bewilderment at the modification while others said they were misled by Senate leadership.

“Legislators are talking about pouring hundreds of billions into industry subsidies and federal R&D, ostensibly to strengthen American competitiveness and to compete with China,” one Senate staffer told the Free Beacon. “Spending that level of taxpayer dollars without meaningful safeguards to ensure they don’t end up in Beijing’s hands—either through Chinese Communist Party espionage, corporate malfeasance, or inept bureaucrats—would be a colossal mistake.”

Exactly why Portman’s measure was removed is a matter of ongoing debate on Capitol Hill. One office blamed Rep. Frank Lucas (R., Okla.), the ranking member on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Two Republican offices pointed the finger at Senate Republican staff tasked with whipping support for the CHIPS Act for failing to communicate that the provision was removed ahead of a procedural vote earlier this month. Another office said the decision to remove the guardrail provision was entirely Schumer’s and couldn’t be stopped by Republicans.

Guardrail provisions such as the ones in Portman’s bill are unpopular with universities with large research departments, as well as some corporations. Universities object for ideological reasons, namely the belief that their research should be enjoyed by everyone around the world. Universities in the last several weeks have been lobbying Republican members including Lucas particularly hard, Republican sources told the Free Beacon.

“Lucas has been turned by the lefty universities,” the individual said. “Disappointing that he’s going soft on China for them.”

One House Republican source called the idea that a single member in the minority party could tank the provision preposterous, and that the negotiations took place entirely in the Senate. A staffer for Lucas on the House Committee on Science and Technology concurred with that characterization.

“The House was shut out of any negotiations after the Senate ended four-corner discussions and then picked up this legislation on their own,” said Heather Vaughan, communications director for the House Committee on Science and Technology. “If the Senate can’t read their own legislative language ahead of a vote or negotiate effectively with each other, that’s simply not within our control.”

No matter the explanation, the lack of guardrails means several Senate offices that were potential “Yes” votes on the CHIPS Act are working behind the scenes to tank it. Other senators, such as Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), are pushing for new guardrail provisions.

Rubio on July 22 filed legislation that would, among other things, establish a counterintelligence screening process to “certify that anyone receiving funds under the bill has sufficient protections against government threats.” Such guardrails are missing from the CHIPS Act, he said.

“America needs to make things again, especially critical chips and other tech, but we need to do it in a way that benefits our country and our workers,” Rubio said. “Unless we add meaningful safeguards in this package, we should call this for what it is: the China Investment Bill.”

The Senate is expected to hold a final vote this week on the CHIPS Act. Original supporters of domestic semiconductor funding, including Rubio, are expected to vote against it.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Declare Emergency hopes roadblocks will pressure Biden to declare a climate emergency

The climate alarmism group that blocked interstates around Washington, D.C., on Independence Day is planning to shut down city streets to pressure resident Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.

Declare Emergency will organize roadblocks, including a conga line to disrupt traffic, and rallies at national monuments throughout the week of Oct. 1—all to put enough strain on the nation’s capital to push Biden to take executive action on climate change, group leader Donald Zepeda told the Washington Free Beacon. During the “week of arrest,” Declare Emergency aims for up to 100 protesters to be arrested for “nonviolent civil disobedience action.”

“What people are interested in and concerned about is that sacrifice element,” Zepeda said, “so I don’t think we’re going to have actions without arrests.”

Like Declare Emergency, which believes there are fewer than 1,000 days left to avert a climate catastrophe, left-wing activists in the United States and Europe are intensifying their protest strategies. Declare Emergency protesters on July 4 blocked all lanes of Interstate 495 in Montgomery County, Md., for more than an hour, leading to 14 arrests. Italian environmental activists on Friday glued themselves to Botticelli’s Primavera painting in Florence, the latest in a series of stunts involving artwork in European art museums.

The climate group Now or Never, meanwhile, is planning to stop the July 28 Congressional Baseball Game to pressure Democratic lawmakers to pass climate legislation. Seventeen congressional staffers on Monday staged a sit-in in Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D., N.Y.) office to demand he reopen negotiations on climate legislation, which has failed to garner support from Republicans and some Democratic lawmakers.

Biden last week announced several green energy initiatives, including new funding for cooling centers and offshore wind projects in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico, but stopped short of declaring an emergency. Environmental activists are demanding an emergency declaration because it would allow the president to redirect military funding to green-energy construction and end fossil fuel exports, among other measures. Declare Emergency said anything short of these actions are “band-aid solutions” that will result in the deaths of “billions” of people.

“While a step in the right direction, resident Biden’s speech fell short of declaring a climate emergency,” group member Michelle Wehner said in a news release. “The efforts he named for adaptation and a clean energy transition are wholly inadequate to stopping the climate crisis. The result will be billions of people left behind.”

Since assuming office, Biden has taken several actions to reduce U.S. energy production, including bans on oil and natural gas leases on federal land. The president also revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from Canada to the United States. Still, Declare Emergency believes Biden has failed to live up to his campaign promise of prioritizing climate change.

“The Democrats are all about this as the biggest issue of our lifetime, and then they do nothing,” said Paul Severance, a Declare Emergency mobilizer. “That’s soft denial. If we don’t all get in this, and get in this fully, we are not going to survive.”

Declare Emergency has organized several “action periods” in the nation’s capital since Biden’s inauguration, aiming for each protest to gain more attention than the last. Between July 1 and 6, the group blocked roads and rallied at the Lincoln Memorial and the White House. It is preparing for the October protests by mobilizing supporters through biweekly meetings, leaflet distribution, and telephone outreach, according to a meeting recording obtained by the Free Beacon. Zepeda expects the October demonstration to be “better” and “bigger” than July’s.

The Washington Monument and the American Petroleum Institute headquarters are under consideration for rallies in October, Zepeda said. Declare Emergency is willing to do “whatever is nonviolently necessary” to get Biden to “begin a full-scale World War II-like mobilization effort” and stop climate change, according to the group’s website.

“Change needs to come very quickly and we don’t have a lot of time,” Zepeda said. “We need to really front load a lot of the changes so that way, we save as many lives as we can.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Anti-Republican super PAC the Lincoln Project congratulated resident Joe Biden for creating “one of the strongest economies in American history” even as the nation approaches its second consecutive quarter of negative growth in gross domestic product. 

Biden has had an “enormously successful first 18 months in office,” the Lincoln Project claimed on Monday in a rosy assessment of the president’s performance that’s at odds with the majority of Americans who blame Biden for record inflation.

“Resident Biden is a decent human being who exhibits the qualities we should cherish in a resident: he’s a strong leader with clear moral standards and empathizes with Americans for the challenges they face every day,” Lincoln Project cofounder Reed Galen said. “Resident Biden shows what American greatness looks like.”

The Lincoln Project cited job growth, wage increases, and historically low unemployment as proof of Biden’s success. But nearly a million-and-a-half Americans could lose their jobs next year, according to a report last month from the Federal Reserve. Around two-thirds of Americans say Biden is either “responsible” or “very responsible” for inflation, polling shows. 

Formed in 2019 to oppose former president Donald Trump, the Lincoln Project is known for spending millions of dollars to oppose Republicans such as Gov. Glenn Youngkin (Va.) while achieving little electoral success. The anti-Republican organization gained notoriety last year after it was revealed that founding member John Weaver sent suggestive messages to dozens of young men and at least one 14-year-old child.

The White House last week redefined the term “recession,” which is commonly understood as two consecutive quarters of shrinking GDP, ahead of a Thursday GDP report that will likely reveal the economy shrunk for the second quarter in a row. The White House said a recession is determined through “a holistic look at the data,” leading critics to accuse the Biden administration of covering its tracks so it won’t have to call the economic crisis a recession.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

‘You cannot call him Uncle f—ing Tom on my watch!’

