Aircraft, guns, vehicles left behind during Biden’s bungled withdrawal
The Taliban is in possession of nearly $7.2 billion in U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons, ammunition, and aircraft as a result of the Biden administration’s bungled 2021 military withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to a government watchdog.
“Nearly $7.2 billion worth of aircraft, guns, vehicles, ammunition, and specialized equipment” was abandoned in Afghanistan when the Biden administration carried out its rushed evacuation, according to a report published in late February by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the federal watchdog group that monitors U.S. expenditures in the country.
“At least 78 aircraft worth $923.3 million, 9,524 air-to-ground munitions valued at $6.54 million, over 40,000 vehicles, more than 300,000 weapons, and nearly all night vision, surveillance, communications, and biometric equipment provided to the [Afghan defense forces] were left behind,” according to information disclosed in SIGAR’s report.
The report comes ahead of the first public hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal in the Republican-controlled House Wednesday and is likely to fuel questions on why the administration failed to prevent the Taliban from stealing U.S. military hardware. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) says the Biden administration has stonewalled his committee’s attempts to obtain documents that could provide a window into the administration’s mishandling of the operation.
The Pentagon told SIGAR investigators that there “currently is no realistic way to retrieve the materiel that remains in Afghanistan, given that the United States does not recognize the Taliban as a government,” according to the report.
Taliban units now “patrol in pickup trucks and armored vehicles likely procured by the U.S.,” according to the report. Taliban-run special operations forces also “wear helmets with night vision mounts likely provided by the United States, and carry U.S.-provided M4 rifles equipped with advanced gunsights.”
The terrorist group also is using “more advanced U.S.-provided equipment,” such as armored vehicles and Mi-17 helicopters.
Furthermore, the Taliban is recruiting former Afghan military personnel to join its air force and fly the abandoned U.S. planes. “The pilots working for the Taliban reportedly need jobs and say the Taliban are the most reliable employer in Afghanistan,” according to the report.
A portion of the most advanced equipment and technology “remains vulnerable to exploitation by adversarial states” who want to analyze how U.S. weapons systems work. This includes “optical and communications equipment, computer software and hardware, and biometrical data.”
SIGAR also found evidence the Taliban is “attempting to summon former government employees to provide access to servers belonging to the former government that included biometric data.”
Another concern is that the Taliban “could sell a portion of the captured arms and equipment to augment its revenue flow.”
Biden administration climate czar John Kerry is criticizing oil companies over plans to increase production even as President Joe Biden has spent months pleading with them to do just that to fight high gas prices.
Kerry toldAxios that he called the CEO of BP to express discontent with the energy giant’s plan to increase its oil and gas investments by $8 billion in the next seven years. Kerry also noted his “concern” over a Chevron initiative to increase oil production in the southwestern United States to 300,000 barrels a day. The climate official went on to urge those companies to “take stock … of where the science is today” and recognize that increased fossil fuel production is at odds with global climate change goals.
Kerry’s remarks reflect the conflict between the Biden administration’s short- and long-term energy policy goals. Biden in 2020 promised to “end fossil fuel,” and after taking office, the Democrat canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and slowed new oil leasing to its lowest level since World War II. But last summer, when the average price for a gallon of gas in the United States hit $5 for the first time ever, Biden changed his tune and urged the industry to ramp up production.
Biden continued those calls through the 2022 midterm elections as the Democrat looked to avoid political blame for Americans’ pain at the pump, and he even assailed the oil industry for what he called a failure to “increase domestic production and keep gas prices down” during his February State of the Union address. Many U.S. oil companies, however, say that the Biden administration’s hostility toward fossil fuels made them hesitant to invest big money in new drilling operations. Kerry, for example, has acknowledged that the administration is working to reduce demand for oil and gas, most notably through the tens of billions of dollars it’s invested in electric vehicle subsidies and manufacturing rebates.
Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, attacked the Biden administration for its “complete inconsistency when it comes to oil and gas policies.”
“The issue is they don’t know what their energy policy is. Are they beholden to John Kerry and the environmentalists, or are they concerned with the economic stability and security of the American people?” Turner said. “And while the Biden administration is playing all of these political games with the oil and gas industry, the American people are the ones suffering.”
The White House did not return a request for comment. Kerry’s office declined to answer questions on how the climate official’s comments square with Biden’s calls to increase oil production.
While Kerry has pressed oil and gas companies to help the administration fight the “climate crisis,” his role as Biden’s climate czar has seen the former senator take gas-guzzling flights to luxury destinations around the world. From March 2021 to June 2022 alone, Kerry flew nearly 200,000 miles—the equivalent of traveling around the world more than seven times—to fight climate change, the Washington Free Beaconreported in September. Those flights produced 9.54 million pounds of carbon, roughly 300 times the average American’s carbon footprint for an entire year.
Months later, in November, Kerry attended an international climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh, an Egyptian resort town known for its long beaches and luxury resorts. In February, meanwhile, the Biden climate official jetted off to the Caribbean to “advance international cooperation among nations particularly vulnerable to the climate crisis,” a mission that took Kerry to Atlantis Paradise Island, a lush five-star resort in the Bahamas that boasts 14 swimming pools, 14 lagoons, dozens of luxury restaurants, a yacht marina, a private golf course, a world-class casino with more than 700 slot machines, at least 3 nightclubs, and a movie theater.
Still, Kerry has taken action to reduce his carbon footprint on at least one occasion. Last summer, his family sold their private jet—which flew for more than 60 hours during Kerry’s time as climate czar—to a New York City hedge fund.
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Dear friend, Although the Biden administration continues to brazenly mandate gender identity ideology on Christian college campuses, one brave college has just asked the U.S. Supreme Court to protect its rights.
The College of the Ozarks is a religious school in Missouri, and the Christian faith is integral to how it operates.
Not surprisingly, the college believes that sex is created by God and unchangeable. And it runs its dorms accordingly.
Alliance Defending Freedom is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the college as they fight to protect their right—and yours—to live out their faith without fear of government punishment.
But this is only possible through your support. And the fight for religious freedom is a lengthy battle.
Why is the college asking the U.S. Supreme Court for justice? We’re asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the college’s case because a radical Biden administration mandate would FORCE colleges and universities to open their dorms, bathrooms, and showers to members of the opposite sex.
Colleges that refuse to comply—the ones that hold to fundamental values and refuse to bend the knee to the Biden administration—risk paying massive fines and, in extreme circumstances, even prison.
This is blatantly unconstitutional. And the College of the Ozarks has stood up against this edict.
But three lower court judges have said the college does not even have the right to ask courts for an order protecting their students from this illegal mandate. So the college has just appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to give the college its day in court.
The federal government’s directive that Alliance Defending Freedom is fighting applies to dorms at all colleges where any student can apply—even private, religious colleges, whether or not they accept federal funds.
This case is about countering the Biden administration’s agenda that is at direct odds with religious freedom. It’s about ensuring that a radical gender identity ideology isn’t forcefully imposed on anyone.
The outcome of this case could be a landmark decision for the right of Christian institutions to operate according to their beliefs, not the government’s ever-changing demands.
Family says video shows Sicknick ‘shake off the chemical irritants and resume his duties’
Newly released footage from Fox News host Tucker Carlson appears to show U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick walking in the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, breach, which Carlson said is evidence that top lawmakers lied about his death to claim a “deadly insurrection” occurred that day.
The new footage released by Fox News on Monday evening shows Sicknick walking through the building and motioning to protesters. Carlson stated that the footage of him walking disputes allegations in anonymously sourced reports and by top members of Congress that he was killed by rioters outside.
At one point in the clip, Sicknick is seen gesturing to protesters to move out of the building. He does not appear impaired in any way, although the clip is only a few seconds long.
“Whatever happened to Brian Sicknick was very obviously not the result of violence he suffered at the entrance to the Capitol. This tape overturns the single most powerful and politically useful lie the Democrats have told us about January 6,” Carlson said, whose team reported that electronic tags indicate that the House January 6 subcommittee had examined the same footage of Sicknick but never brought it up in its final report or during several televised hearings.
Starting with a New York Times report published in early 2021, claims that Sicknick was bludgeoned to death by Jan. 6 rioters were circulated by top Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden administration. They cited his death in claiming that the Capitol breach was a “deadly insurrection.”
An autopsy report released by the Washington, D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office shows that Sicknick died of a stroke the day after Jan. 6, ruling that it was caused by “natural causes.” The U.S. Capitol Police released a statement soon after, saying the officer “died in the line of duty” and was “courageously defending Congress and the Capitol.”
Authorities said that Sicknick was attacked with pepper spray by rioters, although the D.C. Medical Examiner’s office said that he did not suffer an allergic reaction from the spray. The report, released in April 2021, said the officer suffered two strokes and died on Jan. 7, 2021.
The examiner’s office also told The Washington Post at the time that it found no evidence of internal or external injuries. “All that transpired played a role in his condition,” the examiner said.
The Epoch Times has contacted the U.S. Capitol Police for comment.
Family Responds
After Carlson aired the footage, Sicknick’s family released a rambling statement to news outlets and claimed Carlson is trying to “rip our wounds wide open again.” It added, “Every time the pain of that day seems to have ebbed a bit, organizations like Fox rip our wounds wide open again and we are frankly sick of it. Leave us the hell alone.”
Later in their statement, Sicknick’s family claimed that the video shows the officer is trying to “shake off the chemical irritants and resume his duties.” The statement did not address assertions that his death was not caused by the incidents at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
A U.S. Capitol Police officer stands at the door of the Capitol Rotunda near where the late U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick will lie in honor in Washington, Feb. 2, 2021. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via AP, Pool)
Weeks after his death, a family member of the officer told the Daily Mail that he “wasn’t hit on the head,” disputing the earlier NY Times reporting. Video footage released by Fox on Monday showed Sicknick was wearing a helmet.
Meanwhile, a New Jersey man who was at the U.S. Capitol and used pepper spray on officers, including Sicknick, received a sentence of 80 months in prison in late January 2023. Federal prosecutors alleged that 33-year-old Julian Khater sprayed Sicknick and two other officers, and he pleaded guilty in September 2022 to two felony counts of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers with a dangerous weapon. He was not charged with murder, attempted murder, or negligent homicide.
Defense attorney Chad Seigel said earlier this year the medical examiner’s autopsy confirmed that Khater didn’t directly or indirectly cause the officer’s death. “If there was any evidence to the contrary, they would have charged him,” Seigel said.
The four people who died at or near the U.S. Capitol that day were all supporters of former President Donald Trump: Ashli Babbitt, Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Phillips.
The 38th president of Brazil, Mr. Jair Bolsonaro, was in Washington DC over the weekend — where he gave a speech at one of the largest annual gatherings of conservatives in America.
His speech centered around the difficulties of fighting against communist and socialist forces — while at the same time offering hope for the future.
And while he was in Washington, we here at the Epoch Times were able to sit down and get an exclusive interview with President Bolsonaro, in order to get an idea of what’s happening in Brazil, what’s happening in South America more broadly — as well as what the future of global geopolitics might look like.* Click the “Save” button below the video to access it later on “My List.”
Critics say Biden admin rule adds climate and social agenda to asset managers’ primary duty of maximizing returns
The Biden administration and Congress are currently caught up in a tug-of-war over a new Labor Department rule regarding whether Americans’ retirement savings should be used to finance a climate and social justice agenda.
The conflict goes well beyond obscure investment rules and administrative procedures and is likely to affect the financial security of many Americans in their retirement years.
The controversy heated up last week with the Republican-controlled House approving a measure on a 216–204 vote to block the Biden administration’s new rule that permits the inclusion of climate change and social justice principles as pension investment criteria; Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) was the sole Democrat to support the measure. Senate Republicans passed a similar measure 50 to 46, with the support of Democrats Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who both face reelection in Republican-leaning states in 2024.
The rule was challenged under the Congressional Review Act, which is a congressional oversight mechanism that can overturn rulings by federal agencies. Biden has threatened to veto the resolution.
Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), who introduced the measure in the House, said it was “a bipartisan, bicameral joint resolution disapproving of a Department of Labor rule-making that will politicize American’s retirement accounts and jeopardize their retirement security.”
In allowing pension funds to be used for ideological purposes, the Biden administration is “giving away the basic rights of American citizens, to give more power to the radical left,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) stated.
“If you put money into a retirement plan, you expect to get the best return you can get; you expect that whoever is running it is a fiduciary to get the best return possible. What the Biden administration is saying is ‘no, you don’t have to do that … if you have some social agenda, you can focus on your social agenda.’”
Speaking on the Senate floor, Manchin said: “The ESG rule that we’re going to vote on later today is just another example of how our administration prioritizes a liberal policy agenda over protecting and growing the retirement accounts of 150 million Americans that will be in jeopardy. Our country is already facing economic uncertainty, record inflation, and increasing energy costs to keep Americans up at night, and put a squeeze on their pocketbooks.”
The White House denounced Congress’s attempt to overturn the ESG rule, branding it a “MAGA Republican” effort. Contrary to their historical positions, Democrats are now championing the freedom of pension funds and Wall Street asset managers to make their own investment decisions, while Republicans are attempting to limit fund managers to focusing purely on monetary returns.
“Republicans talk about their love of free markets, small government, and letting the private sector do its work. The Republican bill is the opposite of that,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a news briefing on March 1.
Jean-Pierre declined to elaborate when asked by The Epoch Times about the White House’s reaction to growing congressional opposition to ESG investing.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks during the daily press briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on Feb. 13, 2023. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
“As it relates to the dynamics of the Senate and where this is going, I leave that to Senator Schumer,” she said. “That’s something for him to speak to. What I can say is that if this bill reaches the president’s desk, he will veto it.”
“This isn’t about ideological preferences; it’s about looking at the biggest picture possible for investors to minimize risk and maximize returns,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stated on the Senate floor. “Why shouldn’t you look at the risks posed by increasingly volatile climate incidents?”
The conflict centers on an arcane pension law called the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which is overseen by the U.S. Department of Labor, and an equally arcane progressive investment criterion called environmental, social, and governance (ESG).
ERISA and Why It Matters
ERISA is a law enacted in 1974 to ensure that, among other things, those who manage company pension funds are held to the highest legal standard of fiduciary care, and that they act solely to maximize pecuniary, or monetary, returns for pensioners. That applies not only to what pension managers invest in, but also how they vote the shares they own.
Congress passed this law because companies were failing to honor their pension obligations to employees and because pension managers were misappropriating pension funds, in extreme cases using them as their own personal banks. In one of the more egregious abuses of retirees’ money, Teamsters President James “Jimmy” Hoffa was convicted in 1964 of fraudulently using the union’s pension fund as his personal bank, making loans to friends, buying houses, and otherwise using the funds for personal gain.
“The Hoffa thing was highly salient,” Robert Wright, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, told The Epoch Times. “Union-based funds were especially subject to malfeasance, to asset tunneling, to directing funds toward investments that aided the plan owners, the trustees, the unions as the case may be, rather than in the best interests of the employees.”
Asset tunneling is when those in control of corporate assets use them for their own purposes or personal gain.
One of the goals of ERISA was to prevent that kind of activity and set strict standards of fiduciary care. Increasingly, however, pension funds are today being used to support the ESG ideology, based on the claim that it will enhance returns for retirees while simultaneously solving environmental and social problems.
Brandon M, ranch manager at Fortitude Ranch Nevada, surveys the open range flanked by a solar panel on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Is ESG an Investment Strategy or an Ideology?
ESG is an umbrella term that encompasses concepts such as climate change, critical race theory, and social justice; it embraces policies such as reducing fossil fuel production, establishing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and implementing corporate racial and gender quotas.
Examples of ESG in practice include United Airlines mandating that half of its new pilot hires be racial minorities or women; Exxon, an oil company, adding climate change activists to its board to shift toward investing in wind and solar technology; JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs refusing to lend to Arctic oil drilling projects; and Bank of America waiving down payments on mortgage loans to minorities.
ESG advocates say that it isn’t an ideology but rather a risk-management tool. They argue that ESG provides appropriate criteria for investing pension money because companies that are highly rated in terms of ESG compliance perform better financially.
“Our research shows that companies that do well on ESG end up doing better, or fail less,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan stated in 2020. “But the most important thing, it aligns capital, aligns capitalism, it defines capitalism the way that people want to define it, which is stakeholder capitalism and solving the big problems of the world.”
New York state retirement funds declared that “ESG factors are a key component of the Fund’s analysis of both short- and long-term financial risks and opportunities.” State pension funds aren’t under the jurisdiction of ERISA, but rather of state law.
ESG, supporters say, is about prudent risk management and good corporate governance, taking into account the interests of customers, employees, the community, and the environment. This narrative is called “stakeholder capitalism,” and its underlying assumption is that, without ESG, companies would simply pursue an exploitive short-term profit motive that ignores these other factors.
But a closer look at how ESG originated, and what it has delivered to date, raises questions about the claims.
Origins of ESG, UN Sustainable Development Goals
The concept of ESG was originally developed at the United Nations Environmental Programme Financial Initiative two decades ago, as a way to implement its sustainable development goals (SDG) through its principles for responsible investing. It was a way to engage the private sector as a complement to laws and regulations being implemented by governments.
For investment managers who accepted these principles, it was essential that ESG be characterized, not as an ideology, but rather as a way to manage risk and boost investment returns, lest they be liable for violating their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
“While measuring the alignment of investments to the UN SDGs is complex and evolving task, we believe that their integration in investment decisions can help secure long-term financial performance,” states an investment primer by Carole Crozat, BlackRock’s head of sustainable investing research. “Redirecting capital towards UN SDGs could offer $12 trillion of market opportunities linked to our long-term social and environmental well-being.”
ESG has been sold to investors as a profitable way to support goals such as sustainability and social justice. An industry of ESG rating agencies, accountants, consultants, lawyers, and proxy agents has since emerged to track and assist companies with ESG compliance.
A flag of the United Nations flies in front of the organization’s headquarters in Geneva in a file photo. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP)
The biggest profits, however, may go to asset managers, who can charge higher fees for managing ESG funds because they are actively managed, versus low-fee passive index funds that simply buy all companies in an index such as the S&P 500. Meanwhile, critics contend that asset managers can’t credibly demonstrate higher returns from ESG investments, or even clearly explain what ESG criteria are.
“ESG has not been shown to be much of anything at this point,” Wright said. “It’s just a label that’s slapped on, and it’s not clear that ESG scores are related to actual improvements of any sort—environmental or social justice or the quality of governance.
“Problem No. 1 is we just don’t know what these things are measuring,” he said. “There have been several studies that have shown that funds that have highly rated ESG companies in them do not outperform funds with lower ESG scores; they simply just charge more for the ESG label.
“That on its face doesn’t seem to be following fiduciary responsibility that you should be investing for the highest net return for pensioners.”
Does ESG Really Boost Investment Returns?
Several academic studies have shown that, rather than boosting investment returns, ESG actually lowers returns.
A 2020 study by the Boston College Center for Retirement Research found that ESG investing reduced pensioners’ returns by 0.70 to 0.90 percent per year, with much of the difference attributable to higher management fees for ESG funds.
“ESG funds appear to underperform financially, relative to other funds within the same asset manager and year, and charge higher fees,” a 2021 report by Columbia University and the London School of Economics found. It further noted that companies in ESG funds have “worse track records for compliance with labor and environmental laws, relative to portfolio firms held by non-ESG funds managed by the same financial institutions.”
Regarding the benefits of “stakeholder capitalism,” “the push for stakeholder-focused objectives provides managers with a convenient excuse that reduces accountability for poor firm performance,” a 2021 study by the University of South Carolina and the University of Northern Iowa stated. The report found a correlation between a CEO’s underperformance and how vocal they were in supporting unquantifiable ESG goals.
As a result, many states, including Texas, Florida, and West Virginia, have banned their state pension funds from using ESG criteria. Regarding ERISA, the Trump administration implemented a rule in 2020 that emphasized the duty of pension fund managers to invest solely according to pecuniary criteria to the exclusion of ESG criteria. That’s the ruling that the Biden administration has reversed.
“Today’s rule clarifies that retirement plan fiduciaries can take into account the potential financial benefits of investing in companies committed to positive environmental, social, and governance actions as they help plan participants make the most of their retirement benefits,” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh stated when originally announcing the rule in November 2022. “Removing the prior administration’s restrictions on plan fiduciaries will help America’s workers and their families as they save for a secure retirement.”
Lisa M. Gomez, assistant secretary of labor for the Employee Benefits Security Administration, added that the rule “will make workers’ retirement savings and pensions more resilient by removing needless barriers, and ending the chilling effect created by the prior administration on considering environmental, social and governance factors in investments.”
“The Shadow State” clip showing the component parts of ESG. (Epoch Original)
If returns are reduced as pension managers chase ESG funds, Wright said, asset managers may profit, but “the pensioners suffer. It kind of defeats the whole purpose of ERISA.”
The problem with Biden reinterpreting ERISA to allow for ESG is that, in combination with other policies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission’s requirement that all listed companies report their CO2 emissions and plans to reduce them, it could appear to be government advocacy for ESG criteria.
According to a White House statement, Biden’s new ERISA ruling “reflects what successful marketplace investors already know—there is an extensive body of evidence that environmental, social, and governance factors can have material impacts on certain markets, industries, and companies.”
“It’s almost like they are saying, it’s now your duty to invest in ESG funds, and that’s highly problematic,” Wright said.
Drawing a parallel to Biden’s executive order to force companies to fire employees who refused the vaccine, Wright said if corporate leaders and fund managers “have independent reasons to doubt the veracity or rationality of what they’re being told to do, is their responsibility to follow the government dictates or is their responsibility to follow the spirit of the statute, in this case ERISA?”
Indeed, representatives from two of the world’s largest asset managers have recently stated that there is no financial benefit to ESG investing. Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley stated in February that “our research indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing”; Vanguard pulled out of the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative in December 2022.
“We believe that an orderly transition to a low carbon economy is much more beneficial for our clients’ portfolios. A disorderly transition can cost the global economy about a 25 percent reduction in GDP [gross domestic product].”
However, when asked by Texas lawmakers to provide evidence to support this thesis, State Street Chief Investment Officer Lori Heinel stated: “I have no evidence that this is good for returns in any time frame. In fact, we’ve seen the evidence to be quite contrary. Last year, if you didn’t own energy companies, you did miserably compared to broad benchmarks. The year before, that was quite the opposite … but that was just a happenstance, that’s not because it’s a good investment.”
Will ESG Investing Open Up Fund Managers to Lawsuits?
The statements from State Street and Vanguard undermine the case that ESG is good for retirees. And if asset managers can’t show that the pro-ESG thesis is credible, or if it turns out that investing in higher-fee ESG funds reduces pensioners’ returns, there may be legal ramifications.
In 2005, betting on the transition to renewable energy, the Obama administration provided $535 million in loan guarantees for Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that soon went bankrupt, leaving U.S. taxpayers on the hook for those lost funds. If asset managers, by contrast, are seen to have misused bets on ESG criteria, retirees may have someone to go after to recoup lost funds.
Wright said, “I imagine there are corporate lawyers in places like Davis Polk [an international law firm] who are just salivating over this, because there are sure to be lawsuits.”
Author Jennifer London seeks to pass along her late husband’s lessons on leadership to the next generation, via a new book “Ever Vigilant.”
She co-authored the work with her husband Jack Phillip London before his death in 2021 and the work was released last year.
Jack Philip London spent his life and career building one of America’s most prominent defense contracting firms, CACI.
Dr. J. Phillip London, a retired Navy Captain, and a 2019 U.S. Naval Academy Distinguished Graduate was a patriot and former military officer who became a legend in the United States government contracting industry. His memoir “Ever Vigilant, Leadership and Legacy by the Executive Chairman of CACI.” tells a powerful story about winning and achieving excellence, and Dr. Jennifer London shares the many lessons in leadership featured in the book during her speaking engagements.
Dr. Jennifer London is currently engaged in a media and speaking tour to carry on her late husband’s legacy of leadership and sat down with American Liberty News during last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
In the book, J. Phillip London outlines 12 attributes that successful leaders need to possess or develop on their leadership journeys, and when asked about what she most frequently shares with college students, Jennifer London said that the process of taking accountability was a key practice of successful leaders.
London told American Liberty News ‘taking accountability and owning your vision, whether the outcome is negative to themselves or positive is something top leaders are able to do. This is something that President Kennedy outlined in his book ‘Profiles in Courage’, and something that Jack learned from his role models – four-star admirals from WWII – who made decisions based on whether it was right, not concerned about how it would impact them.”
In addition to her work as an author and speaker, Dr. Jennifer London is the president of her own consulting firm, where she has evaluated and developed potential customers nationwide for the development of new and expanded markets for companies ranging from private businesses to Fortune 100 corporations. Much of Dr. Jennifer London’s current time is spent focusing on military and patriotic initiatives. As such, proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit U.S. Navy-affiliated charities. Last month, Jennifer London was appointed to be the honorary chair of the Navy League Foundation Board of Directors.
Christine Anderson, a member of the European Parliament and a member of Germany’s conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) party says that freedom, Democracy, and the rule of law are on the brink of collapse in Western nations and the Covid-19 pandemic is partially to blame.
“We are now violating what we thought was the foundation our societies were built on,” Anderson said.
Anderson recently completed a tour in Canada visiting the Freedom Convoy and decided to take the opportunity to attend this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) which is known to host thousands of conservative supporters, activists, and lawmakers to draw attention to the threats currently facing Western democracy.
The Freedom Convoy is a series of ongoing protests and blockades in Canada against Covid-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions. The convoy was originally created to protest vaccine mandates for crossing the United States border but later evolved into a protest about oppressive Covid-19 restrictions in general.
The German politician noted that her concerns are focused on Western democracy, admitting she doesn’t expect governments in China, North Korea, or even Russia to value ideals like freedom and rule of law.
“I hold the Western democracies to a higher standard, but we are now violating what we thought was the foundation our societies were built on and a really scary thing is that all these Western democracies seem to be in lock-step right now with whatever agenda they are trying to implement and push,” she explained.
The right-leaning EU parliament member says it’s time for the people to hold countries accountable for their actions.
“What is Democracy all about?” Anderson questioned. “Democracy is all about the people telling the government what to do, not the other way around.”
Throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, Americans were forced to shutter businesses, close schools, and blindly agree to take newly released vaccinations. And if anyone dared speak against the latest narrative regarding vaccines or the virus? They could expect to be ridiculed, questioned, and ostracized by friends, family, co-workers, and even leaders in government.
“The whole narrative about ostracizing people was frustrating…the whole narrative of ‘my choice my body’ was gone. People were ridiculed and scapegoated,” the German politician reflected.
In 2021, President Joe Biden insulted Americans who had yet to receive “the jab” conveniently forgetting the fact he had cast doubt on the vaccines while Donald Trump was in the White House.
“If you’re not vaccinated, you’re not nearly as smart as I thought you were,” Biden said.
President Biden was an outspoken critic of former President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed program which is largely credited for helping create and distribute Covid-19 vaccines.
“The way [then-President Donald Trump] talks about the vaccine is not particularly rational,”
Biden said per the Western Journal. “He’s talking about it being ready, he’s going to talk about moving it quicker than the scientists think it should be moved. … People don’t believe that he’s telling the truth, therefore they’re not at all certain they’re going to take the vaccine.”
“And one more thing,” he said. “If and when the vaccine comes, it’s not likely to go through all the tests that needs to be and the trials that are needed to be done.”
However, while Covid-19 was able to highlight some government corruption Anderson says this dangerous assault on democracy has been happening for decades.
“We’ve seen a full-blown gaslighting of the people.” Anderson said. “Now, fundamental rights are being discussed as though they are privileges that the government grants or withholds depending on the citizen’s behavior.”
But all hope is not lost. The German politician was optimistic that more people have “woken up” over the past three years and are ready to push back.
“The so-called pandemic highlighted the left’s pressure campaign to redefine certain concepts,” Anderson reckoned. “It highlighted their ridiculousness and their willingness and determination to push back against people, disenfranchise them, and take away their rights.”
Anderson noted that her home country came dangerously close to repeating history by enacting legislation that would have forced unvaccinated citizens to pay for their own medical treatments or even be turned away for treatment altogether.
Germany’s public healthcare system ensures free healthcare for all.
“My country has been there historically,” Anderson warned. “This is exactly the stuff totalitarianism is made of. I had hoped that the Germans had learned their lesson, but I have to say they have not learned a damn thing.”
However, despite what some could call insurmountable odds Christine Anderson said she’s ready to take a stand against anti-democratic efforts whenever she sees it and refuses to let history repeat itself.
“I will always say what I believe to be true. When I see parallels between another totalitarian regime I will be there and I will point it out.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom‘s (D-Calif.) administration is preparing to face a significant legal effort to overturn the state’s controversial law declaring California a “sanctuary state” for minors seeking transgender medical procedures.
On Tuesday, parental rights nonprofit, Our Watch plans to file a lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court against California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
The filing, to be submitted by Advocates for Faith and Freedom, calls for a jury trial regarding Senate Bill 107. It also seeks injunctive relief, a judicial declaration that the law is unconstitutional, as well as the recovery of attorney fees.
BIG NEWS: @GavinNewsom signed into law our bill (SB 107) to offer refuge to trans kids & their families if they’re being criminalized in their home states.
“Parents know what’s best for their kids, and they should be able to make decisions around the health of their children without fear,” Newsom said at the time. “We must take a stand for parental choice. That is precisely why I am signing Senate Bill l07.”
“California recently passed Senate Bill (‘SB’) 107, which violates the right of every parent in every state to direct the upbringing and care of their child,” according to a copy of the filing obtained by Fox News Digital. “SB 107 allows minors to obtain gender transition procedures like harmful puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries without parental consent, while denying parents access to their child’s medical information. The bill also allows California to exercise ‘emergency jurisdiction’ over minors seeking gender dysphoria treatment.”
The lawsuit contends that “SB 107 interferes with the parents right to control the important medical decisions of their children. Parents, not the government, are best suited to decide whether their child should undergo a life-altering and irreversible surgery that seeks to change the sex of the child.”
Our Watch argued the law violates the U.S. Constitution protections under the First and 14th Amendments because it “allows the ‘taking of the child’ away from his or her parents to California to obtain gender transition procedures.”
“SB 107 overrides the jurisdiction of courts in a family’s home state that are usually the proper forum for custody determinations by allowing California courts to take emergency jurisdiction to make custody determinations over a child struggling with gender dysphoria,” the lawsuit says. “California has decided that its courts – not those of the family’s home state – should be the final arbiters of whether parents are fit to raise their child.”
The California law intent on targeting vulnerable minors has gotten considerable criticism from de-transition activists and experts like Chloe Cole and Oli London.
“As someone who has been harmed by these policies, it is imperative that we challenge SB 107 because it will allow vulnerable children from other states to undergo life-altering and harmful surgeries and drugs,” Cole said in a statement.
House Republicans will use its spending power to restrict funding to the FBI, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), head of the lower chamber’s Judiciary Committee and its weaponization subcommittee, said on Sunday.
Jordan said on Fox New’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that Republicans in the lower chamber will use its “power of the purse,” or spending power designated to it by the Constitution, to restrict federal funding sent to the FBI, as the weaponization subcommittee progresses further in investigations into FBI conduct.
“We’re going to look to propose legislation, and in the end, the real power of Congress, the real power of the legislative branch, is the power of the purse,” Jordan told host Maria Bartiromo. “And we’re going to have to use that both on this issue where we think the government’s been targeting the very people it’s supposed to serve. But also, frankly, on the border—I think we’re going to have to look at ways to use the appropriation process to deal with the border situation.”
‘Egregious Behavior’
Driving the Republican lawmaker’s proposed move is a long list of what Jordan describes as “egregious behavior” by the FBI.
A recent example was revealed when FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle told lawmakers that the FBI created “threat tags” to target pro-life protesters, the lawmaker said, citing Boyle’s interview with Fox published on March 2, 2023. Before using the tags to track pro-lifers, the FBI used the threat tags to track potential threats to the Supreme Court following the court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Boyle told Fox.
“A tag is merely a statistical tool to track information for review and reporting,” the FBI said in a statement to Fox. “The creation of a threat tag in no way changes the long-standing requirements for opening an investigation, nor does it represent a shift in how the FBI prioritizes threats.”
A seal reading “Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation” is displayed on the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building in Washington on Aug. 9, 2022. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
Other allegations Jordan touched on in the Sunday interview include the FBI’s involvement in alleged political censorship on social media, the agency’s lack of transparency with intelligence on COVID-19 origins, alleged targeting of parents protesting at school boards and traditional Catholics, and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which Jordan characterized as election interference.
As a response to these allegations, the Judiciary Committee is laying the groundwork and collecting relevant information before eventually approaching the compulsory subpoena process targeting the FBI, the lawmaker said. He added that the legislative branch could prohibit the FBI from using federal funding for certain purposes.
“[We can] say, this funding can’t be used for X, this funding can’t be used for Y, or limit the funding overall,” Jordan said. “Those are things you have to do, or you don’t have the leverage to change, again, this egregious behavior we’re seeing from these agents.”
FBI Whistleblowers
Jordan said the committee has spoken to three FBI whistleblowers who are willing to go public with their interviews and a couple of dozen others who choose to remain anonymous.
Currently, the Judiciary Committee is seeking to speak with 16 FBI employees for “transcribed interviews,” to inform potential legislative reforms to the FBI’s operations and activities, according to a March 3 letter Jordan sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray. The letter was first reported by Breitbart News.
The Epoch Times has contacted Jordan’s office for comment.
The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington on July 21, 2022. (Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times)
Agency Response
In response to a press inquiry from The Epoch Times on Jordan’s claims, a spokesperson from the FBI said the agency does not “conduct investigations based on a person’s views.”
“The men and women of the FBI devote themselves to protecting the American people from terrorism, violent crime, cyber threats, and other dangers,” the FBI spokesperson said.
“We focus on violence, threats of violence, and other illegal activity regardless of the underlying motivation or what side of an issue a person is on. We do not conduct investigations based on a person’s views. While outside opinions and criticism often come with the job, we will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead, do things by the book, and speak through our work,” the spokesperson added.
Recently released bodycam video from DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers provides more angles to the Jan. 6 beating of protester Victoria White in the Lower West Terrace tunnel at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
The newest bodycam footage, from Officer Jeffrey Leslie, was captured directly behind MPD Cmdr. Jason Bagshaw, who landed most of the baton strikes and punches to White’s head and face during a four-minute span on Jan. 6, 2021.
In the Leslie footage, three officers land strikes, jabs, and stabs at White in the tunnel, starting just before 4:10 p.m.
An ear-piercing siren blared throughout White’s time in the tunnel, making it difficult to hear what was being said.
Bagshaw used his steel baton like a lance and a spear for some of the strikes on White, thrusting it through gaps between other officers and along the tunnel wall as White spun around trying to shield herself.
Officer Leslie slid his baton along the tunnel wall behind the legs of an MPD officer standing on a ledge. It’s not clear if those strikes made contact with White.
At 4:08 p.m., Bagshaw jabbed overhand like a spear, then switched to forehand and delivered at least six blows. On the video, the bright red of White’s sweater was visible occasionally through the arms and bodies of the officers who surrounded her.
The bodycam of the officer standing on the ledge showed Bagshaw’s closed fist as he repeatedly punched White with his left hand. She was visible only briefly, but previously released overhead security camera footage captured the punches to White’s head and face.
‘You’re Going to Kill Her’
Another bodycam, from an officer farther ahead in the tunnel, shows a man in the corner who begged police not to strike White, just as Bagshaw began punching her.
At 4:09 p.m., the man said: “No, no, no, please! Please don’t beat her,” according to the video. Two minutes later, as police shouted at him to “move it, keep walking!” the man replied, “No! You’re going to kill her!”
A police officer grabs the arm of protester Victoria White in the Lower West Terrace tunnel at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Metropolitan Police Department/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)
White stood with her back to the tunnel wall with her arms crossed above her in an effort to protect her head from the batons.
At 4:09 p.m., an officer to Bagshaw’s left made an overhead spearing motion with at least nine thrusts at White, the video shows.
When White’s back was again pressed against the tunnel wall, Bagshaw used his right hand and stabbed his baton at her six times, the video shows.
White said she was horrified by the bodycam images.
“God allowed me to blackout for a reason,” White told The Epoch Times. “I honestly thought one or two officers beating me from the other publicly released footage was horrific, but it looks like four or more had beat me.
“To make matters worse is that all this footage I’m seeing for the very first time wasn’t shown to me by any attorney,” White said. “The last two bodycams were exculpatory, as I’m sure this is.”
White Faces Charges
In a superseding indictment filed in January 2022, White was charged with civil disorder and aiding and abetting, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building. She pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.
White had been scheduled to enter into a plea agreement with prosecutors at a February hearing, but decided days earlier to reject a plea and proceed to a May 8 trial date. At a March 3 hearing before U.S. District Judge John Bates, White said she planned to obtain new legal counsel.
On Feb. 10, prosecutors asked Judge Bates to jail White because she had been on Capitol Hill meeting with GOP lawmakers as part of a group that included Micki Witthoeft—the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd. They said White’s presence in Washington violated her terms of pretrial release. The judge did not jail her but said any meetings with federal lawmakers would have to be pre-approved.
In the original statement of facts filed by the FBI in White’s case, the government included video screenshots of White’s hands and asserted she was trying to grab a police shield, grab at the officer on the ledge, and use her hand “to block the baton.” The document says police were trying to “fend her off.”
The document does not mention the 39 blows to White’s head, face, and body delivered by Bagshaw and other officers. Nor does it detail how the officer on the ledge repeatedly sprayed oleoresin capsicum onto her face as she flopped back and forth between officers—something revealed on security-camera video.
Federal prosecutors in another Jan. 6 criminal case identified Bagshaw as the MPD supervisor who repeatedly struck White.
Metropolitan Police Department has declined to comment on White’s case. The department deemed all of its uses of force on Jan. 6 to be justified.
Everybody, especially conservative justices, must understand and resist this demonization game.
ccording to a recent Washington Post op-ed, conservative judges—especially those on the Supreme Court—should not exist. But they do. And they continue to issue rulings based on judicial philosophies of natural law, due process, and judicial review rather than on left-wing activism.
Columnist Perry Bacon sees this as a big problem. But since it’s not possible to pack the Supreme Court just yet or to get rid of all of the conservative judges, he offers an “informal” solution: Shame them all. Relentlessly. Keep telling them and the public that their rulings are “bigoted.” The goal is “to make Republican judges less conservative in their rulings,” by appealing to their concern for their reputations and desire for respect.
The reasoning is not hard to unpack. The op-ed promotes an age-old tactic to force people to comply with agendas against their better judgment: the threat of ostracism. However, this strategy certainly does not reflect a positive use of shame in a civil society when, for example, a parent might scold a child for bullying. Or, on a greater scale, when we might denounce those who have clearly committed crimes against humanity.
Rather, this use of the term “shame” is a euphemism for a full-fledged demonization campaign. The essay openly calls for “a sustained campaign of condemnation” of conservative judges through heavy-duty mobbing:
Democratic politicians, left-leaning activist groups, newspaper editorial boards and other influential people and institutions need to start relentlessly blasting Republican-appointed judges. A sustained campaign of condemnation isn’t going to push these judges to write liberal opinions, but it could chasten them toward more moderate ones.
Why is this necessary? After all, left-wing leaders in America probably have at their disposal well over 90 percent of all media outlets. They have also captured virtually every institution, the corporate world, Big Tech, medicine, academia, and billionaires galore. They also have the White House and Senate. And even though they’re a minority in the House, they can use their defamation tactics to pick off chosen “Republicans” whenever they deem it necessary.
But that’s not enough for them. They insist on 100 percent compliance from every single corner of society. This is why any conservative in the judiciary, particularly on the Supreme Court, irritates them to no end. Any independent voice is a source of never-ending angst for them. Those who do not prop up their narratives—a physician offering a second opinion on COVID treatment or a teacher who isn’t all in with pronoun protocols—must be canceled and defamed as sources of “disinformation” and/or “hate.”
Demonization is the primary tool of tyrants because they generally cannot win real arguments, or, increasingly, real elections. So the goal is to socially isolate a person—or a group of people—and to build public opinion hostility against those targets so that they either comply or are canceled. This defamation also sends a strong message to all witnesses: if you want to be “respected,” you must cave and obey. Or you’re next.
The natural fear of ostracism is easily exploited because human beings have an innate need to connect with other people. At the same time, we have a primal fear of being ostracized. So demonizing labels—like “bigot,” “hater,” “fascist,” “white supremacist,” “conspiracy theorist,” and so on—tend to cause a lot of people to shut up or even lie about what they believe.