Glenn Loury is sick and tired of the racially charged assault on Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. The Brown University professor ranted on his podcast last week about the virulence of left-wing attacks on Thomas following the justice’s vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Loury, who is black, was particularly outraged at Samuel L. Jackson and others who invoked the racist “Uncle Tom” trope to denigrate the justice as a traitor to black Americans—an egregiously offensive thing to say, Loury argued, about a black man who grew up “a step from slavery” and rose to become one of the most accomplished jurists in the country. By defining Thomas solely by his conservative political views, his critics were denigrating “the value of this man’s contribution” to black history.

“Come on, man. Let’s stay in touch with reality,” Loury said. “I’m sorry, you cannot call him an Uncle fucking Tom on my watch!”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Maryland’s largest school district is prohibiting faculty from disclosing information about children’s chosen gender identity from their parents.

Montgomery County Public Schools has provided guidelines for working with transgender children that say a “student’s transgender status is confidential” and cannot be disclosed with their parent or guardian without their permission.

Public schools across the country this year have implemented policies excluding parents from their children’s education, especially with LGBT policies. In Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools prohibited teachers from consulting parents when students as young as kindergarten-age switch genders at school in July. Loudoun County Public Schools in the state issued similar guidelines in April. A California mother sued her daughter’s school district in January after two teachers allegedly coerced her child into adopting a transgender identity without informing her.

The guidelines say school principals and staff should “ascertain the level of support the student either receives or anticipates receiving from home,” helping the student create a gender-identity plan “even when the family is nonsupportive.”

Harold Maldonado, the father of a rising fourth grader at MCPS, told the Washington Free Beacon he is “angry” and “disgusted” that Montgomery County is pushing “inappropriate” sex education on students.

“The Montgomery County Public School System is overreaching, and this borders the line of criminal,” Maldonado said.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Deputy National Cyber Director Camille Stewart has called for a race-focused defense agenda

Solving “perceived” systematic racism by implementing systematic racism. Sounds like a democrat. Stop looking for hand-outs and start lending a hand. [US Patriot]

Resident Joe Biden’s incoming cyber defense deputy has claimed that “systemic racism” is one of the greatest threats to U.S. cybersecurity.

Camille Stewart, a former Google strategist whom Biden reportedly tapped for White House deputy national cyber director, has argued that “our #NatSec apparatus must be a part of dismantling systemic racism,” and “pursuing anti-racist and anti-hate policy outcomes” should be a chief national security focus for the administration.

Biden’s new hire is likely to stoke concerns from Republican legislators that his administration has been more focused on pushing a race-focused ideological agenda than on traditional national defense issues—such as the increasing risk of cyberattacks from Russia, Iran, and China. The Department of Justice said in June it is bracing for more cyberwarfare from adversarial countries. Last month, the FBI revealed it intercepted an Iranian-backed cyberattack against Boston Children’s Hospital, and Russian hackers targeted an American satellite company in Ukraine earlier this year.

Stewart, who served as policy adviser for the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, has criticized the United States as an intrinsically racist society in her writing and on social media.

She claimed that the U.S. economy “lost $16 trillion b/c of Racism against Black Americans,” and warned in 2020 that “SYSTEMIC RACISM WILL RUIN THIS DEMOCRACY,” arguing that systemic racism was a part of “every institution not just the criminal justice system.”

“[Solutions] to cybersecurity challenges will never reach their full potential until systemic racism is addressed and diverse voices are reflected among our ranks at all levels,” Stewart wrote in a 2020 column for the Council on Foreign Relations titled “Systemic Racism Is a National Security Threat.”

She added that “communities of color are disproportionately affected by cyberattacks that target critical infrastructure.”

In a 2020 column for the Hill, Stewart said the Biden administration’s efforts to combat systemic racism “must be woven into leadership priorities, processes, structures, and domestic and international strategy.”

Stewart proposed that U.S. foreign policy leaders be encouraged to “talk about systemic racism in the U.S on a global stage” and acknowledge the “detrimental effects of racism at home and in U.S. foreign policy towards regions of the world.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A White House press release on Monday said Stewart was “regarded as not only an expert but also as an inspiration, especially to women and underrepresented minorities.”

Republican lawmakers have objected to other recent hires by the Biden administration, including U.S. special representative for racial equity and justice appointee Desirée Cormier Smith, who claimed white diplomats lack empathy and humility.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A group of liberal Capitol Hill staffers were arrested in the office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) after demanding Democratic leadership resume talks on climate legislation.

More than a dozen employees of Democratic members of Congress sat down in Schumer’s office holding signs calling on the majority leader to renew efforts to combat climate change. The protest ended after about half an hour when Capitol Police bound the disgruntled staffers’ hands with zip ties and escorted them out.

One of the protesters, Saul Levin, a staffer for “Squad” member Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.), tweeted photos of the demonstration from within Schumer’s office.

“We, staffers of the US Congress, are peacefully sitting in on Senator Schumer’s office to demand Dems pass climate justice policy this year,” Levin tweeted. “We are putting our bodies on the line because we have no other choice.”

Congressional staffers have increasingly attempted to pressure lawmakers to pursue certain policies and deliver greater benefits for staff. Staffers across several progressive offices have begun efforts to unionize in pursuit of “pay equity” and other aims.

In a similar protest last week, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) pretended to be handcuffed and arrested as they were taken away from a protest at the Supreme Court.

Levin is the son of progressive congressman Andy Levin (D., Mich.), who is currently caught up in a primary contest with another incumbent. A focal point of the race concerns Levin’s failure to support the state of Israel, a key American ally.

Negotiations on a massive climate spending package broke down last week when Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) rejected efforts to spend hundreds of billions on combating carbon emissions. Manchin cited record inflation and the importance of traditional energy sources in outlining his opposition to the “green” policies.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Wheat prices rose on July 25, days after Russian forces struck the southern Ukrainian port of Odesa.

Chicago wheat futures surged by as much as 4.6 percent before paring the gain to trade 3.1 percent higher at $7.82 1/4 per bushel by 3:21 p.m. in Singapore.

Corn futures rose by as much as 2.8 percent on July 25 before the gain eased to 1.4 percent, while soybeans were up by just 0.3 percent.

Wheat prices dropped by almost 6 percent on July 22 after Russia and Ukraine, both of whom are major exporters of grains, reached a deal to allow crucial grain shipments to safely leave three Ukrainian Black Sea ports: Odesa, Pivdennyi, and Chornomorsk.

That level of prices haven’t been seen since before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” in neighboring Ukraine in February.

The agreement was brokered by Turkey and hailed as a vital step toward helping to avert a global food crisis.

Representatives of Turkey, as well as Ukraine and Russia, met in Istanbul on July 22 to sign the deal, along with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said of the deal on July 22: “We are proud of being instrumental in an initiative that will play a major role in the solution of the global food crisis that has occupied the whole world for a long time.”

The president also said the deal would “contribute to preventing the danger of hunger that awaits billions of people in the world.”

Missile Strike

However, Russia said on July 25 that its cruise missiles had struck military infrastructure in Ukraine’s Odesa port over the weekend, shortly after the agreement was signed.

The strike used “Kalibr missiles” and destroyed Ukrainian military infrastructure, “sending a Ukrainian military boat to the Kiev regime’s favorite address in a precision strike,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Telegram on July 24.

The “favorite address” was a reference to Ukrainian forces on Snake Island in the Black Sea who reportedly told a Russian ship to “go [explicit]” itself before a Russian strike in February.

Serhii Bratchuk, a spokesman for the Odesa military administration, said on Telegram that Kalibr-type cruise missiles hit the infrastructure of the port and that two were shot down by Ukraine’s air defense forces.

“Two hit the port’s infrastructure facilities,” he wrote.

Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s southern command, said on TV that the missiles didn’t hit grain storage at Odesa’s port.

An estimated 20 million metric tons of grain have been held up in the port of Odesa in southwestern Ukraine, according to the BBC.