This emotional extortion seems to have worked with former Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy who wrote up a fluffy nonsensical decision in Obergefell, crowning himself a hero in the eyes of the rainbow brigade. Chief Justice John Roberts also made nice with the Left in 2012 when he saved Obamacare by inexplicably calling its individual mandate a “tax.” The same dynamic seems to have affected Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Bacon notes that Kavanaugh has responded to the harassment by writing opinions that “seem almost intentionally written to minimize public blowback.”
There are two great ironies here. First, those who go on the attack do not really care about those they claim to be protecting. The evidence is overwhelming. They don’t care about any “transgender” person who wants to de-transition. Their cavalier response to the environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio shows how little they care about the environment or the people who suffer in such crises.
They also tend to be pro-violence whenever violence supports their agendas. They consistently promote the mobbing and demonization tactics promoted by Saul Alinsky: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” and “rub resentments raw” in order to “agitate to the point of conflict.” Such incitement seems to be exactly what was behind the assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh. If the roles were reversed, the Left would label it “stochastic terrorism,” and conservatives would join in condemning such violence. But when violence is used to advance leftist agendas, the Left tends to either ignore or celebrate such incidents.
The second irony is that those who cave to the pressures, falsely believing they will get relief and “respect” by doing so, are actually digging themselves deeper into isolation. They are also cultivating political correctness, which results in more self-censorship and the further atomization of society. Because if we can’t have simple, open, honest conversations with others or with a public audience, we are in a state of isolation.
Everybody, especially conservative justices, must understand and resist this demonization game. You will getless respect—not more—by kowtowing in any way to protect your “reputation” or “legacy.” Worse, we will all end up harassed if conservative judges compromise the constitutional principles that stand between tyranny and freedom.
Americans are right to be concerned about the impact of illegal immigration on crime. Studies suggesting otherwise are deeply flawed.
hen Joe Biden chose to revoke the Trump Administration’s border rules, he sparked an unprecedented crisis at the southern border. The illegal immigrant population has already risen by 2 million since Biden’s inauguration, and the flow has not stopped. Some of the consequences of this crisis are indisputable—a strain on border communities, a fiscal burden for taxpayers, and a weakening of the rule of law.
Another important consequence, although fraught with controversy, is a potential increase in violent crime. Despite advocates’ repeated insistence that illegal immigrants do not threaten public safety, the evidence is not so clear. In fact, some data out of Texas suggest that illegal immigrants are convicted of homicide and sexual assault at higher rates than the state average.
In thinking about illegal immigrant criminality, it is important to distinguish the number of crimes from the rate of crime. There is no question that illegal immigrants have committed a large number of crimes in border states such as Texas. The state’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) reports that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants have been arrested in Texas on all manner of charges, including 986 homicide charges dating back to 2011.
These numbers are damning enough for some opponents of illegal immigration. From their perspective, the only acceptable number of illegal immigrant crimes is zero, since illegal immigrants should not be here in the first place. If we want to know the impact of illegal immigration specifically on public safety, however, we need to consider the rate at which illegal immigrants commit crime. After all, a town with 10,000 people and three murders is clearly safer than a town with 1,000 people and two murders, even though the latter has fewer total murders.
Activists argue that illegal immigrants have below-average rates of crime. Their exhibit A is Texas, where DPS collects and distributes some of the best data on the immigration status of arrestees and convicts. These researchers added up the number of crime convictions of people who were identified as illegal upon arrest, divided by the estimated population of illegals in the state, and found a conviction rate that was lower than the state average. Therefore, they concluded, illegal immigration actually makes Texas safer.
That conclusion is dubious. A recent report I co-authored for the Center for Immigration Studies shows that prior studies misclassified many illegals as natives or legal immigrants, thus understating the illegal immigrant crime rate. The mistake occurred because not all illegal immigrants are immediately identified as such when they are arrested. Some are later identified in prison, while others may never have their status discovered if they are released without sufficient time for an investigation.
When my co-authors and I re-ran the numbers to include both illegals identified at arrest and illegals identified in prison, we found that illegal immigrants in Texas appeared to have above-average conviction rates for serious crimes such as homicide, sexual assault, and kidnapping. To illustrate, the number of homicide convictions per 100,000 among illegal immigrants was 3.4 in 2017, compared to 2.9 for the overall Texas population. The disparity in sexual assault convictions per 100,000 was even more stark—19.4 among illegal immigrants versus just 9.5 for the state overall.
There are several caveats. First, the DPS classifications remain incomplete and subject to revision. Second, although we used the most widely-accepted estimates of the total illegal population in Texas, the actual number is unknown. (Underestimating the total illegal alien population would cause an overstatement of their crime rate.)
Furthermore, illegal immigrants in the DPS data seem to have below-average conviction rates for robbery, drugs, and a host of lesser offenses. If we naively add up illegal immigrant convictions for all crimes, we find an overall lower rate than the state average. As mentioned above, however, not all illegals are identified upon arrest or even while in prison. Key determinants of whether illegals will be identified in prison are the seriousness of their offense and their length of stay. So while authorities have extensive time and incentive to investigate the immigration status of convicted murderers and rapists, they are less likely to investigate the status of people convicted of simple assault or theft.
To summarize, we know little about the overall crime rate of illegal immigrants in Texas, except that it is probably understated in the DPS data. There is stronger evidence that illegal immigrants are convicted of serious offenses such as homicide and sexual assault at above-average rates, but more research is needed.
In the meantime, blanket statements that illegal immigrants make their communities safer are unwarranted. Americans are right to be concerned about the impact of illegal immigration on crime. Their concern is yet another reason to secure the border as quickly as possible.
The World Health Organization’s new chief scientist made a crucial change to an influential 2020 paper that claimed it was “improbable” that COVID-19 came from a laboratory, a newly disclosed email shows.
Jeremy Farrar, the chief scientist, was credited in one message with helping guide the paper about the origin of COVID-19, according to an email released by the U.S. House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic on March 5.
“Thanks for shepherding this paper. Rumors of bioweaponeering are now circulating in China,” Dr. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University professor, wrote to Farrar in the message.
“Yes I know and in US – why so keen to get out ASAP. I will push nature,” Farrar responded.
In the early 2020 paper, Lipkin and four co-authors claimed that “it is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.”
SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.
A draft of the manuscript, published by Nature, included a different word, the House panel found.
“Sorry to micro-manage/microedit! But would you be willing to change one sentence?” Farrar wrote to Kristian Andersen, who co-authored the paper, in an email just one day before publication.
Farrar asked to insert “improbable” in place of “unlikely,” the email showed.
“Sure,” Andersen responded.
The paper also stated that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct” and that the authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
“This evidence suggests that Dr. Farrar was more involved in the drafting and publication of Proximal Origin than previously known and possibly should have been credited or acknowledged for this involvement,” the panel said.
Asked for a comment from Farrar, the World Health Organization (WHO) told The Epoch Times via email he hasn’t yet started in his new position.
The British scientist was, at the time of the messages, at the helm of the Wellcome Trust, which controls millions of dollars in funding for research in the UK.
The WHO announced on Dec. 13, 2022, that Farrar would be the next new chief scientist and that he would start in the second quarter of 2023. Wellcome, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, has stated that Farrar was due to leave in 2023.
Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington on Dec. 9, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Secret Teleconference
Farrar helped arrange a secretFeb. 1, 2020, teleconference with Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to discuss the origin of COVID-19, previously released emails show.
Some of the participants said details of SARS-CoV-2 indicated it didn’t originate from nature, though others favored the natural origin theory.
Anderson was among the former, writing that “some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”
The call came after a report outlining the possibility that the virus escaped or was released from a high-level laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first COVID-19 cases were detected in 2019.
Scientists on the call later penned the Proximal Origins paper and a letter published in The Lancet that reads, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Farrar was listed as a co-author of the letter but wasn’t listed as a co-author or contributor to the paper. Neither was Fauci. That’s despite Andersen stating, in another newly released email, that the paper was “prompted” by Farrar, Fauci, and others, including Lipkin and then-U.S. National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins. Previous evidence also showed Fauci and Collins receiving a draft of the paper and questioning a key passage, with their recommendations making it into the published paper.
Fauci said shortly after the papers were published, from the White House podium in Washington, that “highly qualified evolutionary virologists” had looked at the virus and concluded the evidence “is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” He also said he couldn’t recall the names of any of the authors but that the paper could be made available to reporters.
Fauci’s agency sent money to the Wuhan lab through an intermediary. Some experiments funded with the money increased the virulence of a modified bat virus.
The P4 laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on May 13, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Softened Stance
Some of the scientists have since softened their stance against the lab leak theory, as more time passes without any identification of a host animal to support the natural origin theory.
Farrar told The Epoch Times in 2021 that “the best scientific evidence available to date” backed a natural origin, but admitted there are “other possibilities which cannot be completely ruled out and retaining an open mind is critical.”
Dr. Peter Palese, a U.S. microbiologist who signed the Lancet letter, said he supported an investigation into the origin of the virus.
The new House subcommittee has vowed to probe the matter, after it was largely ignored under Democrats in the previous Congress.
Like the scientific community, intelligence entities in the United States remain divided over the matter, but several say evidence is supportive of the lab leak theory.
That includes the FBI.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origin of the pandemic are [sic] most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Director Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, said in a recent interview.
The Energy Department has also reportedly shifted to say it’s more likely the origin was the lab.
On March 3, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for countries with information about the origin to share it with WHO and the international scientific community.
“WHO continues to call for China to be transparent in sharing data and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results,” he said. “Until then, all hypotheses on the origins of the virus remain on the table.”
The Biden administration could soon crack down on companies that supported remote learning throughout Democrats’ coronavirus lockdowns, a move that would block hundreds of thousands of students from completing higher education online.
The Education Department last month quietly issued guidance that would hamstring “online program managers,” companies that contract with colleges and universities to provide remote lessons to students. The move is a concession to the left, which has long slammed online program managers as exploitative for-profit entities that draw students into online programs to milk them for tuition, and, in a statement on the rule change, Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal said the policy will “ensure students get value for their money.”
If finalized, the policy change could open the Biden administration to charges of hypocrisy given that universities leaned on online program managers throughout the coronavirus pandemic to support remote learning as Democrats and their teachers’ union allies pushed to keep schools closed. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), for example, has long raised “concerns about the impact of OPM partnerships on rising student debt loads,” but slammed the Trump administration’s push to reopen schools as “cruel, heartless, and incompetent.”
The Biden administration’s proposal would reclassify online program managers as “third-party providers,” a move that would allow the federal government to micromanage and shutter the companies at will. The Education Department’s proposed rule would also make online program managers liable for partnering universities’ actions. Taken together, online program managers say these rule changes would make it impossible to conduct business.
Advocates insist the Biden administration’s proposal will help students, who they claim are being ripped off by for-profit educational entities. But online program managers often partner with some of the nation’s most affordable schools. Ozarks Technical Community College, for example, which boasts in-state tuition of just $5,215 per year, uses online program managers to administer its virtual programs.
And President Joe Biden pledged on the campaign trail that he would make community college free for all Americans. After taking office, he tapped his wife, Jill, to spearhead his administration’s effort to provide universal, free community college. But the first lady, a community college educator who insists on being called “doctor,” announced in February 2022 that the effort had failed.
Republicans appear to be gearing up to oppose the measure. House Education and the Workforce Committee chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) last month warned the Biden administration that its attempt to “blanket compliance policies” on educational contractors was “never going to work.”
“It is reckless for the Department to suggest providing access to online education is a main driver of federal student loan debt,” Foxx said. “Instead, innovations in postsecondary education, including online education, have broken through access barriers for many adult learners.”
Rioters on Sunday attacked a proposed Atlanta Police Department training center, hurling “large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks” at officers who came to protect the site.
“Violent agitators” wore black clothing as they conducted a “coordinated attack” on the proposed Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, destroying “multiple pieces of construction equipment by fire and vandalism,” the police department reported.
The “very violent attack” was about “anarchy” and “the attempt to destabilize,” Atlanta police chief Darin Schierbaum told press.
Police have arrested 35 people in connection with the attack. While the department has not identified the rioters, members of the far-left anarchist group Antifa often wear black while they commit crimes.
News of the attack comes as Atlanta faces a crime wave. Violence has spiked so much that the suburb of Buckhead is “pushing to secede” from the Democratic-run city, the Washington Free Beaconreported. Buckhead alone last year saw 10 murders, 22 rapes, and 238 cases of burglary and breaking and entering.
The property damage to the proposed training center appears to be severe, with images showing construction vehicles ablaze and plumes of smoke rising from the site.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp (R.) in a statement denounced the attack, calling it “domestic terrorism.”
“We will not rest until those who use violence and intimidation for an extremist end are brought to full justice,” Kemp said.
Then-CNN president Jeff Zucker called theory ‘a Trump talking point’
During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker reportedly instructed his staff not to look into the theory that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China—a theory that government reports have since validated.
The FBI and Energy Department have both concluded that a laboratory leak at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology most likely caused the pandemic. When Republicans first raised the theory early in the pandemic, Democrats and members of the media were quick to dismiss it. Zucker barred his staff from looking into the theory he believed was just a “Trump talking point,” a CNN insider told Fox News.
“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the insider said. “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”
When then-president Donald Trump and other Republicans embraced the lab-leak theory, the anti-Trump outlet was quick to knock it down. In a Feb. 18, 2020, “Facts First” examination of the claims, CNN insisted that “it’s possible, yet unlikely, that the lab was connected to the start of the outbreak.” An April 2020 headline read, “Nearly 30% in the US believe a coronavirus theory that’s almost certainly not true.”
CNN host Jake Tapper called the theory a “new, bizarre conspiracy theory” pushed by Republicans, while network anchor John Vause deemed it “misinformation.”
In an interview with Fox last week, FBI director Christopher Wray said the agency has known “for quite some time now” that COVID’s origins are “most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
“U.S. State Department cables written in 2018 and internal Chinese documents show that there were persistent concerns about China’s biosafety procedures, which have been cited by proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis,” the Wall Street Journal reported in its article on the Energy Department’s conclusion.
Energy Department and FBI say COVID virus likely emerged from Wuhan lab
Dr. Anthony Fauci commissioned a February 2020 research paper to dismiss the theory that the COVID-19 virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory, emails obtained by House Republicans show, a revelation that comes as multiple federal agencies voice support for the so-called lab-leak theory.
Fauci cited the paper, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” during a White House press conference on April 17, 2020, during which he pretended to be unfamiliar with the authors. Yet he held a call with the four authors in February 2020 to discuss new evidence that the pandemic emerged from a leak at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The authors sent Fauci the paper, which claimed that COVID likely emerged from an animal-to-human infection, for edits before its publication, the New York Postreported.
“There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences … in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that [the COVID virus] took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human,” Fauci said during the press conference.
He added that he did not “have the authors right now” but would get the paper to reporters.
News of the cover-up comes a week after the Energy Department concluded that the virus likely came from the Wuhan lab. The FBI also said it has long known the “most likely” origin for the coronavirus was the Chinese lab.
The revelations also place heightened scrutiny on the actions that Fauci, once the government’s highest-paid employee, took during the pandemic.
Federal investigators in January issued a report calling out egregious errors by Fauci and his team in overseeing the bat research that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. The nonprofit was responsible for coronavirus research in Wuhan.
Republican lawmakers press Attorney General Merrick Garland to address alleged spying
A pro-life organization claims the FBI under Joe Biden used a federal informant to spy on the group’s activities, an allegation that has prompted backlash on Capitol Hill.
Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) alleges that the FBI spied on their Jan. 19 meeting in Washington, D.C., and used the information against their director of activism in court. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for answers by Wednesday, the Daily Callerreported.
“The American people deserve the truth,” Cruz and Roy wrote. “Are their tax dollars and federal law enforcement agencies being used to spy on pro-life Americans?”
PAAU’s allegations have raised concerns over a pattern of FBI interference with pro-life activists. Armed FBI agents raided pro-life activist Mark Houck’s home in September on charges of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which criminalizes blocking entry to abortion clinics. The Biden administration pushed for an 11-year prison sentence, but Houck was acquitted on all charges.
“They were trying to scare pro-lifers from coming out on the sidewalks and being active,” Houck’s lawyer said of the Biden administration charges.
PAAU says that the FBI sent an informant by the name of Eric Mike Santos, who was approved by the organization to attend their meeting based on his seemingly pro-life presence on Facebook. The page was later deleted.
A recording of the meeting, reportedly taken by Santos, was used in court against director of activism Lauren Handy to demonstrate a violation of the FACE Act.
“It is shocking that the FBI is spending time and resources to physically send informants into our spaces to secretly record the work of totally nonviolent life-saving actions which are compliant with federal law,” said founder and executive director of PAAU Terrisa Bukovinac.
Tom Jurgens participated in attack that damaged proposed police training center in Atlanta
A staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing organization that publishes a “hate map” targeting conservative groups, is among the agitators arrested on domestic terrorism charges for rioting at a proposed police training center in Atlanta.
Authorities arrested Tom Jurgens after the attorney joined more than 30 other black-clad activists who used Molotov cocktails to destroy construction equipment at the construction site of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. The FBI has used the SPLC as a resource in identifying domestic terrorists.
Jurgens’s full name on the arrest notice matches information on the State Bar of Georgia site, which confirms his position at the SPLC. The attorney joined the left-wing group in September 2021, reported the Daily Mail, which reviewed his now-deleted LinkedIn profile. Jurgens also studied at the University of Oxford and earned his law degree from the University of Georgia.
The riot was a “very violent attack” for the purpose of “anarchy” and “the attempt to destabilize,” Atlanta police chief Darin Schierbaum told the press. Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp called the attack “domestic terrorism.”
The SPLC’s targeting of conservative groups with “hate” labels has proved dangerous. In 2012, a gunman entered the Family Research Council, a pro-family-values group, to conduct a mass shooting. He said he was inspired by the SPLC’s labeling the council “anti-gay.” The left-wing group also listed Ben Carson on an “extremist” watch list but backtracked after criticism in 2014.
Employees in March 2022 accused the SPLC of racism because the group required some employees to come back to the office, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Employees who protested the move said it unfairly targeted black women.
The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment.
In The Square and the Tower, Prof. Niall Ferguson looks at the impact Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press; how the most influential figures of the Protestant Reformation, such as Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, capitalised on the new technology to publish their pamphlets, disseminating them across the Holy Roman Empire and Europe. This, then, led to the radical ideas of a select brave minority in the early 16th century, reaching the minds and tongues of millions.
The printing press – like modern social media platforms – came with some downsides, such as the second highest-selling book being the Malleus Maleficarum, which encouraged the first mass witch-hunting movements.
This comparison between our times and the Reformation has merit, but there is a stark contrast between the effects of the printing press to the invention of social media as a form of information dissemination. Namely, the rapidity with which it has devoured our minds and culture. Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, just over sixty years after the invention of the printing press. Donald J. Trump became President in 2016, just nine years after the invention of the iPhone, and ten years after Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were created. In comparison to the world of Gutenberg, we had a sixth of the time to adapt to the new technology that was also orders of magnitude more powerful, influential, and addictive.
The other major change that has taken place since the creation of social media has been the tightening of governmental control over the lives of ordinary citizens. Whereas the Reformation inspired a culture of intellectual curiosity and, thus, anti-establishment ideas, the Faustian bargain of signing into your social media account, nowadays through a slick smartphone, is that of 24-hour surveillance. By storing our technology and online conversations, governments have complete access to our private lives if required. As whistleblower Edward Snowden made clear, our governments sieve through hundreds of millions of emails, conversations, and online interactions. It’s the sort of government interference that the great totalitarians of the twentieth century would have dreamed of, and about which Huxley and Orwell so presciently warned. Yet we are perfectly comfortable with it all as long as we continue to have access to new technologies.
‘Everything is Seen in China’.
For many, the line is drawn at intent. Philosophers and Politicians have recognised the human trait of wishing to trade liberty for protection throughout the centuries. It’s the most fundamental step towards Hobbes’s Leviathan-like state. This was made evident again by the tacit bargain between state and individual: you get your social media, and we get to keep a close eye and keep you safe. And while Western governments fumbled around to weaponize the internet against the public, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has already perfected the art, with its TikTok app serving a means to atomise generations of Westerners.
The app was first launched in 2018 by a CCP-linked tech company called Bytedance. As of January 2023, it had more than 1.5 billion active users across the world, and is considered the most influential social media platform on Earth. Current fashion, cultural, political, and musical trends originate on CCP servers. TikTok was introduced with intentions more nefarious than people are willing to recognise. Its algorithm was created to ensure its users are as ‘active’ (in other words, addicted) as possible.
The algorithm’s aims are twofold; firstly, that of retention, meaning to ensure people keep returning to the app as regularly as possible; and, secondly, that of longevity, thus, maintaining people on the app as long as possible. And thus far, this has been fruitful considering the average user opens the app 19 times a day and spends more than an hour and a half every day on the app – and let’s not forget that those people most likely have all of the other social media apps.
The algorithm succeeds in maintaining the TikTok consumer by feeding information the user wants to see, as well as finding videos that are of a shorter duration, which encourage ever-shortened and more frequent blasts of dopamine. It’s so powerful that after minutes of scrolling through videos on the site, the app can predict one’s interests, likes and dislikes, musical tastes, state of mind, mental well-being, and even sexual orientation. Therefore, it wishes to latch on to and appeal to the most personal and intimate parts of one’s humanity to keep them scrolling through the app.
Once collected, all of this information is analysed and stored by the Chinese Communist Party, who, according to leaked testimonies, have access to everything if they so wish.
According to a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department, “everything is seen in China,” and there is an engineer referred to as ‘Master Admin,’ who “has access to everything.” Worse still, is the fact that the terms and conditions of using the app make it explicit. A TikTok user agrees to share with the app their IP address, region, screen resolution, operating system, the apps that have been downloaded on their phone as well as their keyboard strokes and patterns, meaning everything they type, upon signing up for an account.
There’s a good reason for this.
The creators and engineers working on TikTok’s algorithm are instructed to promote all things degenerate and immoral on the app. The Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin, also owned by Bytedance, promotes engineers, scientists, adventurers and members of the Chinese public working hard to achieve their dreams. Whereas the Western version promotes baseless political ideas, and soft pornography by way of half-naked girls and boys dancing suggestively. The Western version glorifies mental illnesses and emotional instability, all the while celebrating violence, crime, and instant self-gratification.
The ultimate goal of the Chinese government is that of total corruption and atomisation of Westerners, by dumbing down the content that they receive, attacking their ability to concentrate and assume self-control, as well as promoting pernicious and iniquitous ideas and beliefs amongst the youth of rival countries. Such an effort would have been inconceivable ten years ago. Yet now, parents are allowing their children to be corrupted by a hostile, megalomaniacal foreign government hellbent on capturing their attention and pacifying them through endless scrolling – if the parents aren’t themselves consumed by TikTok, that is. And for some unbeknownst reason, there’s little effort or resolve to remove the app or to recognise it as a true threat to western stability and health.
One doesn’t read or hear much about the app or the dangers thereof. That’s even though Donald Trump tried to have the app banned when he was in office, and the ongoing discussions of the Biden administration about whether to ban the app or heavily restrict its usage – interestingly, one of the only points of public policy upon which Democrat and Republican politicians unite. After so much evidence, it’s astonishing that the British government, for example, hasn’t raised it as a talking point. There are no ongoing debates in the UK Parliament concerned with its influence and safety, and how it has captured the minds of the younger generations in this country. There’s plenty of concern about Andrew Tate and his effects on young boys, however. But how do people think he became such a sensation last year? He figured out a way to utilise the algorithm on TikTok for his benefit. Yet no one raises these concerns about the app itself.
Liberalism has failed in its approach to public policy when TikTok has such a stranglehold of billions of young, suggestible Westerners. The classic idea of J.S. Mill’s harm principle, one of Liberalism’s central tenets, which asserts that people are free to act however they so wish provided it doesn’t infringe upon the freedom or rights of others, is not the solution. Were it such, then why would there be a problem with entire generations signing up for an account of their own, free, volition? After all, they’re not infringing on the rights of others. Moreover, if they agree to be monitored by the CCP, then why should they not have the right to? As demonstrated by the American government, this is clearly not the solution.
Instead, a conservative approach is necessary to act accordingly to the dangers of TikTok. And by conservative, I don’t mean libertarianism, which offers the same neglect as Liberalism in this instance; on the contrary, a strict governmental approach aimed at preserving the safety and values of its citizens, promoting a morality that argues foreign powers have no business in using their citizens as pawns in a cold war.
It would be a small-c conservative approach, aiming to protect the rights of its citizens. It wouldn’t be a meddling or interfering government were it to ban TikTok, for if the government is not there to counter aggressive acts or intentions from foreign powers, then it serves no purpose at all. Human beings have (broadly) accepted taxation because they recognise the necessity of a well-fortified wall and equipped city watch. We pay our taxes to fund programmes that are supposed to secure safety from the invader. It just so happens that in the 20th century, war is not merely restricted to an army laying siege to a town or city. Instead, enemies can permeate the homes and minds of their adversaries with software and ingenious algorithms. To fight against it, people must be made aware of the dangers of the app and have those elucidated by their governments.
The more one learns about Bytedance and TikTok the more pernicious it all becomes. Western governments must act incredibly quickly against the tech company to stop it from harvesting information about their citizens – and the fact that it has to be stated explicitly is disconnecting as it should have happened a long time ago. The longer it takes, the more people will sign up, the more information is collected by the CCP and, therefore, the more difficult it is to remove as a result of the influence it holds.
Eviction can be a good thing. King Charles evicted his vengeful son and daughter-in-law. Nancy Pelosi has been evicted as Speaker. And we are now all hoping that voters across the nation will evict the Bidens in 688 days from the White House, so we can secure our borders and evict illegal immigrants who broke into our country.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Governor Ron DeSantis and Governor Greg Abbott have done a great job exposing the problems and the burdens of our broken borders. But, left out of the discussion all too often is the cost to taxpayers. It needs to be understood that even if you are not living in a border state, you are paying for the problem.
Our nation is $31 trillion in debt. We cannot afford to allow this invasion of people who are bringing in fentanyl, stressing our school systems, taking our tax dollars, overburdening our first responders and accessing our health care system.
In my home state of Massachusetts, 10 years ago we were able to calculate that illegal immigration costs our state $2 billion per year in taxpayer-funded benefits. That enormous figure doesn’t include educational or public safety costs or the cost for in-state tuition breaks. At the time, we had 225,000 illegal immigrants. Since Biden entered the White House that number has grown by over 100,000, so the cost has grown even greater. In fact, this week the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed an “investment” of $86 million for emergency housing for “recent international arrivals.”
Last year Taxachusetts residents finally got a tax break when the state sent back $2 billion to the residents. That’s the same amount we had been previously spending on benefits for illegal immigrants every year. If our nation’s borders were secured, every year, Massachusetts taxpayers would get a break. But now we are facing greater burdens.
Nationally, the Center for Immigration Studies data calculates that 51% of illegals are on welfare. If we go with the lowball estimate that there are 12 million illegals in our country, that means there are 6,120,000 on welfare. Let’s say that they get an estimated $1,000 in taxpayer-funded welfare benefits each month. That comes to $6.12 billion per month and $73 billion per year just for welfare. But that’s not all the assistance they receive. There is Medicaid, school lunches, educational costs, housing and public safety.
Worse yet, as we all know, the 12 million estimate is extremely low. Many believe that we have over 30 million illegal immigrants who have invaded our country.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that illegal immigration cost the federal, state and local governments $116 billion in 2017, but looking at the math in the previous paragraph, FAIR’s calculations seem to be low. Moreover, all of this is before Biden, and it doesn’t include the costs of maintaining the border.
Let’s make sure we start serving eviction notices in 2024.
Polling shows that more Americans identify themselves as conservative or center-right than progressive. The conservative advantage has been increasing over the past 20 years. But the advantage isn’t just in political leanings. Since 1994, Republicans have controlled one or more branches of Congress for all but six years. They have also controlled most of the state governorships as well.
So, with this political dominance, one would expect that conservatives are setting the agenda and steering the nation in a conservative direction. They would expect that, but the reality is that the left is winning and setting the direction.
How is this possible with conservatives winning most of the time at the ballot box? For three reasons.
1.) The left, when they are in power, uses that time to advance their agenda despite polls showing strong opposition by voters to it. They are not afraid to lose political power if they pass their plan. Take the example of Obamacare. Polling showed that the public opposed it, and Democrats would pay the price in 2010. They still passed the legislation and lost the House and several Senate seats.
Now, contrast this with Republicans. They vowed if a Republican Congress and president were elected, they would repeal Obamacare. Voters handed both chambers of Congress and the White House to the GOP in 2016. A Republican Congress failed to repeal Obamacare.
2.) Conservatives always take a legalistic and fact-based approach. Look at abortion. Since the Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, conservatives have always made the argument that it was unconstitutional because the federal government had no right in setting policies for the states – abortion was a state issue. Sound legal reasoning. Yet disastrous in the court of public opinion (just ask Robert Bork). Conservatives also promised if Republicans were elected to the White House, they would appoint strict constitutionalists to the Supreme Court who would ultimately overturn Roe. This finally happened in the Dobbs decision. Yet, based on polling, we won the argument but lost the voters. How is this possible?
The left constructed abortion as a woman’s right, her basic freedom and if it could happen to women, who else might be targeted. If abortion was lost, what would happen next? Maybe the conservatives would take away a woman’s right to vote or take away civil rights from African Americans, gays, lesbians and the list goes on. The left made the Dobbs decision all about an assault on freedom. Democratic members of Congress wore lapel pins saying they loved abortion. Most Americans do not love abortion. But when the left made the argument that repealing Roe was an assault on basic liberties, a majority favored abortion rights. And even worse most conservatives were silent or making the legalistic argument for Dobbs. This all helped parlay the red wave into a red drip in November.
3.) The left begins pushing their most extreme arguments with a long-term plan and are willing to compromise along the way to reach their objectives. Look at the battles we are seeing waged about rewriting American history in our classrooms. The left has been pushing that narrative since the late 1960s. They advocated doing away with Columbus Day, reparations for slavery and a condemnation of our nation’s founding. While conservatives believe America is a special experiment, the left sees it as being founded by evil and our nation as nothing special. The far-left agenda was laughed at in the 1960s and 1970s. But at each turn, the left compromised and accepted small portions of their agenda to achieve their objective.
Reparations for slavery? Let’s set up study commissions. Now, states and cities across the nation are not just studying reparations but implementing reparations. Christopher Columbus? First it was let us reevaluate him and put him in perspective. Now, Columbus is considered the face of evil. Statues that haven’t been destroyed are being packed up into storage. There is even a strong movement among the New York City Council to rename Columbus Circle and destroy the Columbus statue. The 1619 Project is now considered gospel among many Americans. Thirty years ago, the proposition that the nation was founded upon slavery and the Revolution was fought over this was considered absurd, save for the extreme left. Despite historians pointing out its fallacies our children are being indoctrinated into it. Our founders? Go to Mount Vernon, Monticello or James Madison’s Montpelier and little of their contributions to America are mentioned. What is mentioned is that they were slaveholders and founded the nation to preserve slavery. In classrooms, children are taught the British fought the American Revolution to free the slaves, despite no evidence of this. In the nation’s capital, there is a strong movement to rename Washington, D.C. At the Washington Monument, and other monuments, markers denoting our Founders’ faults are being erected. The insane is now mainstream.
Conservatives, on the other hand, do not have long-range planning. We are lucky to plan a few months to a year ahead of time. And even worse, we have an all-or-nothing attitude in advancing our agenda. And far too often, it is nothing.
Conservatives are winning the electoral battles, yet we are losing the war. Unless we change our tactics, America will be the face of the far left.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
House Republicans want to hold Antifa accountable after demonstrators allegedly set fire to the construction site of an Atlanta public safety training facility anti-police and environment activists dubbed “Cop City” Sunday evening.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she plans to introduce legislation to declare Antifa as a terrorist organization.
“Antifa are domestic terrorists and I’m introducing my resolution to officially declare them a terrorist organization on Tuesday,” Rep. Green tweeted while sharing a video of the fire.
“This is domestic terrorism. It was planned for weeks and announced on social media. Antifa are self proclaimed communists and consistently organize to attack our government over and over again. They should be taken seriously and not tolerated anymore,” she tweeted.
Fox 5 reported Sunday that the facility was on lockdown after at least one construction vehicle was set on fire amid the latest protests on Sunday.
A progressive group called “Stop Cop City” has been protesting against the new 85-acre training facility being built in the wooded parts of DeKalb County, Atlanta since plans for it were announced, arguing it will promote the militarization of the police and may result in environmental concerns.
Additional “Cop City” construction defense infrastructure appears to have been destroyed by fire as forest defenders overrun the outpost. pic.twitter.com/O3huFUWxK7— UNICORN RIOT 🦄 mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot 👈 (@UR_Ninja) March 5, 2023
“Those who oppose the facility, self-described as “forest defenders,” say “Cop City” will cause an environmentally damaging loss of trees.”
So they set it on fire because, you know, THAT is “environmentally friendly”. https://t.co/XgH8WpkaSz— 🇺🇸 The Archangel Michael 🇵🇱 🇺🇦 (@Mike55029284) March 6, 2023
On Monday, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) confirmed that a group of “agitators” left the nearby South River Music Festival around 5:30 p.m. and descended on the construction site of the proposed Atlanta Public Safety Training Center “to conduct a coordinated attack on construction equipment and police officers,” the APD said in a statement.
Authorities noted that agitators changed into black clothing and allegedly began to throw commercial-grade fireworks, Molotov cocktails, large rocks, and bricks at police officers. Antifa is known to use similar tactics.
Atlanta Chief of Police Darin Schierbaum said Sunday’s incident marked a “significant escalation” both in the level of violence and the number of individuals involved in the attack.
“This wasn’t about a public safety training center. This was about anarchy, and this was about an attempt to destabilize. And we are addressing that quickly,” Schierbaum told reporters. “Actions such as this will not be tolerated. You attack law enforcement officers, you damage equipment, you are breaking the law. This was a very violent attack that occurred this evening.”
The FBI and Georgia Bureau of Investigation have joined the probe, he said.
Atlanta police said at least 35 people had been detained as of Sunday night. Charging decisions have yet to be announced.
“Some of those arrested yesterday were from Massachusetts and New York and France and Canada. So this is a national network, an international group of people that are organized to come to our state to undermine a public safety training center,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said in an appearance on Fox News Monday morning.
“This is not a protest,” the chief added. “I made a clear distinction of what a protest looks like. When it is a legitimate protest, you have the full protection of the Atlanta Police Department. This is not a protest. This is criminal activity. And the charges that will be brought forth will show that.”
Before Sunday, at least 19 people had been arrested and charged with domestic terrorism since December in connection to demonstrations at the “Cop City” site.
In January, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) issued a state of emergency after protests broke out in response to a police shooting of an activist during an operation to clear out the construction site for the facility.
I know I’m old, but I will never forget the rotary dial bit Chris used to do: “2…dah…dah…dah…7….dah…dah…dah…9…oh damm! I messed up. 2…dah…dah…dah…7” [US Patriot]
I could not agree more with his lines about Lululemon charging $100 plus for yoga pants and then lecturing us on politics. Who cares! He’s right; they need to keep their politics out of the stores.
Chris Rock live now on Netflix.
“I don’t want Lululemon’s yoga pants politics… I’d prefer a pair of $20 racist yoga pants to their pair of non-racist $100 yoga pants.”
“The easiest way to get attention is to be a victim… the ER is filled with people with papercuts.”— Monitoring Bias (@monitoringbias) March 5, 2023
But, as we all know, everywhere you turn, there is another business lecturing us on political correctness and their views of equality. These companies should be worrying about their bottom lines and selling products, not lecturing us on social justice.
How many viewers have the NFL lost over kneeling during the National Anthem? Viewership is down as much as 20% since 2016. That’s a business in decline!
The Walt Disney Company is paying a hefty price for putting politics ahead of parks, movies and streaming. Not only is their stock down close to 50%, but they are now going to be forced to pay property taxes. Yikes! Their corporate board might want to rethink canceling Splash Mountain and their belief that schools know better than parents how to educate their children. I am still waiting for someone to specify where the racism was in Splash Mountain.
Hershey is the latest company to get into the ‘go woke go broke’ mode. They cast a transgender activist in their International Woman’s Day promotion. I guess they don’t understand the definition of a woman! I have three words for Hershey — just make chocolate.
Do you remember Gillette complaining about “toxic masculinity” to sell razors? They have kept their mouth shut for a few years after that boondoggle.
Fortunately, I am not a coffee drinker, so I don’t have to deal with Starbucks which asked police officers to leave the premises because some people felt “unsafe.”
Target got a ton of pushback for their transgender family bathroom policy.
It happens at local stores. I have walked out of stores that post “Black lives matter” signs. They don’t get my business because all lives matter, and the protection of life should be color-blind! I am not for the cancel culture, but when I hear of a company going woke, I walk away. Shouldn’t we all?
“Modern feminism is like a cult. If you don’t adhere to the cult mentality, if you are not 100 percent in, and if you question anything, you are banned. If you go against the cult, they will eat you alive,” says Rebecca Barrett, 33, a progressive-turned-traditional housewife from Florida.
A mechanical engineering graduate, Barrett worked full time in the oil and gas industry, fighting hard for her seat at the table, but felt “it was never enough.” Trapped in the endless struggle, she eventually saw through the problems inherent in “hardcore feminism” and braved the wrath faced by those women who switch courses. She now runs a YouTube channel detailing her personal journey, giving life-changing tips to restore relationships, and talking about the ills of feminism and “woke-ism.”
Barrett’s transformation from living in a state of what she now views as misguided anger to a happy, radiant, and fulfilled wife and mother-of-one is striking. Of course, there are the obvious outward signs of femininity; the softer hairstyle, and figure-flattering clothing. But it’s her attitude and outlook that are most inspiring.
Rebecca Barrett. (Courtesy of Rebecca Barrett)
Barrett says modern feminism is all about “chasing the victim hierarchy,” and one has to be more and more the victim in order “to stay in the club.”
“That’s not how life works,” she told The Epoch Times. “For me, there was a decade of believing that I was the victim. Feminism is ingrained in the media and in everything from childhood on. You don’t necessarily have to say that you’re a feminist, but a lot of the belief system that you hold as a woman is rooted in feminism.
“I want to help women understand that and break free of it if that’s what they want.”
Barrett says the biggest lesson she learned going from feminism to a traditionalist is “taking accountability and responsibility” for her actions. “For me, it was a huge wake-up call,” she said.
“It’s easier to blame everyone else for your problems, than owning that you made mistakes as well. You are part of an issue, a problem or the solution,” she added. “We all like to take accountability and we all like to own up to our wins, but a lot of times we want to just blame everyone else for our problems and own the wins.”
Rebecca Barrett with her husband, James. (Courtesy of Rebecca Barrett)
The ‘Extreme Phase’ of Hating Men
Barrett is open and honest about the circumstances that led her to take a hard-line view of men. Her mom was a stay-at-home wife and parent, and Barrett saw her as weak for not having a career and staying in the partnership.
“I started to hate men at a very early age because of infidelity in my house,” she said.
The disdain grew when she moved to New York in 2015, starting her first company. Driven and ambitious, she worked in the oil and gas industry straight from college. Launching a new business in an all-male field was tough, and Barrett, bolstered by other women CEOs and female empowerment groups, began to get resentful.
She said: “It was like putting gasoline on the fire. I got mad at the men that I worked with. I would be resentful of men I would date. Once you start listening to feminism and feminist ideology, you start like ‘Oh, I can blame them. I can blame them for my problem, and I don’t have to feel bad for doing that.’ They come with the argument, ‘that’s not what feminism is about, it’s about equality of the sexes, about equal pay.’ Yes, that’s textbook feminism—it’s not what happens in practice out in the real world.”
Barrett goes further, asserting that many feminists target white men specifically for being the issue, and pointing out the irony since a lot are white themselves.
“You are blaming something on white men, that they have no control over—they were born that way,” she said. “They want equality of outcomes, meaning, I should have the same outcome as my white male colleagues because I’m a woman. No other reason for that, just ‘because I exist as a woman and they exist as a man.’ That’s one of the main issues of modern feminism. We’ve gone to this extreme phase of hating men. Misandry is widespread today.
“We’ve been seeing a lot of the abortions and stuff going on—they say the same things. They have no other talking point other than ‘my body, my choice.’ If you even question that further, they can’t articulate it, because that’s all they know.”