Wheat futures rose by 70 percent to a record high of $12.94 per bushel in the two weeks after the invasion began, prompting concerns that the conflict could impact global supplies, worsen food insecurity, and drive prices up further.

Wheat prices have gradually declined by roughly 42 percent since reaching those initial highs, but U.S. wheat features are still 15 percent higher than where they were last year, while the Benchmark French milling wheat futures are 65 percent higher than they were at this time last year, according to Business Insider. 

The EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, said on July 23 that the bloc “strongly condemns” the attack.

He wrote on Twitter, “Striking a target crucial for grain export a day after the signature of Istanbul agreements is particularly reprehensible & again demonstrates Russia’s total disregard for international law & commitments.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

It’s all part of the script of The Great Reset – just look at who invested a half-billion dollars into this major online grocery retailer as government prepares to radically restrict livestock farming and meat production.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• In early June 2022, the government of The Netherlands announced it would cut the size of livestock herds in the country by 30% to meet European Union nitrogen and ammonia pollution rules
• According to Dutch Parliament member Thierry Baudet, the government is following the script of The Great Reset, which requires weakening the country, making it more dependent on food imports, and diluting nationalism by taking in more immigrants. To make room for immigrant housing, they need to take land from the farmers
• The newly assigned Minister for Nature and Nitrogen Policy, Christianne van der Wal-Zeggelink, is married to Piet van der Wal, who together with his brother are heavily invested in the major online grocery retailer Picnic. In September 2021, Bill Gates invested an estimated half-billion dollars into Picnic, thereby becoming one of its lead investors. Gates’ involvement has raised questions about government corruption
• At the same time the Dutch government is preparing to radically restrict livestock farming and meat production, Gates is gobbling up farmland back home. Despite land prices being at a record high, Gates purchased a 2,100-acre potato farm in North Dakota in June 2022, bringing the total land share held by the Gates’ Red River Trust above 270,000 acres
• Gates claims he intends to lease the farmland to farmers. Viewed from the perspective of The Great Reset, it would then appear Gates may be engaged in the same kind of wealth-shift scheme as BlackRock and other investment groups that are buying up single-family homes and turning them into rentals. The end goal is to eliminate all private ownership and turn the population into serfs

In early June 2022, the government of The Netherlands announced it would cut the size of livestock herds in the country by 30% to meet European Union nitrogen and ammonia pollution rules.^1,2 As a result of this “green” policy, many farmers will be driven out of business³ and they have gathered in protest across the country.

This is important because many may not realize that even though The Netherlands is a small country, it’s the second-largest exporter of agriculture in the world, after the United States.⁴ As with current energy shortages, the forced reductions in farming and food production are said to be an “unavoidable” part of the Green Agenda to improve air, soil and water quality.⁵

In a public statement about the new emissions targets, the Dutch government even admitted that “The honest message … is that not all farmers can continue their business.”⁶ Those who do continue will have to come up with creative solutions to meet the new emissions restrictions.

A Clear Case of Corruption?

The restrictions on nitrogen for livestock farmers have befuddled many. Why would government restrict farming at a time when food shortages and famine loom on the horizon worldwide? Some claim to have discovered conflicts of interest within the Dutch government that can help explain this irrational move.⁷

The newly assigned Minister for Nature and Nitrogen Policy (who created the nitrogen regulations and is responsible for overseeing the cuts to farming), Christianne van der Wal-Zeggelink, is married to Piet van der Wal, who together with his brother, Bouke van der Wal, own a massive supermarket chain called Boni.

As noted by The Conservative Treehouse,⁸ “when Dutch farmers sell product to Boni they are directly funding the wealth of the government minister who seeks to destroy their livelihoods.”

The van der Wal family is also heavily invested in a major online grocery retailer called Picnic. Picnic buys food at wholesale prices directly from Boni, which minimizes its operational costs. Picnic basically functions as a home delivery service for Boni.

In September 2021, Bill Gates entered the Dutch enterprise. He invested an estimated half-billion dollars into Picnic, thereby becoming one of its lead investors.⁹ Not surprisingly, Picnic focuses on selling the fake “food” that Gates is invested in and promotes, imitation beef in particular.

The CEO of Picnic, Michiel Muller, a Dutch climate change activist, has also publicly vowed to “change the entire food system” to be in line with sustainable goals,¹⁰ which falls right in line with Gates’ agenda.

The strong recommendation to replace beef with fake meat was made in Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” released in February 2021.¹¹ In an interview with MIT Technology Review, he also suggested that people could learn to like fake meat and, if resistance continues, regulations may be needed to force the switch.¹²

According to The Countersignal,¹³ “many participating in the ongoing farmers’ protests in Holland have openly stated they believe Gates may be partly responsible for pushing additional climate laws.” Curiously, July 10, 2022, a large Picnic delivery facility in Almelo, Holland, burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances.^14,15,16

Why Get Rid of Farmers Amid Rising Food Insecurity?

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/IiyQrr5wOyc/

The attempt to rid The Netherlands of livestock farmers really only makes sense if seen from the globalists’ point of view, with an eye on The Great Reset, the Green New Deal, Agenda 2030 and related Sustainable Development Goals.

According to Dutch Parliament member Thierry Baudet, the Dutch government is following the script of The Great Reset, which requires weakening the country, making it more dependent on food imports, and diluting nationalism by taking in more immigrants. To make room for immigrant housing, they need to take land from the farmers.

Indeed, according to Dutch Parliament member Thierry Baudet (video above), that’s really what the nitrogen restrictions are all about. The Dutch government is following the script of The Great Reset, he says, which requires weakening the country, making it less independent and more dependent on food imports.

The Great Reset script also calls for diluting nationalism and weakening borders by taking in more immigrants, and to make room for immigrant housing, they need to take land from the farmers. So, the new nitrogen rules are basically a precursor to a land grab. They intend to put farmers out of business so they can take their land and stack it full of low-income, government-assistance apartment buildings.

Aside from that, farmers also pose a threat to the technocratic elitists because they don’t need to rely on government for basics such as food and shelter, and they can allow those who buy their food to maintain their independence as well.

The globalists’ plan is to eliminate access to as much real food as possible, and replace natural foods with patented foodstuffs so that the population becomes entirely dependent on them for survival. At that point, they are easily controlled. Eliminating independent food producers — farmers — is therefore a key to the globalist cabal’s eventual success.

Gates Gobbles Up Farmland While Pushing Fake Foods

At the same time the Dutch government is preparing to radically restrict livestock farming and meat production — likely with Gates’ blessing, if not due to his influence — Gates is gobbling up farmland back home.

Despite land prices being at a record-high, Gates purchased a 2,100-acre potato farm in North Dakota in June 2022, bringing the total land share held by the Gates’ Red River Trust above 270,000 acres — up from about 242,000 acres in mid-September 2021.

The following map, from AgWeb,¹⁷ shows the distribution of his land holdings prior to his North Dakota acquisition. As you can see, the vast majority is farmland.

Gates Plan: Turn Farmers Into Modern Serfs

However, as reported by AgWeb at the end of June 2022, Gates didn’t get a warm welcome:¹⁸

“North Dakota hosts ‘corporate farming laws’ that barres [sic] corporations and limited liability companies from owning and leasing farms and ranches. With the Gates’s new $13.5 million farmland purchase, North Dakotans — including the attorney general — are concerned the sale violates the state’s law. The North Dakota attorney general’s office sent a letter to the Red River Trust on Tuesday, alerting the trustee of the North Dakota land law.

‘Our office needs to confirm how your company uses this land and whether this use meets any of the statutory exceptions, such as the business purpose exception,’ wrote Drew Wrigley, North Dakota attorney general.”

MoneyWise¹⁹ followed up on the story, reporting that by July 5, 2022, Gates had secured legal approval for his farm purchase — a decision that has raised the ire of many North Dakotans who don’t believe Gates has good intentions.

According to MoneyWise, “The anti-corporate farming law does allow individual trusts to own farmland if it is leased to farmers — and that’s what Gates’ firm plans to do.” Viewed from the perspective of The Great Reset, it appears Gates may be engaged in the same kind of subversive wealth-shift scheme as BlackRock and other investment groups that are buying up single-family homes.

They buy them, often sight-unseen and at above-market prices, with the intent of turning them into rentals. This too is part and parcel of The Great Reset and the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The intent is to eliminate all private ownership and turn the population into modern serfs. “Serf” is a term that describes people who are required to work for the “lord” who owns the land they live on, or who are otherwise underpaid, overworked or exploited in some way.

That’ll be all of us, one day, if the world doesn’t wake up and refuse to go along with the globalist cabal’s Great Reset plans. The plight of the Dutch farmers is just the beginning.

Originally published July 22, 2022 on Mercola.com

Sources and References

• ¹ Substack, The Freedom Corner with PeterSweden July 1, 2022
• ² Reuters June 10, 2022
• ³ Bloomberg June 28, 2022
• ⁴ WEF. November 27, 2019
• ^5, 6 Indian Express July 3, 2022
• ^7, 8, 10 The Conservative Treehouse July 12, 2022
• ⁹ USSA News July 10, 2022
• ¹¹ Market Watch February 16, 2021
• ¹² MIT Technology Review February 14, 2021
• ^13, 14 The Countersignal July 11, 2022
• ¹⁵ Newspunch July 11, 2022
• ¹⁶ Sott.net July 11, 2022
• ^17, 18 AgWeb June 28, 2022
• ¹⁹ Moneywise July 5, 2022

Source: The Epoch Times

In a 10-page executive order issued on June 15, resident Joe Biden declared war on conversion therapy and pledged to defend the LGBT community from various forms of discrimination.

The order, which was accompanied by a seven-page explanation, is one more salvo in the clash of rights that has arisen in recent years over transgender issues.

The order describes conversion therapy as “efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

Keeping a campaign promise he made to the LGBT community, Biden called for an administration-wide push to eliminate the use of conversion therapy by therapists across the nation. He described it as a “harmful” and “discredited practice that research indicates can cause significant harm, including higher suicide rates…”

“My administration must safeguard LGBTQI+ youth from dangerous practices like so-called ‘conversion therapy,’” said Biden.

The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that there were two million Americans identifying themselves as transgender in 2021—about six-tenths of one percent of the nation’s population.

Twenty states and over 100 municipalities have banned conversion therapy for minors.

To further protect the rights of LGBT individuals from encroachment by other states, Biden is marshaling the resources of 10 departments of the federal government, along with numerous supporting agencies. The list includes the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Housing and Urban Development.

Biden said in his order that the Federal Trade Commission “is encouraged to consider whether conversion therapy constitutes an unfair and deceptive trade practice, and to issue such consumer warnings or notices as may be appropriate.”

Such a designation by the FTC could expose therapists to prosecution.

The aggressive promotion of these and other LGBT policies has provoked a backlash around the country.

In the first quarter of 2022, 238 bills that would “limit the rights” of LGBT  individuals were proposed by legislatures across America—half of which involved transgender people, according to NBC News.

The state proposals aim to limit LGBT curriculum in schools, affirm parental rights, defend religious liberties, and restrict Gender Affirming Care (GAC).

The World Health Organization defines GAC as psychological, behavioral, and medical interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity when it conflicts with the gender the person was assigned at birth.

Biden’s order has aroused strong opposition from former gays and lesbians, clients and their therapists, and civil liberty legal foundations, who say that individuals have the right to voluntarily seek help to be free of unwanted same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria (an uncomfortable state of confusion).

Brothers Road is a Virginia peer support fellowship made up primarily of men seeking to align their sexual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with their personal values, beliefs, faith, commitments, and life goals.

Rick Wyler, the group’s founder, told The Epoch Times, “Many of us have been harmed, sometimes deeply, by therapists who demand that we embrace a gay identity and engage in gay relationships as, supposedly, the only possible path to peace, even if doing so would mean leaving otherwise satisfying marriages or cutting ourselves off from faith communities, beliefs, and traditions that we greatly value.”

Elizabeth Woning of California is a co-founder of the Changed Movement, an international network of people who no longer identify as LGBT.

Woning told The Epoch Times, “So-called ‘conversion therapy’ is a pejorative phrase that is being used to promote state-sanctioned viewpoint discrimination. LGBTQ-identifying people deserve the right to follow their conscience, even when it means receiving support to diminish unwanted sexual feelings.

“Such bans dramatically oversimplify the lived experience of anyone who identifies as LGBTQ. They offer only one route for people to follow, no matter their faith or conscience.

“And so, anyone who doesn’t endorse Gay Pride for their own life is disallowed counseling that addresses trauma and emotional distress related to their sexual identity,” she said.

“In the end, counseling bans cause harm and simply limit everyone’s freedom.”

Nevada therapist Robert Vazzo told The Epoch Times, “Don’t ban anything that is poorly defined and can lead to a witch hunt among therapists whose world view regarding homosexuality is different from the mainstream.”

Vazzo questioned the ability to determine at what point during a counseling session the therapist can be said to be actually practicing therapy and attempting to change a client’s sexual orientation.

“The desire to change one’s sexual orientation is often linked to one’s religious views and having thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are congruent with those views,” he said.

“How a person expresses their sexuality and deals with attractions is a very personal thing, and we especially don’t need Joe Biden and the federal government telling us what we should like, dislike, or try to change in ourselves.”

Vazzo said the courts have consistently affirmed a therapist’s right to give his opinion during a session as part of free speech.

He described Biden’s order as “an assault on both personal and religious freedom.”

Tampa, Florida, recently lost a case that challenged the city’s ordinance banning conversion therapy on First Amendment grounds.

New York City recently ended its ban on conversion therapy because of a civil rights lawsuit.

In a July 13, 2022, statement to The Epoch Times, Family Watch International, an organization which promotes and defends marriage and family values, said of Biden’s executive order, “Elite leftists are seeking to prohibit parents and children from obtaining necessary, and demonstrably successful, care [while] the Biden administration is pushing ‘gender-affirming therapy’ as normative treatment. This ‘therapy’ includes such horrifying procedures as blocking normal adolescent development, administering cross-sex hormones, and performing mutilating surgeries that result in permanent sterilization.

“Federal bureaucrats should not be micromanaging matters of health and wellness, especially as it relates to children. It is the role, responsibility, and right of all parents to determine the upbringing of their children, especially as it relates to their healthy development,” the organization said.

Attorney Mathew D. Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a non-profit organization that provides legal assistance in cases dealing with religious liberty and family issues, told The Epoch Times in an email, “I am confident that litigation will eventually doom these counseling bans … To deny a client the right of self-determination is both unconstitutional and dangerous.”

“The ultimate goal of this movement is to prohibit change-exploring therapies and counsel, and to abolish the Judeo-Christian ethic regarding human sexuality, and even the very understanding of God,” he said.

He pointed out the irony in a system of laws where it is not considered harmful to take puberty blockers, opposite sex hormones, or undergo life-changing surgeries,  yet it is regarded as harmful to learn about the causes of gender dysphoria and how to become comfortable with one’s birth sex.

Staver said that, under some laws banning conversion therapy, or what he calls “change counsel,” a counselor must either tell the client the type of counseling he may desire is not permitted; or even though the client wants to change, the counselor must, by law, override the client’s decision and counsel the client to accept unwanted attractions, behaviors, and identities.