The couple married in 2018, and the bride says they were meant to be together, even though it “wasn’t easy like rainbows and butterflies.” (Courtesy of Rebecca Barrett)
Seeing Through the Delusion
The switch that altered her perspective flicked on when Barrett started to detect holes in the ideology.
“I would pick up on flaws time and time again,” she said. “We would have female led conferences where you could go to any speaker, and every topic was like: ‘The white man is holding you down’, or ‘We need to fight for our seat at the table.’ Everyone is blaming someone else for the reason they’re not there. Corporations, institutions; everything is systemic. They love throwing around the word ‘systemic.’”
Reading the works of Jordan Peterson, a well-known Canadian professor of psychology and best-selling self-help author, started to give Barrett the understanding that accountability for her problems is on her, and she began to move away from the “victim mentality” that, she says, is crushing women’s chance at happiness.
She met her husband, James, also 33, in 2018. By then, the walls she’d built around her had started falling.
“I would shut men down all the time—I wouldn’t even give them a chance. For some reason, I gave my husband a chance,” she said. After that the couple were inseparable, but it wasn’t easy. Still shackled to her previous mindset, Barrett approached relationships with a competitive attitude, always wanting to one-up her men.
“That’s not healthy whatsoever, that’s not how any relationship should work or function. That’s the reason why we have men and women, or yin and yang—because we complement each other in our skills and thought processes,” she said.
(Courtesy of Rebecca Barrett)
It took extensive premarital counseling and a lot of work to achieve the contented, healthy marriage the couple have now. James, being more traditional, had a certain take on what men and women are supposed to be in a marriage, and Barrett had other ideas. She wanted to be the working parent, and for her husband to stay at home with the baby, for instance. It was all a far cry from the situation the family are in now.
Barrett says traditional men want peaceful women. After a long day of work, they want to come home to a woman who is not yelling at them or nagging them. “They want to find peace in their house,” she said. “They don’t want to argue, they don’t want to fight … the number one need of a man is that he wants to feel respected. Women’s number one need is feeling loved. Both feel love in different ways. A man feels love by being respected, a woman feels love by being adored, she wants that adoration.
“It’s a two-way street: The more I respect my husband, the more love he gives me, and vice versa. It’s not a competition, it’s not keeping score. [If] I genuinely respect my husband and with my respect I’m going to do the things that show respect to him. In turn, his natural way of reciprocating that is providing me with more love and care.”
With the realization that the sexes ought to not battle, but complement one another, Barrett now thinks of herself as a traditionalist. She stays at home with her baby daughter River Rein and loves the role of mother and homemaker. Besides revamping furniture, sewing, and learning about growing food, Barrett spends an hour each day options trading on the stock market. Sometimes she’ll even tackle electrical jobs.
“Running around, taking care of my daughter, doing house chores—that to me is fun. As women, we like to do these things anyway, at least a lot of us do,” she said. “You like your house clean; you love decorating and it’s a full-time job. My friend calls herself a ‘domestic engineer.’ We are domestic engineers: I take care of the household and I problem-solve every day.”
Barrett with her baby daughter. (Courtesy of Rebecca Barrett)
Braving the Feminist Backlash
A lot of feminists have been very upset by Barrett’s stance. The backlash she has received for communicating that her husband works full-time while she stays at home has, at times, been savage. Going back to her cult premise, Barrett asserts that by not adhering to modern feminism and questioning its ideologues, she’s been thoroughly canceled.
“There’s a massive misconception,” she said, “that you are a slave to your husband and children; that you have no say in your life, you have no skills, and you can’t work. When I was younger, I also thought it was stupid. Why would anyone want to do that? Now that I’m here, I’m like ‘wow, this is amazing!’”
There’s so much societal pressure, Barrett says, and a lot of it comes from women. “I get a lot of criticism from women saying, ‘What if he cheats on you and leaves you? You’re gonna be left with nothing. How can you teach that to other women?’ I’m not teaching that to other women. I’m encouraging them to hone their skills, to learn new things,” she said.
With her channel, Barrett tries to help other women—especially younger women—know that it’s okay to question their existing ideas if that’s what they want. The woman she talks to is like she once was: miserable, and struggling with her feminist identity and belief system.
“A lot of women feel stuck,” she said. “Of course, there are a lot of women who are thriving in corporate environments, but a lot don’t.”
This, she says, is due to many females getting to the point in their career where they don’t wish to chase the next promotion, but to settle down and have children. “That’s our biology, that’s intrinsic in women. It is really dangerous, that they are pushing this work narrative: ‘get your education, go chase a bag, go chase your career, focus on your career, because the career will never leave you, the career is going to be there forever instead of a man.’”
(Courtesy of Rebecca Barrett)
One of the main contradictions Barrett sees in modern feminism is that it says it’s women’s prerogative to do whatever they want while demonizing those who choose to stay at home with their kids.
“My choice is to stay at home and take care of my family,” she said. “Why is that bad? So many women are telling other women: ‘Oh, well, you have internalized misogyny. You are setting women back to the 1950s.’ That’s sad.”
Barrett stresses “femininity is a beautiful thing” that has been completely undervalued in our society. Modern women, she says, have been taught that femininity is weak.
“I believe that men and women are equal in value but we are not the same physiologically, behaviorally and emotionally,” she said. “Women need to realize that we are fundamentally different from men. It doesn’t make us weaker; it just makes us different. Instead of competing with the men in our lives, we would be much happier and more at peace if we play to our strengths.”
Legislation proposed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would invalidate driver’s licenses and state identification cards obtained by illegal immigrants in other states.
The “bold initiative,” according to Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, would crack down on illegal immigration in the Sunshine State by addressing the issue on multiple fronts, including employment, health care, voting, human smuggling, and out-of-state IDs.
“I believe that this is going to be the largest, most comprehensive, landmark, state-led, anti-illegal immigration bill ever passed in the United States,” the Republican lawmaker told Fox News in an interview published on March 5.
“I believe it should be the blueprint for other states to pass so we can all push back as states on the federal government, the Biden administration, Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas, and their open border policies,” said Ingoglia, who is sponsoring the legislation.
Under the new law, employers would be required to verify their employees’ citizenship status, and violations of that requirement would trigger new penalties. Penalties also would be increased for human smuggling, and confirmation of U.S. citizenship and Florida residency would be required for voter registration.
Additionally, any driver’s licenses or state IDs issued in states where illegal immigrants can legally obtain them would be nullified.
“We will not recognize a driver’s license from any state that issues them to illegal immigrants,” Ingoglia said. “Law enforcement will then be told to proceed as if they had no license whatsoever.”
At present, 18 states, plus Washington, allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.
In California, illegal immigrants have had that capability since 2013, but in September 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed a bill allowing all noncitizens to obtain state identification cards, regardless of their ability to drive or provide proof that their presence in the United States is authorized.
The law also eliminates the previous requirement that those “restricted” IDs be marked with a recognizable feature to set them apart.
While Florida doesn’t currently allow the issuance of state IDs or driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, Ingoglia noted that some city and county governments have been able to circumvent the law by paying third-party organizations to issue community identification cards, which illegal immigrants then use to obtain government services.
“It’s stuff like this, plus more, that the state of Florida is looking at doing to really force the federal government to finally fix this problem, which has been festering for about 50 years.”
Another measure in DeSantis’s proposal would require hospitals that receive state Medicaid funds to ask patients upon intake whether they are in the country legally and submit quarterly reports to the state on the number of illegal immigrants who passed through emergency rooms and the costs of their care.
In proposing the bill on Feb. 23, DeSantis said: “Florida is a law and order state, and we won’t turn a blind eye to the dangers of Biden’s border crisis. We will continue to take steps to protect Floridians from reckless federal open border policies.”
Australia’s drug regulator was slow to update the country’s Database of Adverse Event Notifications (DAEN) despite several deaths being attributed to the vaccine, including two children, aged 7 and 9.
The information came to light following a Freedom of Information request by an Australian doctor that found the delayed response from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
Senator Gerard Rennick said he would push for independent oversight of the TGA.
“A third independent medical party should examine the evidence as the TGA has a conflict of interest because they approved the vaccines and would therefore be held responsible for the deaths of these children due to poor regulatory oversight,” Rennick told The Epoch Times.
Nationals Senator Matt Canavan (L), Liberal Senator Alex Antic (C) and Liberal Senator Gerard Rennick (R) at a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Nov. 21, 2022. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)
The senator also said he was concerned that the TGA was soft-pedalling the risks with the COVID-19 vaccines, especially around myocarditis and cardiac arrests.
“They are definitely downplaying the risks. They do not have enough information to rule it out given the known link between the vaccines and myocarditis and myocarditis and cardiac arrests,” Rennick said.
The TGA states that they “rigorously assess any COVID-19 vaccine for safety, quality and effectiveness before it can be supplied in Australia.”
Currently, the TGA has granted provisional approval to VaxZeveria, Nuvaxovid, MVC COVID-19 vaccine, Cosmovaxx, and vaccines by Janssen, Moderna, and Pfizer.
“All COVID-19 vaccine applications are being treated with the greatest priority as part of the Department of Health and Aged Care’s response to the pandemic,” the TGA states.
“Under normal circumstances, the TGA’s assessment (for both provisional and full registration) begins once all information to support registration is available. For COVID-19 vaccines, the TGA has agreed to accept rolling data to enable early evaluation of data as it comes to hand using the provisional pathway.”
As of March 6, the DAEN states that since the beginning of the vaccination rollout in Australia, 137,576 adverse events have been reported relating to the range of COVID-19 vaccines. Of those, 134,224 are believed to be directly related to the vaccines, while 980 are vaccine-related deaths.
What the Vaccine Safety Investigation Group Does
The TGA does have a pre-existing independent review vehicle for vaccines called the Vaccine Safety Investigation Group (VSIG).
The group is meant to provide independent expertise to assist the TGA in investigating and managing Adverse Event Following Immunisation (AEFI) cases.
The group is described as a time-limited working group of experts that can be convened when a single serious AEFI—that is unexpected and without an obvious non-vaccine cause—occurs. The TGA notes that an AEFI is considered unexpected when it is not listed in the product information document for a drug, or when causality cannot be established.
A father covers the face of his son as he receives a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in Balgowlah in Sydney, Australia, on Jan. 11, 2022. (Jenny Evans/Getty Images)
Alternatively, the group can be established when a serious AEFI results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient or prolonged hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability/incapacity, or a congenital anomaly/birth defect.
It can also be established when an AEFI is above an expected rate or level of severity, or there is a cluster of AEFIs that are serious or could be due to administration or quality issues. A cluster is considered to be two or more cases of the same or similar events related in time, geography, and/or vaccine administered.
Despite the 100,000 plus adverse events recorded, according to the TGA’s website, the VSIG has been convened only a couple of times during the pandemic.
One instance occurred on Jan. 21, 2022, to discuss two fatal cases of suspected thrombosis with thrombocytopenia following a second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“Both cases were complex and involved patients with underlying conditions that could have caused their symptoms. After extensive deliberation, the panel concluded there was not sufficient evidence to link either case to vaccination,” the TGA said.
TGA Head Defends Agency’s Record
The deputy secretary of Health Products Regulation Group, Prof. John Skerritt, defended the TGA’s decision to recommend the vaccines in a Senate Estimates hearing in February.
He said that while the TGA acknowledged and apologised for the pain and distress of those seriously injured from the vaccines, those reactions were rare.
“I have actually apologised on national television, together with former Minister Hunt, when the first death—the first sad death was a lady from the Central Coast. We apologised in writing for what were weekly and are now fortnightly vaccine safety reports.
“So we put out detailed public reports—as well as doing media—on vaccine safety, and, in those, we acknowledged the pain and distress of those who had been seriously injured, but we also emphasised the extreme rarity of these conditions,” he said.
Dr. John Skerritt appears before a Senate Estimates hearing at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on April 6, 2022. (Screenshot by The Epoch Times)
He noted that all modern medicine comes with a set of associated risks, adding that many other common medicines have a higher rate of injury and death than the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We have modern medicines, and every medicine has risks as well as benefits,” Skerritt said. “By way of indication: since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, more than 10 times as many people have died from paracetamol, from Panadol, as from adverse events due to COVID vaccines.”
According to the DAEN website, since 2020, adverse events attributed to Panadol number 99; of those adverse events, 58 are believed to be directly tied to the medicine with four reported deaths.
The DAEN website also notes that since 1971, there have been 1,002 adverse events related to Panadol, with 38 deaths.
Doctors Hands Are Tied
Meanwhile, an Australian doctor who spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, said they knew of hundreds of Australians suffering adverse reactions.
“I know of literally hundreds who are suffering from adverse events; they have had their WorkCover or government compensation claims declined and have been left with disabling injuries,” the doctor said.
“As doctors, we really do not know how to treat these adverse events; there is limited information and limited collaboration because overall there is some reluctance to discuss these events and for some doctors even to admit they are happening.”
The New York Police Department is advising businesses to ask patrons to take off their masks before entry in light of the high number of thefts and robberies across the city.
Removing masks should be made a “condition of entry,” NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said at a press conference last week, noting that criminals have been taking advantage of masks to avoid detection on surveillance cameras.
“People are coming up to our businesses, sometimes with masks, hoods and latex gloves, and they’re being buzzed in, they’re being allowed to enter into the store and then we have a robbery or some kind of property being stolen,” Maddrey said.
“We are asking the businesses to make this a condition of entry: That people, when they come in, they show their face, they should identify themselves,” he continued. “And if they feel like they want to put their mask on after they identify themselves for their safety, by all means, they should do so.”
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most businesses in the city would block customers from entering the premises with masks on, according to the police chief. But taking in masked customers is now “a way of life.”
“Since the pandemic, this is a way of life for us, where people wear masks regularly,” he said. “But we’re seeing this being used too much as a ruse to enter into businesses and to victimize our businesses.”
“We need our businesses to be proactive and do their due diligence. We need to make sure people are identifying themselves,” Maddrey said.
A Shoplifting Epidemic
The advice comes as New York City Mayor Eric Adams admitted that a shoplifting epidemic is forcing chain stores to close down and costing retail workers their jobs.
“People who say that we’re criminalizing the poor—they’re wrong,” Adam said at a Feb. 12 budget hearing in Albany as he made the case for billions in additional state funding for his city. “Poor and low-income New Yorkers are being unemployed because we’re losing those businesses in our city.”
“We’re losing chain stores that are closing down. People who are being employed in those stores are losing their jobs,” the mayor told the state Legislature. “They’re adding to our unemployment.”
The surge in shoplifting has prompted some business owners to take action on their own.
The 34th Street Partnership, a trade group representing small businesses in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood around Penn Station and Madison Square Garden has recently hired K-9 units to sniff out shoplifters.
According to an analysis of NYPD data by The New York Post, there were 63,699 reports of shoplifting along with retail related larcenies and robberies in 2022, and 43,675 incidents in 2021.
A large group of Hollywood actors says they have been locked out of their union buildings and blocked from competing for roles because they decided against taking the COVID-19 shot.
In exclusive interviews with The Epoch Times, the celebrities said they have sent more than 800 “unanswered” emails to their union, SAG–AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), about its continued enforcement of what they call an unconstitutional mandate that violates their right to informed consent and protection against what they characterize as medical experimentation with overwhelming proof of potentially dangerous health risks.
Emails, memos, and other correspondence shared with The Epoch Times show that COVID-19 vaccine mandates are in fact as much a battleground issue in Hollywood as it has been for military and health care workers.
Like others, actors told The Epoch Times that their requests for religious exemptions from the vaccines have been ignored, despite that a “return to work agreement” established by SAG–AFTRA explicitly says producers must consider them.
According to a SAG–AFTRA memo, 1 in 4 productions have mandated the vaccine for so-called Zone A workers, which includes on-set performers.
“No business that I know of, including our own government, requires testing before you enter a building, including hospitals,” “Summer of ’70” director Ed Rollin wrote in a recent email to SAG–AFTRA President Fran Drescher, best known for her role in the 1990s TV hit “The Nanny.”
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher speaks onstage during the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles, Calif., on Feb. 26, 2023. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Some actors also shared stories of the health problems they developed after caving to the expectation that they get the COVID-19 vaccine, such as Hollywood stuntwoman and actress Michelle Jubilee Gonzales, who told The Epoch Times that she believes she developed both reproductive and cardiac-related health problems immediately after getting an injection.
“SAG–AFTRA is no longer running like a member-run union but rather a tyranny with Duncan Crabtree-Ireland at the helm,” said Gonzales, whose credits include the TV series “Stargate Origins” and stunts in the 2022 Marvel blockbuster “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”
“It is criminal what is happening under his usurped leadership.”
Crabtree-Ireland, the executive director of SAG–AFTRA, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Pushback Escalates
The controversy heated up three weeks ago when SAG–AFTRA, along with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, decided to extend COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other protocols for members.
This past week, the group of actors called for a debate on the issue with their own medical experts pitted against a retired pediatrician that SAG–AFTRA contracts with to establish their pro-vaccine mandate policy. Union executives, including Drescher, declined.
The debate continued into this weekend with actor Woody Harrelson sending shock waves throughout national media and sparking a frenzy of social media posts over his unscripted monologue mocking COVID-19 vaccine mandates on “Saturday Night Live” on Feb. 25.
In talking about a fictional script he pretended to have rejected, Harrelson said:
“The movie goes like this: The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians, and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes—and people only can come out if they take the cartels’ drugs and keep taking them over and over.
“I threw the script away—I mean, who’s going to believe that crazy idea?”
Woody Harrelson’s SNL monologue—the whole thing—is quite fascinating. Obviously establishment–approved. I imagine serious tools are being employed to monitor the reaction. For those unaware of the context, here’s the unexpected line (towards the end of the pic.twitter.com/jul8N6Eicv… https://t.co/dHOmzdV5IB
Also this weekend, actors against the vaccine mandate organized a protest of Sunday night’s annual SAG Awards ceremony. It is being aired live on Feb. 26 from the swanky Fairmont Copley Plaza in Los Angeles. A party hosted by People Magazine is planned—which drew charges of hypocrisy from the actors since it listed no vaccine requirements.
What Hollywood’s Anti-Mandate Actors Are Saying
The day before the awards, actress Maya Dunbar of “The Mentalist” told The Epoch Times that refusing the COVID-19 injection has become like the “scarlet letter” in Hollywood.
“Thousands of us [have] been gaslit, demeaned, and kept out of meetings,” she said, adding that early in the pandemic, she could understand the criticism of vaccine skeptics, but not now with all of the negative evidence regarding the safety of the vaccines.
“It has honestly been the most horrific experience our family has ever gone through.”
She and her husband, Rockmond Dunbar, have four children, whom they homeschool. They left California over that state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Last year, Rockmond Dunbar filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Disney after being fired from the set of Fox’s popular TV show “9-1-1” for refusing the jab.
Rockmond and Maya Dunbar are among Hollywood actors who have come out in opposition of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. (Courtesy of Maya Dunbar)
Disney also rejected Rockmond Dunbar’s medical and religious requests for exemption from the experimental injections.
The veteran actor, who’s been in major shows for the past 30 years, has not been able to land any roles since, and has been shunned and subject to hateful criticism, Maya Dunbar said, in the very industry that claims to embrace diversity.
“This is a Godless industry,” she said, pointing to Hollywood’s heavy reliance on big pharma advertising, which she sees as the true reason why, as she put it, “a blind pharmaceutical kind of frenzy cult” has been created in Hollywood.
“You have a lot of people who just don’t want to lose what they have—their worldly treasures, and if that means having to shill some shots or some pills or whatever [it] is, that’s what it means.”
She emphasized that her husband’s lawsuit was filed under the religious beliefs they hold as members of the Church of Universal Wisdom, which forbids vaccines.
Other actors have also filed lawsuits after being refused roles or barred from sets, while others told The Epoch Times they are planning to do the same. The discrimination against their medical choices is becoming a growing legal battle that belies the hyperbole that Hollywood is a bedlam filled with pro-mandate “liberals.”
In contradicting more Hollywood stigmatism, several actors point to the fact that the industry embraces the pro-abortion “My body, my choice” slogan, but abandons the edict over COVID-19 vaccination.
The contradiction was first raised at SAG–AFTRA’s national convention by actor and Hollywood voiceover artist Erik Nicolaisen, who became a household face in 2013 when he starred in a popular but controversial Super Bowl commercial for Volkswagen, in which he portrayed a white man who spoke Jamaican.