“These laws unconstitutionally restrict only one viewpoint—change—on the subject matter of same-sex attractions, behavior, or identity. The U.S. Supreme Court has never upheld viewpoint discrimination. … Such viewpoint discrimination violates both First Amendment rights of the client and the counselor … [the] government must not censor the viewpoint of any subject matter the client wishes to receive and what the counselor or therapist may provide.”

California therapist Joseph Nicolosi told The Epoch Times in an email, “In a client-therapist relationship, the client is in the driver’s seat. They set their own goals, which the therapist helps them achieve. Politicians have no business telling people that their therapy goals are illegal.

“Everyone should be free to choose a life consistent with their values … no government should bar access to another person’s choice to live consistent with their faith and their values.”

Medical Experts Divided

The American Psychological Association, in a report released in 2009, said therapies used to try to change sexual orientation can be harmful and that most do not succeed.

In a 2018 position statement on conversion therapy and LGBTQ patients, the American Psychiatric Association recommended that “ethical practitioners refrain from attempts to change individuals’ sexual orientation” and “respect the identities of those with diverse gender expressions.”

The psychiatric association said it encourages “psychotherapies which affirm individuals’ sexual orientations and gender identities.”

In a 2018 policy statement, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) stated, “Conversion therapies’ (or ‘reparative therapies’) are interventions purported to alter same-sex attractions or an individual’s gender expression with the specific aim to promote heterosexuality as a preferable outcome…

“These interventions are provided under the false premise that homosexuality and gender diverse identities are pathological. They are not; the absence of pathology means there is no need for conversion or any other like interventions.”

The American Psychiatric Association ceased classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973.

The AACAP statement warned that “there is evidence that ‘conversion therapies’ increase risk of causing or exacerbating mental health conditions in the very youth they purport to treat.”

Biden’s executive order and the current narrative of the professional psychiatric and psychological guilds upon which it is based; have received strong criticism from other medical quarters.

“The habitually misquoted American Psychological Association’s Task Force’s 2009 report (on page 43) stated specifically that modern change-allowing therapy ‘since 1978’ was ‘nonaversive,’ meaning free of infliction of pain or shame,” wrote Dr. Andre Van Mol, MD. in an email to The Epoch Times.

Van Mol, a Board-certified family physician and co-chair of the Committee on Adolescent Sexuality of the American College of Pediatricians, said the Task Force’s report explicitly states on pages 43 and 82, that research meeting scientific standards did not allow attributing harm or help, inefficacy or efficacy, to change-allowing therapy.

“Banning counseling choice for gender dysphoria condemns already at-risk sexual minority youth to experimental and unproven hormonal and surgical gender-affirming therapy (GAT), which permanently and prematurely medicalizes children for a condition that overwhelmingly resolves by adulthood,” he said.

Van Mol stated that GAT has not been proven safe and effective. It does not reduce suicides and is not the international standard of care for gender dysphoric minors.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) have introduced legislation that would allow adults who undergo body-altering gender-transition surgeries as minors to sue surgeons for damages for up to 30 years after the procedure.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

COVID-19 injections may damage the innate immune system in children from properly developing and functioning, according to epidemiologist and researcher Paul Alexander.

People are born with an innate immune system, which is the body’s first line of defense against the many pathogens they encounter.

Alexander says that while the innate immune system in young children is broadly effective and potent, it is still “antigenically naive,” and it is exposure to germs and foreign substances that helps train their innate immune system to function.

Related Coverage

Genetic COVID Vaccines May Damage Children’s Innate Immunity—Dr. Paul Alexander

“The children have a window of opportunity to train the innate immune system properly, and principally, they’re trying to train the innate antibodies and the innate NK [natural killer] cells,” Alexander told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. “They get that training, those cells of the innate immune system, get training by the exposure to a pathogen.”

“Why the training of the antibodies is so key is because in that period of time in young childhood, once the innate immune antibodies and the innate immune system can be trained and you allow it to be trained, it functions,” he added.

This training may be disrupted when children are administered the messenger RNA shots based on the initial virus strain. That is because the vaccine antibodies are highly specific in targeting the spike protein and prevent the innate antibodies from doing their job.

“The vaccinal antibodies would bind to the spike antigen, [and] first block the innate antibodies from its functional capacity, which is binding,” Alexander said.

He also says that proper training helps the immune system differentiate a normal cell from a non-self pathogen. If the immune system is not able to do that, it can lead to autoimmune disease as a result of the immune system attacking the body.

“So it is absolutely critical that the innate immune system, and particularly the innate antibodies very early on in childhood, be allowed this training,” he said.

Strong Innate Immunity

Without being vaccinated, healthy children are able to eliminate and sterilize the virus to prevent infection, replication, and transmission, Alexander says. That is why children, for the most part, do not show any symptoms or have mild symptoms, especially against the Omicron variant that is dominant in the United States and other countries.

“Children come with this innate immune system, it’s their first line of defense … That is critical and that is why young people, normally young children, do so well against pathogen[s] and they survive in the environment, not having a copious number of years of existence, they’ve not had exposure to a bunch of stuff, to pathogen. Yet, they bump up against these things in the environment and they do well,” Alexander said.

Studies have shown that children have a robust innate immune system that can effectively eliminate the virus.

In September 2020, researchers compared blood samples from pediatric (children and youths younger than 24 years old) and adult COVID-19 patients to try to understand why children had milder disease compared to adults. They found that the pediatric group had certain proteins (IFN-gamma and interleukin-17A) that were not present in the adult cohorts. These proteins play important roles in the innate immune response.

The same researchers provided evidence in a different study in April 2021 on why children fared better when infected with the virus, saying that it was because children’s innate immune response stopped the virus in its tracks before it had a chance to spread.

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight, involved 27 adults and 12 children who tested positive for COVID-19 at Montefiore Medical Center’s emergency department. The authors found that, compared to adults, children had larger quantities of genes associated with immune cells, including several proteins secreted by immune cells.

Related Coverage

Dr. Harvey Risch: Why Are Vaccinated People Getting COVID at Higher Rates Than the Unvaccinated?

None of the children in the study required oxygen, whereas seven adults did and four adults died.

Data also show that the immune system in infants is a “vigilant establishment” that is flexible and can respond to many stimulants.

The authors of a 2018 study wrote that “mounting evidence supports the concept that infantile immunity is in fact a highly regulated, but intellect, orchestrated, functional, and dynamic network of competent molecular and cellular components.

“This wakeful immune scheme plays pivotal roles in protecting the growing and developing infants from pathologic conditions (e.g., inflammatory situations) as well as providing adequate and appropriate defense against infections by promoting immature or deviant to highly mature responses,” they added.

The Push for Vaccination

Although children are generally at low risk for severe disease when they contract the virus and have a robust innate immunity to fight it, health authorities say that children as young as 6 months are recommended for the COVID-19 vaccines.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) authorized and recommended the shots for young children last month although the CDC’s own data and several other studies indicated that the vaccinated were more likely to get infected with COVID-19, including Pfizer’s clinical trial in children (pdf).

The FDA also stated in a press release on June 17 that the estimate of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine was unreliable “due to the low number of COVID-19 cases that occurred in study participants,” which was based on 10 cases, three in the vaccinated and seven in the unvaccinated.

Alexander says that a governmental health authority that makes a recommendation for vaccination based on a small number of events is concerning and says that there is no data to support vaccinating very young children.

“We know from a scientific point of view, a methodological point of view, that that is a red flag for high risk of overestimating the treatment effect,” Alexander said. “We don’t make policy decisions or any kind of decision on two events or three events in a study.”

“There’s so much uncertainty in terms of what is beneficial or not. And we found when you read the submission, you see that at some point, they reported that children who got multiple infections of COVID were vaccinated. That’s a red flag. We also read that the children who got the most severe adverse events were vaccinated,” he added.

The Danish health authority is taking a different course from the CDC, as it put out guidance in June 2022 that children aged 5 to 17 would not be offered primary vaccination, acknowledging that children “only very rarely have a serious course of COVID-19.” The vaccine would only be administered “after specific medical assessment.”

‘Risk-Benefit Analysis Has Changed’

Real-world data from Singapore shows that nearly two dozen children suffered serious adverse events from an mRNA shot.

A new study from Singapore examining the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against Omicron in over 250,000 children aged 5 to 11 between January to April 2022 found that 288 children were hospitalized and 22 suffered a serious adverse reaction to the vaccine.

A serious adverse reaction, according to the Singaporean Health Sciences Authority (pdf), is if it results in hospitalization or an extended hospital stay, a significant reduction in disability or functioning level, a life-threatening illness or death, birth defects, or a medically important event.

Of the 288 hospitalized children, five were given supplemental oxygen. And of the five on oxygen, four were admitted to the intensive care unit, two were fully vaccinated, two were partially vaccinated, and one was unvaccinated. No deaths were attributed to COVID-19.

“In terms of admission to intensive care, there’s no evidence here that vaccination provides protection, there’s no evidence that vaccination provides protection against oxygenation here,” John Campbell, a retired nurse educator said in a video on July 21.

The authors of the study did not give more information on the adverse events other than mentioning that 22 children (0.005 percent of all doses administered) experienced them.

“The risk of adverse events is roughly more than four times the risk of the child requiring oxygenation or indeed being admitted to intensive care,” Campbell said, adding that “the risk-benefit analysis has changed.”

Prolonging Pandemic

Vaccinologist and virologist Geert Vanden Bossche claimed in early 2021 that the mass vaccination of people during a pandemic would likely drive the propagation of more infectious variants of the original strain of the virus, thus prolonging the pandemic.

“I mean, in their own right [the vaccines] are of course excellent, but to use them in the midst of a pandemic and do mass vaccination. Because then you provide, within a very short period of time, the population with high antibody titers so the virus comes under enormous pressure,” Bossche said in an interview in March 2021.

“That wouldn’t matter if you can eradicate the fire, if you can prevent infection, but these vaccines don’t prevent infection, they protect against disease.”

The vaccines initially provided over 90 percent protection against symptomatic infection, but after the emergence of Omicron, they became less than 50 percent effective against infection after a short period of time, even after booster doses.

Related Coverage

Genetic COVID Vaccines May Damage Children’s Innate Immunity—Dr. Paul Alexander

Alexander states that with the continued administration of mRNA vaccines that produce non-neutralizing antibodies that can’t eliminate the virus and stop transmission, the pandemic will not end.

“In other words, if you keep vaccinating with these vaccines, you can never ever stop this pandemic. This pandemic can go on for 100 years, it will never end. And what we’re seeing is, it’s infectious variant after infectious variant, more infectious, each iteration that is coming is more infectious. So it’s a terrible situation,” he said.

For the pandemic to end, Alexander explains that herd immunity must be reached, and “to get to herd immunity, you need to cut the chain of transmission.”

The FDA, the CDC, Pfizer, and Moderna did not reply to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A coalition of 17 attorneys general is threatening Google with an anti-trust investigation if it censors pregnancy crisis centers from search results related to abortion.

Pregnancy crisis centers are different from abortion centers in that they provide resources for women who choose to carry their babies to full term.

The attorneys general of Virginia and Kentucky, Jason Miyares and Daniel Cameron, respectively, are leading the group, which sent a letter to Google on July 21.

In the letter, the group asks whether the tech giant has taken any steps to treat crisis pregnancy centers differently in search results since Roe v Wade was overturned.

Google, Miyares, and Cameron did not respond to requests for comment. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said he joined the effort because he did not want to see Google succumb to political pressure.

The AGs’ joint correspondence was in response to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Congresswoman Elissa Slotnick’s (D-Mich.) June 17th letter asking what steps Google CEO Sundar Pichai will take to limit the appearance of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers in Google search results when users search for “abortion clinics” or “abortion pills.”

“Google should not be displaying anti-abortion fake clinics or crisis pregnancy centers in search results for users that are searching for an abortion clinic or abortion pill,” Warner and Slotnik wrote. “If Google must continue showing these misleading search results and in Google Maps, the results should at the very least be appropriately labeled.”

An additional 12 Senators and nine members of Congress, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), signed the letter.

“Senator Warner believes that users who search for “abortion services” should receive results that are relevant to their searches,” said Valeria Rivadeneira, a Warner spokesperson. “Crisis pregnancy centers—which routinely misinform and mislead clients about their reproductive health—make every effort to appear in these search results in order to deceive individuals into thinking they offer a full range of reproductive health services.”

Rivadeneira added that Warner has not yet received a response to his June 17th communication to Google and that Google should apply appropriate labels to all organic search and map results.

Curtis Hill, former Attorney General of Indiana, said the cadre of Democratic politicians want Google to act as an arm of the government in suppressing information.

“It’s a typical sidestep that some government officials try to create, and we’ve seen it in other areas,” he said. “So, it’s highly appropriate for the state’s attorneys general to call it for what it is…possible antitrust violations for which they would face sanctions.”

Because Google operates in all their states, the company falls under the jurisdiction of each AG’s consumer advocacy responsibilities.

“They have the right to investigate companies that are operating within their state on information that consumers are being duped or otherwise are having difficulty being treated fairly,” Hill told The Epoch Times.

He commended his former colleagues for demanding to know whether Google intends to comply with the request made by members of the Senate and Congress.

“I’d want to know if the algorithms had been changed by a particular date and if any differences or distinctions seem to be in compliance with the request that was made,” Hill added. “It’s been suggested that some of the searches be limited. So, I would want to see the searches.”

Pregnancy crisis centers like the Crisis Pregnancy Support Center (CPSC) in Texas City, Texas, don’t just rely on Google for clients.

Instead, it’s word of mouth that brings pregnant women to their doorstep, according to Christy Anne Collins, CPSC executive director.

“Most of our referrals come from people in the community who are involved in social service type of work and know the services we offer,” she said. “We’re not competing with the abortion listings, and we don’t want to.”

Collins thinks it’s appropriate that Texas AG Ken Paxton is among the Generals who signed the letter.

“Google or anybody else shouldn’t be stifling free speech, not on this issue or any other issue,” she said.

Serving up to 170 individuals per month ranging in age from 9 to 52 years old, CPSC has been in existence since 1992.

“If somebody is interested in alternative information or they are interested in crisis pregnancy centers, we shouldn’t be blocked out,” Collins told The Epoch Times. “I’m very concerned that that kind of thing could happen very easily.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore’s high-profile progressive prosecutor who was indicted on federal charges, has been defeated in her bid for reelection as the city’s state’s attorney in the Democratic Party primary.

Ivan Bates, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor, won with 30,486 votes or about 40 percent; Thiru Vignarajah, 31 percent; and Mosby, 29 percent, according to results released by the Maryland State Board of Elections.

Bates criticized Mosby, a two-term incumbent, on the campaign trail over what he called the mismanagement and incompetence of her office. He often said that he ran to make Baltimore safer.

“I am humble, grateful, and excited that Baltimore decided it was time for a change, and the voters have placed their trust and belief in me,” Bates wrote to his supporters in an email announcing his victory on July 23.

“The job of helping build a safer Baltimore is a tremendous challenge. I am ready to lead—and to work with collaborators of all stripes to help make that a reality.”

During Mosby’s two terms, homicides in Baltimore rose steadily, averaging 333 every year between 2015 and 2021. This year’s numbers are on track to surpass those of 2021, according to Baltimore Police Department data.

During Mosby’s predecessor Gregg Bernstein’s final term, the city had a yearly average of 215 murders.

To fight crime, Bates proposes a five-point prosecution plan (pdf), including putting more resources into prosecuting illegal gun possessors, users, and traffickers, according to his campaign website.

He ran against Mosby in the 2018 primary and lost.