“They squelched any discussion of it,” Nicolaisen, who served as a union delegate at the time, told The Epoch Times. “That’s how they dealt with the contradiction.”
Who’s Responsible?
Nicolaisen joins several actors who place especially heavy blame on Drescher, the union’s president, for not supporting actors opposed to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, as well as for not putting more pressure on the union as well as productions to allow personal choice. Drescher reportedly experienced her own adverse reaction to a COVID-19 vaccine.
Boston-based actor Chuck Slavin, who serves on SAG’s New England board, is also critical of Drescher for not objecting strongly enough to the union’s mandate.
He and other actors have called the vaccine mandates “Nazi-like protocols” akin to directing unvaccinated actors to wear armbands.
“On this issue, she is acting more like a Hollywood actress than a union president,” Slavin told The Epoch Times. Slavin’s credits include “Boston’s Finest” and “Annabelle Hooper.”
Drescher didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In a Feb. 9 interview with Variety magazine, Drescher indicated that she supports measures to prevent the spread of disease on sets and that increasingly fewer productions are mandating the shot—a trend she expects to continue.
“I have been outspoken about my position on this, but I’m really only one person,” she said. “It’s not a dictatorship. And I have kept the conversation alive.”
In a recent exchange of emails that contained occasionally fiery debates—with some between Drescher, Slavin, and other actors—Drescher pointed out to Slavin that the extension of the vaccine mandate was based on a survey of actors that showed the majority of them supported keeping the order in place.
Drescher conceded that many surveys turned in by actors were omitted from the results because they were submitted anonymously, asserting that they could have been completed by “someone’s grandmother for all we knew.”
But as some actors—like major Hollywood stuntman Peter Antico, who works with big names such as Sylvester Stallone—pointed out, the survey grossly underrepresents union members’ views, counting just 7,696 responses, representing around 5 percent of SAG–AFTRA’s 160,000 members.
The results, which were shared with The Epoch Times, show that 67.1 percent wanted the mandate to stay in place, 26.1 percent didn’t, and about 6.8 percent didn’t respond to the question.
“’Do it for grandma’ was a lie,” Antico said. “These are now irrefutable facts. Crabtree-Ireland and President Drescher have refused an open debate on these facts, nor have they demonstrated common sense. And as a result, they have irrevocably harmed thousands of members.”
SAG–AFTRA Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland has been supportive of pro-COVID-19 vaccine actors, but not those who oppose the shot, members of the entertainment union say. (SAG–AFTRA)
Actors Say Industry Violating Constitutional Rights
Drescher has also encouraged those not wanting to take the vaccine to apply for an exemption.
The problem with her position, several actors told The Epoch Times, is that none of their exemptions have even been considered, let alone granted.
Antico, Slavin, Dunbar, Nicolaisen, and Gonzales—along with some high-name recognition actors who asked to remain anonymous—heavily emphasized that SAG–AFTRA is violating their Title VII rights, which require employers to accommodate employees’ religious beliefs.
It’s the same argument under which health care workers have won lawsuits against hospitals that have denied them exemptions from the experimental vaccine.
In a recent exchange of emails with a SAG–AFTRA lawyer, “La Cible” and “Eleanor” actress Imoya Monroque asked the attorney to send her copies of the “so-called reports” that back the union’s mandate policy.
“Do you live in a vacuum or a bubble?” Monroque asked in a Feb. 21 email, detailing evidence that the vaccines are not only ineffective at preventing transmission and infection, but also dangerous.
The basis of her ire was the union’s decision to bar her and a group of actors from using the members’ lounge for a meeting at its New York location without proof of vaccination.
Union attorney Jason Touretz told Monroque by email that the decision was “due to the unreasonable risk” they would pose to other members.
Maya Dunbar said the argument is hypocritical at best, with SAG–AFTRA hosting unvetted COVID-19 parties in the same buildings where they had exiled unvaccinated union members who “pay the same dues” to support the facilities and union like the vaccinated actors they are supporting. She also pointed to all the industry events they attend, as well as other high-profile events like sports games including the recent Super Bowl.
“The reality is, they know they have done so many members wrong and they don’t want to have to deal with us, face us because they don’t want to be accountable,” she said. “We’ve been completely shut out and shut up.”
A recent memo circulated by Crabtree-Ireland to union members outraged anti-mandate actors.
“We recognize that some of our members face challenges in securing employment if they are unable to or choose not to be vaccinated, but we also acknowledge the many members who would be unable to work or who would choose not to work in an unvaccinated workplace due to the additional risk involved,” stated Crabtree-Ireland, who was first hired in 2021 as SAG–AFTRA’s top executive.
Slavin said when he and other actors contacted Crabtree-Ireland about the comment, the executive director basically replied with the attitude that there are “two kinds of actors—those who are vaccinated and can work, and those who are unvaccinated and cannot work.”
‘I Only Did It to Keep My Job’
Union actor Lynne Marie Merzejewski, who made appearances on “Desperate Housewives” and “CSI: New York,” told The Epoch Times that she was so opposed to the vaccine that she was “literally crying in the corner of CVS” trying to muster the strength to do what she said she knew was wrong.
“I had worked so long to get where I was. I only did it to keep my job,” she said.
Unfortunately, Merzejewski’s fears proved true and she developed several medical conditions right after taking the shot, including peripheral neuropathy in one of her legs, that she had never experienced before.
She said she went to a neurologist, who told her the symptom was a common side effect of COVID-19 vaccines; however, the doctor didn’t want to get involved in reporting her case to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. More commonly known as VAERS, it’s the government’s self-reporting database of potential vaccine injuries intended to track the safety risks from vaccines.
“Nobody in Hollywood wants to admit that these things are happening,” Merzejewski said, who can no longer work in the business because of her injury.
Other actors who have also taken action against SAG–AFTRA’s vaccine mandate include Ingo Rademacher, who was a star of the daytime soap opera “General Hospital.” Rademacher has filed a lawsuit against ABC over his firing for refusing to get a COVID-19 injection.
Other big-name actors who have risked upsetting Hollywood producers by coming forward to talk about the issue include Ice Cube, who in November told Entertainment Weekly that he lost a $9 million contract for a role in the movie “Oh Hello No” for refusing to the vaccines.
Correction: A previous version of this article featured an incorrect spelling of Nicolaisen’s name. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
We need more responsible citizens and a more virtuous electorate, and that may be harder to produce than a few more Republican victories.
ast week I listened to a conversation between Jesse Watters and Karl Rove about the “embarrassment” of having the brain-damaged, clinically depressed, and now hospitalized John Fetterman serve as a U.S. senator from my state of Pennsylvania. Fetterman is unfit for the office he holds for multiple reasons. He is mentally incapable of exercising his senatorial responsibilities and is spending his days not in the Senate but as a patient being treated at the Walter Reed Hospital for various health conditions.
These various health issues do not even touch on John’s kooky political views. These include setting up heroin centers at convenient locations at government expense, releasing second-degree murderers from jail, and placing no restrictions on the right to dispose of one’s offspring up until the moment of birth and even afterwards. Jesse and Karl addressed the question of how such an underqualified, incapacitated eccentric was “allowed” to become our U.S. senator.
Our conversationalists target two objects of blame. One, Fetterman’s wife Gisele, who has now gone on to the politically congenial country of Canada, was responsible for her husband’s ill-advised election. Gisele could have headed off our current problem if only she had dissuaded hubby from staying in the race, particularly after he suffered a serious stroke during his campaign. Unfortunately, Fetterman’s spouse, according to Jesse, was just too hungry for the benefits of Washington high society to keep her debilitated husband from winning a Senate seat. Two, the real fault, according to Rove, lies entirely with the Democratic Party. The Democrats did not have to run Fetterman for the Senate after it was apparent that he was physically and mentally unable to serve. They should have replaced him with the “moderate” Conor Lamb, who is now a congressman from Western Pennsylvania. Since Lamb has voted most of the time the same way as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, I’m not sure what makes him, even in the eyes of a Bush Republican, a “moderate.” But let’s focus on the question of whom we should blame for Fetterman’s election.
As far as I can determine, only one group bears blame for this unhappy outcome, and its blame may be total. It is the majority of the voters in Pennsylvania, who put Fetterman in office, knowing full well that he was gravely incapacitated. Our Pennsylvania voters happily elected him as a placeholder for the far Left, even after watching a debate with his opponent Dr. Mehmet Oz, in which Fetterman was utterly incoherent. At that time and ever since Fetterman has used a computer monitor to understand and respond to questions. Fetterman made absolutely no sense during the debate in providing answers to queries from a generally friendly moderator. Please note that Fetterman didn’t just squeak through in his contest against Oz. He won by almost five points; and even with early voting and the usual dishonest precinct reporting from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the odds are that Fetterman really did beat his very centrist, inoffensive opponent. The majority of voters wanted a woke leftist as senator, no matter his obvious disabilities and no matter how non-threatening Mehmet Oz seemed throughout his campaign.
The conservative media establishment, as I’ve frequently observed, most definitely doesn’t want to blame voters for anything that goes amiss. It’s always that old Devil the Democratic Party that successfully conspires to put the wrong guys into public office. Inner city voters, I am led to believe, don’t elect wicked district attorneys who favor violent criminals at the expense of their victims. The Democratic Party is entirely responsible for this disaster. Nor was it a combination of unmarried women, soccer moms, college students, government workers, and urban blacks who bestowed a senate seat on Fetterman. Again, it was the Democratic Party that perpetrated this mischief.
The Democrats put up candidates who are electable; and Fetterman was one such candidate. This is a far scarier truth than imagining that the fault lies entirely with one of the two national parties, and once we alternate parties, the problem is fixed. We need more responsible citizens and a more virtuous electorate, and that may be harder to produce than a few more Republican victories.
Almost every Western country has seen its electorate culturally radicalized in recent decades; and it doesn’t help denying that the public is fully complicit in this process. Last night I heard news about the police in Calgary, Alberta roughing up and arresting a devout Christian pastor, who had been protesting a drag queen story hour taking place at the public library. Tucker Carlson and the Canadian press magnate Ezra Levant stressed that it was the leftist government in Calgary and elsewhere in Canada that were trampling on religious and other civic rights. Although I am second to none in despising the woke totalitarians who are denaturing our politics and culture, the baddies didn’t achieve power on their own. A massive popular vote stands behind them.
REVIEW: ‘The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us’
What do Ray Kurzweil and Greta Thunberg have in common? On the surface, not very much. One is an American computer scientist and futurist famous as a prophet of “the singularity”—the moment when the line between man and machine disappears and our brains get an ever-improving software upgrade. Another is a Swedish teenager who made a name for herself by ditching school and shouting at world leaders about climate change.
To Adam Kirsch, though, they are connected in a profound way. Both are part of a phenomenon after which he has named a short new book: The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us. Kurzweil and Thunberg, argues Kirsch, belong to a disparate group that “from Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communities to academic philosophy departments” is considering a revolutionary and novel idea: “that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent and that we should welcome it.”
This “turn against human primacy” takes two forms. One is “Anthropocene antihumanism,” a “radical response to … ecological crisis” that rejects the philosophical notion of “humanity’s traditional role as Earth’s protagonist, the most important being in creation.” The other is transhumanism, a glorification of technological progress according to which “the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens.”
These notions seem less fringe by the day. Climate doomsaying is, increasingly, par for the course in much of the media, with predictions of our imminent extinction becoming so common as to have lost their power to shock. And while we roll our eyes at Mark Zuckerberg’s cartoonish Metaverse and ask ChatGPT to tell us bad jokes, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re in the midst of a fundamental change in our relationship with machines. We slip further and further into our screens, blurring the line between the virtual and the real. That may not be transhumanism, but it is a step in that direction, and our age’s most powerful tech titans, from Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, take the idea seriously.
With The Revolt Against Humanity, Kirsch, a poet, literary critic, and editor of the Wall Street Journal‘s weekend Review section, has produced pen portraits of these twin ideas and their potentially far-reaching moral and political consequences.
Kirsch explains convincingly why these ideas aren’t like what has come before them. Take the environmental anti-humanists, for example. Their doomsaying has a lot in common with the apocalyptic fears of nuclear wipeout that were common during the Cold War and have made an unwelcome comeback in recent years. Both are warnings about humankind’s own folly leading to its—and the planet’s—demise. But, as Kirsch explains, the climate-change doomsayers have a “more radically unsettling” warning: “It means humanity is endangered not by our acknowledged vices, such as hatred and violence, but by pursuing aims that we ordinarily consider good and natural: prosperity, comfort, increase of our kind. The Bible gives the negative commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ as well as the positive commandment ‘be fruitful and multiply,’ and traditionally they have gone together. But if being fruitful and multiplying starts to be seen as itself a form of killing, since it deprives future generations and other species of irreplaceable resources, then the flourishing of humanity can no longer be seen as simply good.”
Kirsch approaches these ideas as an even-handed skeptic; he is clearly disturbed by their implications, but does his best to understand their proponents on their own terms. That said, he does allow himself to have fun with the more amusingly out-there elements in the antihumanist rebellion. There’s Timothy Morton, for example: an adherent of “object-oriented ontology,” or OOO. He urges greater solidarity with “non-human people,” meaning not just animals but also plants and random objects like rocks. Or Patricia MacCormack, a philosopher who peddles a worldview so dark it is hard to take seriously. She has claimed to be “deeply saddened that there has never managed to be an annihilation of the human species, in spite of plague and war.”
I doubt slogans like “rocks have feelings too” or “let’s all die” have especially widespread appeal. Thankfully. But don’t let these fringe cases encourage an already understandable temptation not to take the antihumanists too seriously. Kirsch appears aware of this urge to dismiss climate alarmism as, well, alarmism, and transhumanists’ predictions of our cyborg future as science fiction. He urges more serious engagement.
And it is here where The Revolt Against Humanity is so persuasive. When faced with, say, the growing trend of millennials saying they aren’t having children because of climate change, or predictions of species-transforming technological revolution just over the horizon, it is easy to be cynical: to assume that you have encountered glib hyperbole, not a serious worldview.
Kirsch understands that reaction: “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye, said La Rochefoucauld. The disappearance of the human race belongs in the same category. We can acknowledge that it’s bound to happen someday, but the possibility that the day might be tomorrow, or 10 years from now, is hard to contemplate. That instinctive reaction contributes to an air of unreality that surrounds many of the ideas in this book. Calls for the disappearance of humanity are hard to understand other than rhetorically. It’s natural to assume that transhumanism is just a dramatic way of calling attention to the promise of a new technology, while Anthropocene antihumanism is really environmentalism in a hurry.”
But Kirsch warns us not to fall into the trap of dismissing a set of beliefs just because they rest on a prediction that you think is wide of the mark. After all, many world-changing religious traditions have made predictions of an end of humanity that have not borne out. As Kirsch points out, “In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his followers that the world is going to end in their lifetime. … This proved not to be true—at least not in any straightforward sense—but the promise still changed the world.”
Kirsch is not the first author to draw comparisons between climate-change doomsaying or transhumanist tech-utopianism and traditional religions. He subscribes to the idea that these movements “appeal to the people who are committed to science and reason, yet yearn for clarity and purpose of an absolute moral imperative.” This promise of enlightened sacrifice, Kirsch argues, is what makes the revolt against humanity so potent.
When Kirsch points out the differences between these voguish ideas and older theology, he offers disturbing new insights. Many religious traditions predict an end of humanity, but they offer something more: “Rather than simply vanishing, we will be physically and spiritually transformed.” Contrast that with the modern idea of human extinction, which “implies that our disappearance will change nothing. The planet and the universe will go on in exactly the same way after humanity ceases to exist, except that other animals and planets will have a better chance to flourish. The death of the human race is as cosmically meaningless as the death of an individual, since both are soon swallowed up by oblivion.”
That is a disturbing foundation on which to construct a worldview. And even if it proves to be an incorrect prediction, Kirsch is utterly convincing in his argument that this set of beliefs can nonetheless upend our politics, economics, technology, and culture.
The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us by Adam Kirsch Columbia Global Reports, 104 pp., $15.99
Oliver Wiseman is deputy editor of the Spectator World, the U.S. edition of the world’s oldest magazine.
The U.S. government has been funneling taxpayer money to the left-wing group bankrolling protests against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Israeli funding documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The documents indicate that, since 2020, Foggy Bottom has sent over $38,000 to the Movement for Quality Government (MQG), theIsraeli nonprofit stoking nationwide anti-Netanyahu protests that have seen protesters clash with police and target Netanyahu’s family members. MQG is seeking to takedown Netanyahu’s government over his support for major reforms to the Israeli supreme court that would significantly limit its power. The organization petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court earlier this year to oust Netanyahu, claiming he is unfit for office due to ongoing investigations into allegations of political corruption and bribery.
The State Department, which confirmed the funding, calls the group a nonpartisan organization, but its work opposing Netanyahu raises questions about how the group was able to obtain U.S. funding. The United States typically avoids funding foreign partisan groups to avoid claims of political meddling. Even before MQG emerged as the leading force behind the current wave of anti-Netanyahu protests, it made a name for itself as a leading critic of the Israeli right, which has long seen Netanyahu as its leader. Given the Biden administration’s chilly diplomatic relationship with Netanyahu—which includes repeated criticism of Israeli settlement construction and the decision to launch an unprecedented FBI probe into Israel’s anti-terrorism operations—the U.S. funding to MQG has come under new scrutiny.
“The State Department should never fund foreign partisan organizations in allied democracies,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Free Beacon. “If the shoe was on the other foot, the Biden administration would accuse Israel of interfering in our elections. Congress should absolutely review the State Department’s potential funding of partisan politics in Israel.”
The State Department downplayed its funding for MQG and would not answer questions about whether U.S. funds could have been diverted to the organization’s anti-Netanyahu activities.
“The State Department has provided small grants to the Movement for Quality Government, including a grant signed in 2020 during the previous administration and continued under the Biden administration that focused on teaching civic education and supporting good governance,” a State Department official told the Free Beacon. The last tranche of funding was awarded in September 2022. The money was meant to be used for democracy training programs in the Israeli school system.
The State Department described MQG as “a respected, independent, non-partisan, grassroots non-governmental organization committed to promoting values of democracy, transparency, good governance, and civic participation.”
The United States provided funding to the group beginning in 2020, near the end of the Trump administration. One former senior U.S. official familiar with the matter said the grant was likely approved by career State Department officials and that the small amount of money likely went unnoticed by Trump administration political appointees who could have blocked it.
The State Department typically allows its grantees to self-report how the money is used, meaning there are few guardrails in place to prevent it from being spent on other causes, according to Gerald Steinberg, founder of NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that monitors these issues. “Few if any funders even attempt to monitor the actual use of grants,” he said.
Steinberg, who has closely followed MQG’s activities, noted that “if a foreign government had funded a similar NGO operating in the United States, the Biden administration would have taken immediate action.”
Grant information shows that MQG received grants of around $10,000 to $15,000 dollars in 2020, 2021, and 2022. In each of those years, the State Department was listed as the group’s sole foreign donor.
The majority of MQG’s funding comes from its membership dues and from donations made by charitable organizations. The group says it “is not willing, by principle, to receive any assistance from the governmental system,” but does not include a similar prohibition on foreign government funding.
MQG did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment about how the U.S. funds were used.
Israeli political observers also have raised concerns about whether the U.S. funding is helping to fuel opposition to Netanyahu’s government.
“The Movement for Quality Government has worked for decades to subvert Israeli democracy,” Caroline Glick, an Israel-based political pundit who first raised questions about State Department funding for the group in a column last month, told the Free Beacon. “It is a slap in the face of the Israeli public and an expression of contempt for Israeli democracy that the State Department is funding this radical group.”
The State Department has come under fire in the past for funding foreign groups opposed to Netanyahu.
During the Obama administration, the State Department was caught deleting emails that showed it funded the OneVoice Movement, a liberal group that was waging an anti-Netanyahu smear campaign at the time.
The Biden administration also has come under fire for pushing an anti-Israel agenda through the Justice Department, which announced last year that it is conducting an unprecedented FBI investigation into Israel’s accidental shooting of a Palestinian-American reporter.
The United States Marine Corps has axed its scout sniper platoons.
Since World War II, the elite and deadly units have been attached to infantry battalions. Their exploits are legendary.
However, the service branch has followed through on its promise to reassign the snipers to reconnaissance units.
The Marine Corps Times has more on the development, which officials have ordered to happen immediately:
The message, first reported by Coffee or Die Magazine, said that scout sniper platoons didn’t provide battalion commanders with sufficient “continuous all-weather information gathering.”
The scout platoons are meant to “provide the commander with relevant, reliable, accurate and prompt information,” the message said.
“The shift to a Scout Platoon will allow those Marines to focus their training and evaluations on scouting, providing commanders the right tools to accomplish their mission,” Marine spokesman Capt. Ryan Bruce said in a statement to Marine Corps Times.
Bruce noted that infantry Marines will still have access to precision rifles as necessary.
Scout snipers aren’t the only snipers in the Marine Corps. Some special operators and reconnaissance Marines receive long-range precision fire training.
What do you think of the Marine Corps’ decision? Tell us in the comments below!
Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake said during a Saturday speech that she was recently offered a bribe to leave politics.
Speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland, Lake said that days ago, “powerful people” approached her and tried to bribe her to get out of politics. A rising star in the Republican Party, Lake has been floated as a possible vice presidential candidate or a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2024.
“Somebody showed up at my door this week, they called me before and said, ‘I gotta talk to you in person,’ this can’t be done over the phone,” Lake told a crowd Saturday. “They came to my door and they tried to bribe me [into] getting out of politics. This really happened. I’m telling you this because this is how disgusting politics is.”
Lake did not elaborate on the identity of the individual or provide other specific details about the group. The Epoch Times could not independently verify her claims and has contacted her team for additional comment.
“They tried to bribe me with a job title, with a huge salary, a position on a board—this is how they do it,” she told the crowd. “This person standing before me was sent at the request of some powerful people back east,” she added, without going into detail on the board position or the organization. “They want me out of politics.”
A former local television news anchor in Arizona, Lake stepped away from her longtime job in 2021 to enter the 2022 midterm race for governor of the state. Democrat Katie Hobbs was sworn in as governor earlier this year, although Lake has challenged the results of the Nov. 8 election in the state’s court system and recently filed an appeal with the Arizona Supreme Court.
CPAC’s annual conference is known for its straw polls of would-be presidential and vice-presidential candidates. During this year’s drawing, former President Donald Trump handily won CPAC’s straw poll with 62 percent of the vote, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis got about 20 percent.
Lake was the No. 1 choice for vice president among those who were polled at the conference. Lake got 20 percent of the votes, DeSantis was second place with 14 percent of the votes, and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was in third place with 10 percent to become the GOP running mate, according to reports.
What’s Next
In the meantime, Lake has said that she plans on pursuing her election case in Arizona’s court system, although last month she confirmed she’s “entertaining” a run for Arizona’s Senate seat in 2024. That seat is currently held by former Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has not indicated whether she’s running for reelection.
When asked by Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk if she’s considering a run for the seat, Lake responded: “Yes, I am entertaining it. I mean my number one priority is our court case, and I have full confidence in our court case and I hope we will get a judge to do the right thing.”
“But I’m also looking at what happens if we don’t get a decent ruling in that, and they want me to go away, they want our movement to go away,” Lake added. “I represent we the people, and if they want us gone so badly that they’re willing to steal an election then I’m not going to let them have that, I won’t go away.”
In December 2022, a Maricopa County judge, Peter Thompson, dismissed Lake’s initial lawsuit in which her lawyers pointed to a range of Election Day issues across Maricopa County polling centers. They have argued that the election should be redone or that Lake be declared the winner.
After appealing to the Arizona Court of Appeals, the court last month tossed her election suit and said she didn’t provide enough evidence.
“Lake’s claim thus boils down to a suggestion that election-day issues led to long lines at vote centers, which frustrated and discouraged voters, which allegedly resulted in a substantial number of predominately Lake voters not voting,” the panel of appeals court judges wrote (pdf). “But Lake’s only purported evidence that these issues had any potential effect on election results was, quite simply, sheer speculation.”
On March 2, Lake wrote on Twitter that she would take her challenge to the state Supreme Court.
“We filed our Historic Election Integrity case with the Arizona Supreme Court. Pray for our Attorneys. Pray for the Judges. Pray for Justice. Pray for America,” Lake wrote.
‘I had the personality that kept us out of World War III’
President Donald Trump says that China and Russia are growing closer, and the risk of nuclear war is increasing as a result of the failed leadership of the Biden administration, he told an audience at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on March 4.
Trump said during a nearly two-hour speech in National Harbor, Maryland, that while he was in office, an important national security goal was to “never allow Russia and China to get together.” He blasted President Joe Biden for making the two nuclear powers “buddies.”
In February, China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin held a meeting in Moscow to expand the “mutually beneficial cooperation” between the two countries. That occurred just days before the first anniversary of the beginning of the Ukraine conflict.
Putin has spoken positively about the progress of Russia–China relations, highlighting the potential for further advancements in areas like bilateral trade.
Trump lays the blame on Biden.
The former president criticized Biden for his weak leadership, suggesting that Putin decided to invade Ukraine after witnessing Biden’s failed withdrawal from Afghanistan during his first year in office. Trump said he believes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wouldn’t have taken place if he was still in office.
“Russia never would have pulled the trigger,” he said. “There would have been no obliterated cities that can never be rebuilt.”
“I had the personality that kept us out of World War III.”
Things could get worse now, Trump said, with Biden risking nuclear annihilation by continuing to fund Ukraine. Officials in the current administration have echoed similar concerns.
In an interview with The Financial Times, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Cairman Gen. Mark Milley said the war will ultimately have to end at the negotiating table and not on the battlefield.
“In this particular case, it’s against a country that is large and is nuclear-armed. So you have to be very, very conscious about managing escalation.”
Trump criticized some of his former generals for pursuing policies that kept U.S. troops abroad indefinitely, something Trump said is bad for America.
Trump advocated for a “policy of peace through strength,” mentioning that no new wars were starting during his presidency and no American soldiers lost their lives in service of their country.
“This is the most dangerous time in the history of our country that Joe Biden is leading us into oblivion.”
There is ample scientific evidence that suggests that the mixture of adjuvants contained in HPV vaccines and other vaccines is responsible for post-vaccination-induced autoimmune diseases in some patients.
Adjuvant-induced disorders have become so widespread that medical experts have coined a new term to describe this umbrella syndrome: Autoimmune/Inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants (ASIA).
In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series, we have discussed HPV vaccines and their links to ovarian insufficiency, neurological and autoimmune disease, the vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing cervical cancer, and the inability of clinical trials to detect safety issues. In Part 4, we will discuss concerns regarding particular vaccine ingredients and provide a reflection on the HPV vaccine development.
Summary of Key Facts
Adjuvants are used in HPV vaccines including Gardasil to get the attention of the immune system.
Aluminum is a common adjuvant in Gardasil that may be responsible for adverse events.
Another discovered “secret” ingredient of Gardasil “HPV DNA”, may also be responsible for adverse events.
Both immunogenic adjuvants may induce a strong immune response or autoimmune conditions.
Research should focus on careful risk-benefit analyses to determine which populations benefit from vaccination. Some people may not benefit from vaccination but would be best served by cancer screening outreach.
To stimulate an enhanced immune response intended to last for 50 years, Merck added a particularly toxic aluminum-containing adjuvant, amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate (AAHS), to the Gardasil vaccine.
Aluminum is the third most abundant metal in the earth’s crust and is widely present in the environment—in plants, soil, water, air, the food chain, and pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, aluminum is a potent toxin that can severely harm multiple human body systems, including but not limited to nervous, respiratory, musculoskeletal, digestive, renal, and hepatic systems.
The brain is the main target organ of aluminum. It can penetrate the barrier into the brain. Aluminum has been linked to mechanisms of action including, but not limited to:
Peer-reviewed studies show that aluminum binds to non-vaccine proteins, including host proteins and latent viruses, triggering autoimmune and other severe conditions.
Pediatric vaccine experts are determining children’s acceptable exposure level to aluminum.
In a 2020 article published in Frontiers in Microbiology, Paul Offit, M.D., and colleagues argued that an infant’s cumulative exposure to aluminum via vaccines through six months of life is less than the natural exposures through breastmilk and infant formula.
Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He and his colleagues have developed vaccines and have written extensively on vaccine safety.
But this argument is not reassuring. At issue here is a child’s cumulative exposure to aluminum. These exposures come from natural sources, such as breastmilk and infant formula. Various vaccines and other pharmaceutical products layered on top of these natural exposures (e.g., several brands of vitamin K shots given to infants at birth also contain aluminum).
Even more concerning is that the newer version of this vaccine (Gardasil 9) contains nearly double the amount of AAHS as the earlier version of the vaccine.
Gardasil’s ‘Secret’ Ingredient
Medical practitioners in nine countries submitted samples of Gardasil to be tested for human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA because they suspected that residual recombinant HPV DNA left in the vaccine might have been a contributing factor leading to unexplained post-vaccination side effects.
To conduct this research, scientists requested samples of Gardasil from Australia, Bulgaria, France, India, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Spain, and the United States. Each sample was confirmed to be from a different lot number.
The lab tests revealed that all 16 Gardasil samples contained fragments of HPV DNA. The specific fragments included: HPV-11 DNA, HPV-18 DNA, or fragments comprising elements of both genotypes.
The fragments of HPV DNA were found firmly attached to the adjuvant (AAHS).
Whether these findings have clinical significance is an open question. Additional vaccine safety research must consider this and design the appropriate studies to understand the biological impact of residual HPV DNA fragments bound to a particulate mineral-based adjuvant.
Vaccine adjuvants cause the immune system to mount a robust response. This is helpful when vaccinating the elderly, who have an immune system in “senescence,” meaning it is beginning to wind down. However, adjuvants in vaccines designed for young people with healthy immune systems who undergo tremendous metabolic changes during adolescence require more caution.
These DNA fragments may act as a toll-like receptor 9 (“TLR9”) agonist. TLR is a group of proteins on the surface or inside cells, acting in the immune system’s front line, detecting various pathogens or harmful signals from the environment and responding to them.
Dr. Sin Hang Lee, director of Connecticut-based Milford Molecular Diagnostics, has surmised that, without adding the TLR9 agonist, Gardasil would not be immunogenic. According to Lee, the DNA fragments bound to the AAHS virus-like nanoparticles act as the TLR9 agonist in both Gardasil and Gardasil 9 vaccines, creating the strongest immune-stimulating adjuvant in use in any vaccine.
A 2015 textbook, Vaccines and Autoimmunity, edited by Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, the father of autoimmunity research, includes articles by many of the world’s leading autoimmunity experts. These scientists concluded that Gardasil could cause autoimmune disorders because of the vaccine’s potent immune-stimulating ingredients.
Serious Adverse Events After Receiving HPV Vaccines
In a JAMA Network Open study published in 2009, 12,424 reported adverse events were recorded in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following Gardasil vaccination from June 1, 2006, through Dec. 31, 2008. Among these were 32 deaths with a mean age of 18. The deaths occurred two to 405 days after the Gardasil injection.
Of the 32 deaths, medical records and autopsy reports were reviewed for 20. These reviews confirmed four unexplained deaths and six cardiac-related deaths. There was no attempt to establish a causal relationship, meaning any effort to ensure or exclude a link to Gardasil vaccination. However, the authors reported that the Gardasil recipients’ syncope (loss of consciousness caused by a drop in blood pressure) and thromboembolic events (e.g., deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism) were disproportionately high.
3. Syncope
Syncope occurred in 1,896 cases, half within 15 minutes of injection. Among those who fainted, 15 percent resulted in a fall, and most of these falls (68 percent) resulted in a head injury. Vaccine recipients are advised to sit for 15 minutes after the injection.
Anaphylaxis among young women receiving Gardasil vaccination is approximately 10 to 53 times higher than identified in a comparable school-based program for meningococcal C vaccination. HPV-related anaphylaxis incidence was 1.0 to 5.3 per 100,000, whereas it was 0.1 per 100,000 for meningococcal C vaccination. All cases of anaphylaxis were identified using the Brighton case definition of anaphylaxis.
HPV Vaccination Among Males
Routine vaccination of boys and men has been implemented in only a few countries, including Australia, Canada, and the U.S. Population-based vaccination programs are designed to increase herd immunity among males and females and reduce the incidence of anal, penile, head, and neck cancers among males specifically.
A systematic review of HPV vaccination effectiveness and safety among males was conducted to gather research through 2017. Seven studies were included in the analysis, comprising data on approximately 5,000 males; four studies were randomized and three were non-randomized. Only two studies included serious adverse events and none of them were judged by the investigators to be vaccine-related.
This study suggests that vaccination is more effective among males if administered before the onset of sexual activity. This finding supports research leading to the same conclusion about females.
The authors highlighted that more research is needed to establish the benefits of large-scale vaccination programs among males. While this 2018 systematic review of HPV vaccination effectiveness and safety was the first to be published for males, seven systematic reviews among nearly 46,000 participants had been conducted for females, demonstrating a disproportionate share of research among females at the time.
Certain risk factors increase the likelihood of HPV anal, penile, and throat cancer among men, including smoking, early onset of sexual activity, HIV-positive status, and men who have sex with men. Using a condom, maintaining stable sexual networks, and starting sexual activity later in life all reduce the risk. Some healthcare providers can offer an anal Pap test to men who are at greater risk of anal cancer, such as men living with HIV and those who receive anal sex.
The CDC states that vaccination is not universally recommended for males older than 26: “HPV vaccination for ages 27 through 45 provides less benefit. Most sexually active adults have already been exposed to HPV, although vaccination does not target all HPV types.” Those in a stable relationship are unlikely to get a new HPV infection.
Do We Really Need HPV Vaccination?
HPV infection is a risk factor for cervical cancer. However, there are many other risk factors for cervical cancer. These include engaging in sexual intercourse before the age of 16, having multiple sexual partners, exposure to HIV, smoking, and being exposed to carcinogens at a young age.
Future research should consider differential screening rates by ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status. Results should be stratified by age at first sexual contact and vaccination history to begin disentangling the effects of early vaccination coupled with disparities in screening rates.
Would it make sense to test women before vaccination if they had already engaged in sexual activity? Perhaps. Because vaccination is prophylactic, we could optimize vaccine benefits and reduce harm by offering vaccination to those not yet infected (primary prevention) and focusing on cancer screening (secondary prevention) among those who have already been infected with an HPV strain.
Teenagers who engage in early sexual activity are at higher risk for an array of mental and physical health problems. The CDC recently released a report stating, “Almost one in five young women have experienced sexual violence—a 20 percent increase since 2017.” Approximately one in 10 teen girls reported being forced to have sex.
Sexual violence is a serious concern, and preventing unwanted sexual contact should be a priority. Parents, public health authorities, and doctors can help protect teen girls by coaching them on anticipating high-risk situations. This will also help prevent cervical and genital cancers by reducing unwanted intimate contact. Strengthening the cancer-screening process among those who are already sexually active is another way to reduce mortality from cervical cancer.
Aside from the evidence that HPV vaccines cause harm and absent a robust risk-benefit analysis, vaccinating teenagers against a sexually transmitted disease raises ethical and moral issues. Giving tweens, teens, and very young adults a vaccine that promises to prevent a sexually transmitted disease introduces a moral hazard—they may engage in higher-risk practices because they feel it is safe to do so.
With the sense of being protected, teens may engage in sexual behaviors at a very young age, which is often associated with other high-risk activities such as substance use. Instead, we could be directing resources to help teens take concrete steps toward making self-care a priority at a time when events and people around them challenge their self-esteem.
Encourage Positive Social Influence
Community leaders and public health professionals could invest in health-promoting activities, such as building community centers and gyms to make regular physical activity and social connections accessible regardless of family income, enabling all teens to build a robust social network with shared values.
Young adults must also set good nutrition and sleep habits, develop a healthy relationship with alcohol, and understand the link between mental and physical health.
Finally, busy parents must be supported in enhancing their child’s sense of belonging within his or her community.
While the promise of human vaccine technology is alluring for preventing disease and even curing cancer, we should reflect rationally on the longstanding relationship between viruses and humans.
Certainly, vaccines have dramatically improved important pediatric outcomes, but newer vaccines targeting otherwise healthy young adults must be held to the most rigorous standards to estimate associated risks and benefits.
Data Quality and Transparency Is Required
When considering the evidence for inclusion in risk-benefit analyses, care must be taken to evaluate the quality of systematic reviews. A recent publication compared the rate of industry-funded vs. non-industry-funded vaccine systematic reviews. The non-industry-funded studies had a higher quality score than those funded by the industry.
Public health officials should refrain from blanket recommendations predicated on flimsy science and instead invest in robust trials which can truly elucidate for whom a vaccine offers the most benefit. Clinical trials must be appropriately sized and conducted for a period long enough to detect benefits and risks. Surely some subgroups do stand to gain value while others may not.
To protect the United States vaccine program, officials in industry and health authorities must:
Conduct robust trials powered to detect safety signals,
Release anonymized, individual trial data promptly for public inspection,
Develop transparent and rigorous risk-benefit analyses before recommendations are made, and
Eradicate vaccine mandates.
Ethical vaccine policies are essential for encouraging lifestyle choices that promote vibrant mental and physical health.
JACKSON, Miss.—The group of physicians, vaccine-injured people, and whistleblowers speaking at the Mississippi Capitol building on Monday and Tuesday weren’t asking state officials to cease all COVID-19 vaccinations and to convene a grand jury to investigate its rollout in the state.
They were demanding it.
“Stop the shots” was the refrain of those who had treated COVID patients over the last three years and those injured by the vaccine.
On Monday and Tuesday, the medical freedom organization MS Against Mandates (MAM) held the Mississippi Medical Freedom Conference in Jackson, Mississippi, which included over a dozen physicians, several whistleblowers, six physician-confirmed vaccine-injured patients, and two parents whose sons died after receiving the vaccines.
Dr. John Witcher is the co-founder and former president of MAM. He stepped back from the leadership position to focus on his run for Mississippi governor in the 2023 gubernatorial election.
MAM orchestrated the event that gave a voice to many who are being silenced in media and the medical community, such as Dr. Peter McCullough, a practicing internist and cardiologist in Dallas who is also the national medical adviser for MAM.
McCullough told The Epoch Times that the purpose of the three-and-a-half-hour roundtable—chaired by Republican state Rep. Randy Boyd—was primarily to educate Mississippi officials about safety concerns regarding the vaccine.
“The state must pull these products off the market,” McCullough said. “There can be no more administration of the COVID-19 vaccines in the state of Mississippi.”
McCullough, author of “The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex,” said the essential problem with the vaccines is the safety concern for the large number of people who have taken them without informed consent about adverse events.
“The CDC now says 92 percent of Americans have taken at least one shot and that 79 percent have taken two shots,” McCullough said. “If there are safety concerns, that’s a problem because the denominator is so big.”
Because of those large numbers, any rare side effect isn’t rare from a safety perspective and, as was heard in the testimonies, there are concerns that the state officials haven’t kept track of the full number of the injuries and has even undercounted them, McCullough said.
In Mississippi, which represents under 1 percent of the U.S. population, McCullough estimated that there are several hundred people who have been injured by the vaccines and that some have died from the vaccines.
“That’s several hundred too many, and it didn’t need to happen,” McCullough said. “None of this needed to happen.”
Community Standard of Care
Physicians like Witcher and others on the panel have reported that their state health officials have only recited federal talking points instead of allowing them to cultivate what McCullough called their own “community standard-of-care,” which McCullough said is intended to evolve over time.
“The community standard of care always comes from the doctors who are treating the patients,” McCullough said. “Under no circumstances does it come from federal or state agencies, pharmaceutical companies, or even from hospitals or hospital systems. It comes from the doctors in the field who are learning how to treat their patients based on the medical literature, clinical judgment, and the differences in the community.”
This is why McCullough said each state needs its own doctor-in-charge, like in Florida, where Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has refuted federal guidelines handed down by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Dr. Anthony Fauci when he was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“We’re seeing how valuable it is for a state to have its own independent thinker who is not biased, influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, or influenced by any state or federal public health agency,” McCullough said.
A doctor-in-charge in Mississippi would have acted as the representative for state officials to hear the testimonies given in the state Capitol on Monday, McCullough said.
“The state of Mississippi needs an independent thinker who can attend medical panels like this, take them under consideration, and provide advising to the attorney general,” McCullough said. “In this case, it would be to get the vaccines off the market.”
If Witcher were to become governor, he said he would create a position for a state surgeon general, and McCullough said he would “entertain the appointment as a doctor and a public figure.”
Noticeably, the Capitol chamber where the roundtable convened was absent of lawmakers—aside from Boyd—which McCullough said wasn’t surprising, as he’s seen it “over and over again.”