Mosby wrote in a social media post to her supporters on July 23: “I am grateful to my family and my colleagues in the State’s Attorney’s office for their commitment to our city and all their hard work on behalf of the citizens of Baltimore. We have so much to be proud of and I am forever indebted to so many for their love, support, and partnership over these past eight years.”

She ran her reelection campaign on her record of reducing the population behind bars, holding police officers accountable for their actions, and reviewing convictions for potential exoneration.

A former city prosecutor and wife of a Baltimore councilman, Mosby unseated incumbent Bernstein in 2014 after a robust grassroots campaign.

Months after she took office, she grabbed national headlines by prosecuting six police officers over the death of Freddie Gray. However, all charges, including murder and manslaughter, were later dropped.

Mosby also fired a slew of veteran prosecutors upon taking office, including a 20-year veteran in the middle of an armed robbery trial against a violent repeat offender. She instead hired young, inexperienced lawyers to fill the posts.

Many veterans resigned, including Roya Hanna, who now works as a defense attorney.

In a previous interview, Hanna told The Epoch Times that while working as a defense attorney, she saw the quality of prosecution plummet under Mosby, from plea offers to trial performance.

“These prosecutors are young, and they don’t know what they don’t know. There is such a high turnover that they don’t have many old guards around to seek guidance from,” Hanna told The Epoch Times.

Hanna is running as an independent in the race and will face Bates in the general election. Baltimore is heavily Democratic, and there is no Republican candidate in the race.

At the height of the pandemic, Mosby also stopped prosecuting nine categories of nonviolent, low-level crimes, including drug possession, prostitution, and trespassing. She later made the policy permanent.

In January, Mosby was indicted on federal charges of perjury and making false mortgage applications. She allegedly made false applications to withdraw retirement money to purchase a vacation home in Florida. Mosby has pleaded not guilty on all charges.

In a February status report, federal prosecutors said they anticipated the trial to take place in days.

However, U.S. District Judge Lydia Griggsby later agreed to Mosby’s request to postpone the trial date until after the Democratic primary. The trial is scheduled to begin on Sept. 19.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

With The Washington Post blaring that “Big Tech is bracing for a possible recession,” the Biden White House is redefining the word.

A recession is traditionally defined as two consecutive quarters in which the nation’s Gross Domestic Product shrinks. A new report Thursday will assess the results of the second quarter. Shrinkage took place in the first quarter, and with inflation running at 9.1 percent, there’s not a lot of hope for economic good news.

As noted by Business Insider, economists Bloomberg surveyed believe growth will be a paltry 0.9 percent, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model pegs shrinkage at 1.6 percent.

“The big headwinds for consumers are price inflation and higher interest rates. And inflation could erode the excess savings consumers accumulated through the pandemic, especially if price increases continue to run ahead of wage growth,” Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank said Thursday, according to CNN.

“We’re seeing an increase in bad debt to slightly higher than pre-pandemic levels as well as extended cash collection cycles,”  AT&T CEO John Stankey said the same day.

Yellen: There’s an org called the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks at a broad range of data…I will be would be amazed if the NBER would declare this period to be a recession

FLASHBACK: in ’08, NBER didn’t announce until Dec the recession had begun A YEAR EARLIER

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) July 24, 2022

But consumer pain does not make a recession, according to a White House handout,

“What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data,” the handout said, listing labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production and income data will all be mined.

The White then offered a prediction: “Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year — even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter — indicates a recession.”

Despite the growing mountain of gloomy economic forecasts, the handout said, “Recession probabilities are never zero, but trends in the data through the first half of this year used to determine a recession are not indicating a downturn.”

In fact, it said, “There is a good chance that the strength of the labor market and of consumer balance sheets help the economy transition from the rapid growth of the last year to steadier and more stable growth.”

Biden owns this recession. He is the WORST resident in American history.

— Proud Elephant 🇺🇸 (@ProudElephantUS) July 21, 2022

Related:

Levin: Joe Biden Is ‘Sabotaging’ Economy, Implementing Marxist Ideology Under Guise of Climate Policy

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers was not as chipper. In a Sunday interview, he called chances of coming out of the battle against inflation without a scarred economy “very unlikely,” according to Bloomberg.

“There’s a very high likelihood of recession when we’ve been in this kind of situation before,” he said.

“Recession has essentially always followed when inflation has been high and our employment has been low,” he said.

Summers said new policies are needed.

“There’s a lot we can do to contain or control inflation,” he said. “But if we continue with the kind of ostrich policies we had in 2021, there’s going to be much, much more pain later.”

What began as a situation involving a woman barricaded in a hotel room has morphed into a Twitter campaign to free Baltimore-area resident Shanteari Weems, who admits she shot her husband.

The incident began Thursday night at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C.

According to a police affidavit, the smoke detector went off in Weems ‘ hotel room and is believed to have been triggered by a gun being fired.

A hotel staff member who responded “observed blood on the wall” after entering the room.

When police responded, Weems would not let them in. The man in the room called out that he had been shot. Weems remained barricaded inside the room for about 30 minutes, according to WRC-TV.

After police forced their way into the room, Weems offered a justification for shooting the man, who she said was her husband of five years, according to The Washington Post.

She said children at the daycare she runs in Maryland told her that her husband had molested them. Weems said she reported the allegation to the proper authorities.

Police said a notebook with comments about the shooting  included one from Weems that said, “I’m going to shoot [victim], but not kill him.”

Weems said she shot her husband because during their argument over the allegations, he rose and came towards her.

Weems has been held in jail pending a hearing Monday, which enraged some activists on Twitter.

People across social media platforms are yelling “Free Her” after Shanteari Weems was arrested for shooting her husband. Weems owns a day care center & alleges her husband was molesting some of the children at said establishment.https://t.co/a6IfNq653D

— TheShadeRoom (@TheShadeRoom) July 24, 2022

“Free her” – Americans tell police to free woman and Daycare owner, Shanteari Weems, who shot her husband for allegedly molesting children at the centerhttps://t.co/SqaE2hMFGP

— 🇺🇸KossyDerrickEnt (@KossyDerrickEnt) July 24, 2022

Man Requests Police Ride-Along But Is Thrown in Cuffs After Cops Take a Closer Look

Shanteari Weems alleges she shot her husband because he was molesting kids at her day care business, court documents say https://t.co/WBLOGTqWo6 #DomesticViolence pic.twitter.com/Rcxu9K3Cbf

— Lipstick Alley (@lipstickalley) July 23, 2022

Weems, 50, of Randallstown, operates a daycare in Owings Mills, according to the Baltimore Sun.

The Baltimore Sun did not release the husband’s name but said he was a former Baltimore Police officer who retired department in 2005 and served as a contractor through 2008.

Police said the man’s wounds are not life-threatening.

Sgt. Gladys Brown, of the Baltimore County Police, said the daycare is closed “while an investigation moves forward.”

“Baltimore County detectives are currently monitoring the recent developments in Washington D.C.,” Brown said in a statement. “Due to the sensitive circumstances leading up to this incident, the Baltimore County Police Department continues to support the families impacted.”

Weems faces charges of assault with intent to kill and assault with a dangerous weapon.

David Jakubonis, the man facing federal charges for getting on stage with a weapon in his hand last week and moving toward Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, has told investigators who was behind his actions:

And it turns out it was Jakubonis alone — with some fuel from the whiskey he’d been drinking, according to Fox News.

Jakubonis told investigators he didn’t even know who was speaking when he confronted Zeldin, according to Fox, which cited a criminal complaint.

Video from Thursday’s event at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Fairpoint, New York, shows Jakubonis calmly walk on stage as U.S. Rep. Zeldin was speaking.

Jakubonis can be heard saying “you’re done” several times in the video as he moved toward Zeldin.

The video also shows Jakubonis holding in his right hand with his index and middle finger what appears to be a “self-defense keychain” that looks like a cartoon cat’s head, with ears protruding as two points.