“The fear among legislators on both the state and federal levels is extraordinary,” McCullough said. “This is the biggest thing that’s happened to our country over the last three years in modern history and you’d think they’d be interested to hear from doctors who traveled from far distances and who have vast experience in this. It’s not for my benefit. It’s for their benefit, and it’s extremely disappointing that they found something else that they thought was a higher priority.”
Dr. Peter McCullough speaks at the Mississippi Capitol about COVID-19 vaccine adverse events in Jackson, Miss., on Feb. 27, 2023. (Courtesy of Charlotte Stringer Photography)
‘Grossly Misled’
The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reflects an “embarrassing gross underestimate of what is happening in America,” McCullough told the audience in the Capitol chambers.
“Through Feb. 17, 2023, the CDC is verifying that 16,967 Americans have died shortly after the vaccine,” McCullough said. “Most of these deaths occur on the day they took the shot or the next few days afterward.”
There are 16,342 permanently disabled Americans in VAERS, he added, while 372,770 have been hospitalized for vaccine injuries, he said.
“Our CDC V-Safe data—which is the patient-reported data on the cell phone—has revealed that 7 to 8 percent of people who take the vaccine within a day or two have to go to the ER for acute care,” McCullough said.
In Mississippi, this means there are hundreds of Mississippians who have died from the vaccine or are now disabled, he said.
Despite this, federal and state agencies continue to advocate for the vaccines and underreport their side effects, he said, even after federal agencies like the CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have acknowledged their adverse events.
The question is, McCullough said, who in Mississippi has known about the injuries, and what was done about it.
“If you have a product that you use in your state that has this type of safety track record, there is a fiduciary responsibility lawmakers have to protect the people from further harm,” McCullough said. “That’s why we are here today. The people of this state have been grossly misled on the COVID-19 vaccines.”
‘This Is Not Normal’
Janci Lindsay, a Texas-based molecular biologist and biochemist, addressed the room after McCullough, stating that she’s seen an increase in immune system impairment, as well as an explosion in autoimmunity, a decrease in fertility, and an increase in stillbirth and miscarriage.
Among the lies the public was told about the vaccines was that they were not gene therapies (GTs), she said.
“I can tell you that these genetic vaccines are in fact gene therapies,” Lindsay said. “What does that mean? That means you are injected with a genetic sequence that causes your human cells to make a foreign viral protein and display it on the surface of your cells for your body to then mount an immune reaction against those proteins on your cells.”
Another lie was that the gene therapies would stay in the arm, she said.
“These GTs travel everywhere in the body to all organs, to all cells,” Lindsay said. “They even pass to your brain, into your bone marrow, and into your testes and ovaries.”
From her research, she said it’s probable—not just possible—that men who have received these shots are passing the GTs to their partners as well as their progeny either directly or by way of sperm-mediated gene transfer, Lindsay said.
“Birth rates are plummeting and reports of miscarriages and stillbirths are increasing worldwide among those who have received these GTs,” Lindsay said.
The longer the genetic sequences in the nucleus, the higher the chance it will be integrated into the genome, causing mutagenesis leading to an explosion in cancers, which she said are already being reported by multiple oncologists as well as pathologists.
“Now children around the world are having heart attacks and strokes and dying in their sleep. This is not normal,” she said. “And the CDC and FDA are nowhere to be seen. We must protect Mississippi and we must protect our children. We must stop these shots.”
‘Nothing Short of Catastrophic’
Dr. James Thorp, a Florida-based OB-GYN who specializes in maternal-fetal medicine, supported Lindsay’s findings on the dangers of the vaccine on pregnant women, stating that what he’s found is “nothing short of catastrophic.”
“It’s extremely dangerous to pregnancy,” he said.
The FDA and CDC consider a twofold increase in adverse events to be a danger, Thorp said.
“So, we compared the COVID-19 vaccines over 18 months to the influenza vaccines over 282 months,” he said.
Thorp said menstrual abnormalities are 1,200 times higher, miscarriages are 57 times higher, and fetal deaths are 38 times higher, along with increases in 15 other serious pregnancy complications.
“This is not Jim Thorp data,” he said. “This is your data from your government, from the CDC and the FDA, and they’re still pushing this vaccine.”
Dr. James Thorp and molecular biologist Janci Lindsay address COVID-19 vaccine adverse events in pregnant women and infants at a round table discussion at the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Feb. 27, 2023. (Courtesy of Charlotte Stringer Photography)
‘Never Seen Anything Like This’
Dr. Reni Moon, a board-certified pediatrician based in Washington state, addressed the implementation of the children’s vaccine program. She said children were at statistically zero risk of becoming ill with COVID-19.
Moon said that she and other health care workers with whom she’s communicated are seeing an uptick in myocarditis in children as well as a “clear increase in health issues in young people that are very unusual.”
“We’ve never seen anything like this in our careers,” Moon said.
Increase in Cancer
Dr. Jeffrey Howard, a Mississippi-based diagnostic and interventional radiologist and the president of MS Against Mandates, said he had a unique perspective on what took place in his community after the vaccine rollout because of the large number of patient studies he interpreted.
Howard began seeing a significant increase in side effects such as stroke, myocarditis, heart attack, arrhythmia, neurological disorders, and sudden death, he said.
“As the vaccination campaign continued throughout 2022, I have observed a sizable increase in the number of various types of cancers, including the dramatic increase in very rare types of cancers,” Howard said, which he added is also being reported by his colleagues.
Many of these patients are being diagnosed with advanced stages of cancer at a younger age, he said.
“Why? We believe that this is related to the damage these gene-altering shots are having on the immune system,” Howard said.
(L–R) Nurse Kimberly Overton, VAERS Whistleblower Deborah Conrad, Dr. Jeffrey Howard, Dr. Reni Moon, and Dr. James Thorp discuss COVID-19 vaccine adverse events at the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Feb. 27, 2023. (Courtesy of Charlotte Stringer Photography)
‘An Astonishingly Bad Idea’
Dr. Christina Parks, a Michigan-based cellular and molecular biologist who did her graduate work in cytokine signaling, followed Howard.
“The degree that I hold is very much involved with how to manipulate genetic material as was done in the production of these new gene transfer vaccines for COVID,” Parks said.
While there has been much media focus on gain-of-function research to create a more virulent strain of SARS-CoV-2, Parks said it appears “we’ve missed seeing the hazard and immorality of using gene-transfer technology for vaccines.”
“The issue that we really need to be focusing on is why our scientists and governments decided to force millions, if not billions, of people to inject a product that forces the body to produce a toxic foreign viral protein that is known to cause all of the deleterious effects of COVID?” Parks asked. “Why would we have our cells produce this when we knew that the immune system would see cells that are producing this spike protein as a foreign invader and attack them? You don’t need a Ph.D. to recognize that this is an astonishingly bad idea.”
‘Free of Adverse Events’
Dr. Robert Corkern said that in November 2020, he began treating COVID-19 patients who had comorbidities in what he called the underserved region of the Delta in Greenville, Mississippi. He used early treatment protocols, including ivermectin, that led to a rate of zero mortality and ICU admission for his patients.
“Today, I’ve treated over 10,000 COVID patients,” Corkern said. “Still, no ICU admissions or deaths.”
Corkern reported that in his clinical observation, natural immunity has given more effective protection against COVID-19 than the vaccines, adding that natural immunity itself is “free of adverse events.”
“It’s much more effective than immunity from vaccines,” Corkern said. “In low-risk populations such as infants and children, it’s difficult to justify incurring risk from vaccination to combat a threat that is nonlethal to begin with.”
Corkern added that there are many lessons to be learned from what went wrong in the response to COVID.
“Perhaps the most egregious to me was the actual shutting down of collegial discourse among physicians, labeling all conclusions different from the majority as misinformation,” Corkern said. “Many lives would have been saved if voices were not censored.”
A Physician Maligned
Dr. David Calderwood, a physician based in Huntsville, Alabama, faced what Corkern described regarding media censorship and attacks.
On the steps of the Mississippi Capitol building, Dr. John Witcher (back L) stands with people who have either been injured by or have had family members die from the COVID-19 vaccine, in Jackson, Miss., on Feb. 28, 2023. (Courtesy of Charlotte Stringer Photography)
Despite this, Calderwood said he’s successfully treated over 500 patients using a multidrug therapy that includes hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and he said he’s only lost one patient.
What he said he’s found in his clinical observations of the COVID-19 vaccines is that they’re exactly the opposite of what’s been advertised.
“These vaccines are the most unsafe and ineffective vaccines that have ever come to market,” Calderwood said. “Almost three times as many deaths and permanent disabilities have been reported through the VAERS system than from all other vaccines in history.”
The meeting in the chamber was followed by a press conference on Tuesday on the Capitol building’s steps, where the assembly continued their call for transparency and the removal of the vaccines from the market.
“People are being injured and dying suddenly from these shots, and the state needs to recognize it,” Witcher said.
Correction: A previous version of this article misquoted Dr. Peter McCullough’s statement about V-Safe data, specifically the percentage of people who reported going to the emergency room after receiving the vaccine. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
Former President Donald Trump has revealed his dream for a new America ahead of the 2024 presidential race, promising to bring back the country’s boldness “in a very big way” and heralding a “quantum leap” in living standards.
“Past generations of Americans pursued big dreams and daring projects that once seemed absolutely impossible. They pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier. They transformed American life with the interstate highway system, magnificent it was, and they launched a vast network of satellites into orbit all around the earth. But today, our country has lost its boldness. Under my leadership, we will get it back in a very big way,” Trump said in a video address released Friday.
“If you look at just three years ago, what we were doing was unthinkable. How good it was, how great it was for our country. Our objective will be a quantum leap in the American standard of living. That’s what will happen.”
Pointing out that a third of the American landmass is owned by the federal government, Trump noted that just a “very small portion of that land” amounting to “one-half of one percent” can be used to hold a contest to “charter up to 10 new cities and award them to the best proposals for development.”
“In other words, we’ll actually build new cities in our country again. These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hard-working families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact the American dream.”
Transportation, Manufacturing
A “big opportunity” that Trump cites in the video is in the transportation sector. In the United States and China, numerous companies are “racing” to develop vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.
In the last century, it was the United States that led the automotive revolution. “I want to ensure that America, not China, leads the revolution in air mobility. These breakthroughs can transform commerce, bring a giant infusion of wealth into rural America, and connect families in our country in new ways,” Trump said.
An American company engaged in vertical takeoff vehicle development is California-based Wisk. Last January, Wisk announced that it had secured $450 million in funding from Boeing.
In August, San Jose-based Archer Aviation received a $10 million deposit from United Airlines for an order of 100 electric takeoff and landing air taxis.
Trump also proposed a “strategic national manufacturing initiative” that will turn “forgotten communities into hives of industry.” This will ensure that these communities produce goods that the United States will no longer have to import from China. The initiative is going to be “very, very successful.”
The American manufacturing sector is currently struggling through various challenges like inflation, talent scarcity, supply chain problems, and economic uncertainty.
“Manufacturers continue to grapple with talent challenges that may limit the industry’s growth momentum. Moreover, supply-chain issues, including sourcing bottlenecks, global logistics backlogs, cost pressures, and cyberattacks, will likely remain critical challenges in 2023,” Deloitte said in its 2023 manufacturing outlook report.
Lowering Costs, Other Initiatives
Trump also promised to introduce a “major initiative” to lower the cost of living, especially focusing on reducing the cost of a new car and the cost of building single-family homes.
Annual inflation has remained above 6 percent every single month since October 2021. New vehicle inflation has remained above 5 percent every month since June 2021.
The median sales price of homes in the country hit $467,000 in the fourth quarter, up 10. 4 percent from the same period a year back. The United States is estimated to be facing a shortage of 3.8 million to 5 million homes.
Trump also intends to ask Congress to support “baby bonuses” for young parents, a move he hopes will trigger a “baby boom.”
He promised to carry out a “great modernization and beautification campaign” in 50 states that will get rid of ugly buildings, refurbish public spaces and parks, ensure a pristine environment, make cities and towns more livable, and build “towering monuments to our true American heroes.”
“Very importantly, I will also make sure all of these new places are safe. We love and cherish our police. They will do the job the way they have to,” Trump said.
“It is time to start talking about greatness for our country again. I will dramatically increase living standards and build a future that brings our country together through excitement, opportunity, and success.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) has come under renewed scrutiny in recent days over its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and its plans for addressing pandemics in the future.
This week, the World Health Assembly—the WHO’s decision-making body—began considering new ways to govern international responses to disease outbreaks. An early-stage draft before the Assembly includes both binding and non-binding language regarding how nations handle disease outbreaks internally, as well as how they coordinate with international partners. Article 15 of the draft document (pdf) specifically describes the WHO as the “directing and coordinating authority on international health work,” and says the WHO’s Director-General shall be the one to declare pandemics. The WHO’s draft document also calls for wealthier developed nations to reserve a percentage of the diagnostic tools and disease treatments they create to share with developing nations.
Some critics of the WHO’s proposed international pandemic response network have raised concerns that the system would require participating countries to cede a degree of their sovereignty, resources, and decision-making independence to a superseding global body.
“It [the WHO] funds a bureaucracy writ large: A new organization, a governing board, which would presumably be under WHO, requires countries to give a certain percentage of their health budgets to emergencies and sets up a supply network for the WHO,” said David Bell, a public health physician and former WHO staffer specializing in epidemic policy, in an interview with NTD News.
The WHO draft document says it “reaffirms” the sovereignty of participating nations, though the convention would require participating countries to contribute resources and funding in times of pandemics, while simultaneously giving the WHO the power to declare such pandemics.
The document defines a “pandemic” as “the global spread of a pathogen or variant that infects human populations with limited or no immunity through sustained and high transmissibility from person to person, overwhelming health systems with severe morbidity and high mortality, and causing social and economic disruptions, all of which require effective national and global collaboration and coordination for its control.”
The proposed treaty states that participating countries shall provide funding for the international pandemic response framework, and shall establish regulatory measures within their home countries to “accelerate the process of approving and licensing pandemic-related products for emergency use in a timely manner”—including waiving intellectual property rights on medical products that are developed to address pandemics.
Bell outlined his concerns that the WHO’s ability to declare pandemics and, thus, trigger the sharing of resources and funding would present an internal conflict of interest.
“[The global pandemic response proposals] put [pandemic response measures] in the hands of an individual and a bureaucracy whose sole function is to find threats and institute this,” Bell said. “So we’re putting a mechanism in place that will be self-perpetuating, and its sole role is to find and respond to emergencies and institute the poverty-increasing measures, the wealth-concentration measures, etc., that we’ve seen over the last three years.”
Distrust of WHO
The pandemic response treaty comes about as the WHO has been criticized heavily for its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the initial COVID outbreak, then National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien alleged that China was slow to provide information about the risks posed by the virus. Furthermore, several weeks passed before a WHO team was allowed to enter the country. The WHO’s initial report on the outbreak, however, then praised the Chinese response—while making little mention of the Chinese regime’s efforts to suppress critics and whistleblowers who brought attention to the virus outbreak.
The World Health Assembly began debating the proposed pandemic response treaty in the same week that U.S. Department of Energy investigators reported that the COVID-19 outbreak likely began as a leak from a Chinese virology laboratory.
The WHO has been accused of helping to suppress indications that COVID-19 came from a lab leak. In a March 2021 report, the WHO described the lab leak theory as “extremely unlikely.” In July of 2021, however, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus walked back that assessment, saying it was “premature” to rule out the lab leak theory. Peter Ben Embarak, the WHO researcher who led the research effort in China, later claimed the Chinese regime pressured his team to dismiss the lab leak theory.
The WHO has a history of downplaying information that could reflect negatively on China, according to Dr. Rik Mehta, a health care law professor at Georgetown University and a former Republican Senate candidate in New Jersey.
“When COVID first started, there was this push to say, well, if you thought that it originated from China, and it was man-made, then you’re a conspiracy theorist. And if you say that it’s a ‘Wuhan virus’ or something related to China, then you’re a racist,” Mehta told NTD News. “And so now we know that that’s completely untangling and that there is a probability that it could have been man-made, made in a laboratory, and then leaked out of that laboratory subsequently.”
Mehta believes the lab leak theory is the most likely scenario for the origins of COVID-19.
“[COVID-19] is unlike any other viruses we’ve seen. Zika, monkeypox, Ebola [are] viruses that have been around for more than 50-plus years. COVID is something that’s brand new to the scientific community, to the public at large. And so it’s hard to argue that it was created in wet markets or animal-to-human transmission,” Mehta said. “And the likely prevailing theory was that it was created in the laboratory. Really the true question here is: Was it leaked accidentally? Or was it leaked on purpose?”
Mehta also urged caution against the WHO’s pandemic response agreement, given past problems with sharing information about the spread of viruses.
“Of course, there’s a level of interplay [where] countries need to work together and participate when you truly have a pandemic the size of COVID,” Mehta said. “That being said, this cannot be taken lightly. Every country needs to protect their sovereignty: They cannot just give an unelected body, an international governmental organization that has no accountability to the people, and ceding that kind of authority that can then get into the lives of Americans.”
Mehta called for members of Congress to thoroughly review any WHO pandemic treaty before entering the United States into such an agreement.
Last month, Republican Senators introduced a bill that would bar U.S. participation in a WHO global pandemic response agreement without first gaining the approval of the U.S. Senate.
NTD News reached out to the WHO for comment but did not receive a response before this article was published.
The governor of Arizona on March 3 said an execution of a convicted murderer will not take place, despite an order from the state’s highest court.
“Under my Administration, an execution will not occur until the people of Arizona can have confidence that the State is not violating the law in carrying out the gravest of penalties,” Arizona Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs said in a statement to news outlets.
The Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that state law barred it from not issuing a warrant of execution once certain conditions are met and that the conditions had been met in the case of Aaron Gunches.
Gunches, convicted of murdering Ted Price, his girlfriend’s former husband, in 2002, asked the court to issue a warrant in late 2022, “so his sentence of death may be carried out immediately. … so that justice may be lawfully served and give closure to the Victims family.” Then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, filed in support.
But the new top law enforcement official in the state, Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes, asked to withdraw the case, citing how Gunches had changed his mind.
“The State would not have moved for a warrant of execution at this time if Gunches had not asked to be executed. And on that front, circumstances have now changed,” Mayes said.
Hobbs, shortly after entering office, ordered a review of Arizona’s execution protocols and has since appointed retired U.S. Magistrate Judge David Duncan to lead the review.
No executions should take place while the review is taking place, Mayes has argued in court.
Forced to Issue Warrant
Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel said in the new ruling that the court was forced to issue the warrant after a defendant’s conviction and sentences were affirmed on appeal, post-conviction proceedings have been completed, and the state has notified the court that the conditions are met.
Not granting a warrant would result in the court “inappropriately involving itself in a determination assigned to the executive branch, contrary to this Court’s statutory role to provide only review and authorization,” Brutinel wrote. He denied the requests from Gunches and Mayes and granted the original motion for a warrant, scheduling the execution for April 6.
Hobbs said that the warrant “authorizes an execution and does not require it,” enabling her to not carry out the execution.
“Under my Administration, an execution will not occur until the people of Arizona can have confidence that the State is not violating the law in carrying out the gravest of penalties,” she added.
The timeline for the review isn’t clear. Duncan has been directed to issue a report on the review once it’s finished.
In a statement to the Associated Press, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office disagreed with the governor.
The office, which prosecuted Gunches, said Hobbs “has a constitutional and statutory responsibility to carry out all sentences, including the execution of Aaron Gunches.”
Pauses
Arizona has paused executions before.
Lethal injections in the state began in 1993 after voters approved a state constitutional amendment to make it the method of execution. Twenty people were executed from 1993 to 2009.
One pause was implemented in late 2000 and remained in place until May 2007. Another pause happened afterwards with executions not resuming until October 2010. Thirteen people were executed between 2010 and 2013.
Executions were halted in 2014 after the execution of Joseph Wood, using a drug combination that had not been used in the state before. Mayes has described Wood’s execution as “botched.”
Under then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, Arizona started executions again in 2022. Three executions took place that year.
The new administration says the history of lethal injections in Arizona and in other states supports pausing executions again while the review takes place. The review will include looking at how the state procures drugs for lethal injections, the procedures for conducting an execution, and how well staff members are trained.
Mayes noted that other states have recently undertaken similar reviews, including Tennessee, adding in one recent filing