The two men got into a minor scuffle before others rushed to tackle the intruder and he was taken into custody.

Zeldin then got back on stage and continued his speech.

Jakubonis was initially released on his own recognizance after the incident, but on Saturday was arrested by federal authorities and charged with assaulting a member of Congress with a deadly weapon.

The man accused of attempting to stab New York gubernatorial nominee Rep. Lee Zeldin on stage at a campaign event has been arrested on a federal assault chargehttps://t.co/vSa8eumQC7

— CNN (@CNN) July 24, 2022

If convicted, Jakubonis faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, according to a Justice Department news release.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, some Republicans accused Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul of encouraging opponents of the GOP to “stalk” Zeldin.

On Thursday, hours before the confrontation occurred, according to the New York Post, Hochul’s campaign put out a news release listing the dates and times of some upcoming Zeldin events and encouraging liberals to “RSVP” the Zeldin campaign.

“The Hochul campaign is encouraging people to stalk Lee Zeldin,” Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman said, according to the New York Post. “This is what the liberals have done to our Supreme Court justices.”

That’s a reference to the Justice Department charging a California man who was arrested near U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house in Maryland last month with attempting or threatening to kidnap or murder a U.S. judge.

Blakeman went on to say, “It’s wrong. Kathy Hochul should have known better.”

State Republican Party spokeswoman Jessica Proud agreed.

Watch: Crowd Gasps as Woman Collapses During Lee Zeldin’s Live Press Conference

“The Hochul campaign’s rhetoric was incendiary and over the top,” she told the Post. “They ginned this up.”

Politicians are likely on edge about security breaches for another reason.

Earlier this month, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s former prime minister, was shot twice and killed while giving a speech on a street in the city of Nara, Japan.

Hochul used social media to express relief that Zeldin was okay, while also denouncing political violence.

My team has informed me about the incident at Lee Zeldin’s campaign event tonight. Relieved to hear that Congressman Zeldin was not injured and that the suspect is in custody. I condemn this violent behavior in the strongest terms possible — it has no place in New York.

— Kathy Hochul (@KathyHochul) July 22, 2022

“My team has informed me about the incident at Lee Zeldin’s campaign event tonight,” Hochul wrote in a Thursday night tweet. “Relieved to hear that Congressman Zeldin was not injured and that the suspect is in custody.

“I condemn this violent behavior in the strongest terms possible – it has no place in New York.”

Two of Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes’s biggest donors are major funders of the “defund the police” movement and bankrolled a successful campaign to remove law enforcement from schools in crime-plagued Oakland, California.

Barnes’s leadership committee—a political fundraising committee that candidates often use for personal expenses unconnected to their campaigns—raked in 13 percent of its donations this year from millionaire real estate developer Wayne Jordan and his wife, Quinn Delaney, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The couple is heavily involved in left-wing and anti-police activism through their charity, the Akonadi Foundation.

The funding could complicate Barnes’s attempts to distance himself from the increasingly unpopular “defund the police” movement. Barnes, who serves as Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, previously partnered with anti-cop groups, sponsored a bill to end cash bail, and took $28,000 in campaign donations from an organization that supports defunding police, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

But Barnes’s campaign told the Free Beacon in February that he “does not support defunding the police.”

Jordan and Delaney, who contributed $10,000 in May to Barnes’s leadership committee Leading the PAC and $5,800 to his campaign, are prominent in the progressive activist world.

The couple founded an Oakland-based nonprofit group, the Akonadi Foundation, that in 2020 pledged $12.5 million to fight to “fix school discipline,” remove police from schools, and close juvenile detention centers. In June 2020, the Oakland Unified School District board voted to dismantle the school system’s police department—and even temporarily shut down a popular police volunteer mentorship program for students—because it claimed the presence of officers was “fundamentally undermining the economic and public health of the Black community by restricting access and opportunity.”

The Akonadi Foundation went even further than objecting to law enforcement in schools, arguing that police departments should be defunded entirely.

“To address police violence instead of reforming we need to defund police & invest in non-police solutions,” said the Akonadi Foundation in a June 4, 2020, Twitter post, adding in another post that “cities across the U.S. need to defund the police and invest in communities of color.”

The decision to remove police security from schools was one of several anti-law enforcement initiatives adopted in Oakland and neighboring areas that preceded a massive crime spike in the city.

The city recorded over 130 homicides last year, the highest since 2006, and residents have decried a sharp increase in youth crimes, with kids as young as 11 committing car jackings and robberies, according to reports. In May, officials reportedly recovered 15 pounds of fentanyl and over $100,000 from drug traffickers operating out of a school parking lot in Oakland.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Branch says it ‘derives its strength from the diversity of its force’

The Minnesota Army National Guard paid tens of thousands of dollars to advertise in an LGBT publication that has promoted transgenderism and “queer” identities among children.

The National Guard, which operates through the Department of Defense, between 2019 and 2022 awarded $76,951 to Minneapolis-based Lavender magazine, paying for advertising campaigns in an effort to “reach the LGBTQ community” and “lend credibility to the National Guard.” Between May 2021 and May 2022 alone, it paid $22,224 to the LGBT magazine, according to a federal government contract disclosure. The advertising campaign appears to be related to the Minnesota National Guard’s “LGBT Special Emphasis Council.”

The magazine focuses on LGBT issues, and has published multiple profiles on children who identify as transgender. As the National Guard was paying for advertising in October 2021, for example, Lavender published a profile of 11-year-old boy Hildie Edwards, who identifies as “trans nonbinary.” The magazine also publishes a monthly column written by transgender activist Ellie Krug, who in a 2016 piece compared using bathrooms that align with biological sex to the Holocaust. Krug ends the piece by offering to speak at the schools of “trans youth in Minnesota.”

The National Guard is not the only military organization to promote transgenderism under the Biden administration. Republican senators found that the military has subjected service members to nearly six million hours of diversity, equity, and inclusion training. The Army this year coached officers on “when to offer soldiers gender transition surgery,” while the Navy in May published a video that instructs sailors on “proper gender pronouns,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. After combat veterans criticized what they consider the military’s “woke” posturing, left-wing pundits called them racists.

Stephen Rocheford, the president of Lavender magazine, told the Free Beacon that “the reason the MN National Guard and Lavender magazine have a good relationship is because of statistics.” Rocheford pointed to a study commissioned by the magazine that indicated that LGBTQ individuals are overrepresented among the Minnesota National Guard. He said that the magazine has “received positive feedback from Minnesota National Guard leaders” and “from the LGBTQ+ community.”

A spokesperson for the Minnesota National Guard in a statement told the Free Beacon the branch “derives its strength from the diversity of its force” and “has seen an increase in LGBT+ service members.”

In addition to the paid advertisements, Lavender has provided extensive positive coverage for the Minnesota National Guard. The positive coverage is not part of the advertising contract.

The Free Beacon contacted the magazine to inquire as to whether their coverage of the guard was related to their business relationship.

In its 2021 contract with Lavender, the National Guard requires the magazine to ensure the branch is “not associated with drugs, alcohol, adult content, or sites that may damage brand reputation.”

The magazine has run pieces that allege a connection between BDSM sex and Christianity, positively portrayed an organization that distributes LGBT books to kindergartners, and promoted a group that pairs children with LGBT “mentors” without notifying their parents.

Another article in the June 2022 Pride Month issue of Lavender states, “I have been thinking about younger queer kids.” The piece, also by Krug, details the author’s experience as a transgender woman mentoring “queer” middle and high school students on gender and sexuality through a local school district. Krug called the activities “holy work.”

“We need to protect the kids,” Krug’s essay concludes. “It always has to be about the kids.”

The National Guard shares advertising space in Lavender with Planned Parenthood and “gaymortgage.com,” among other advertisers.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon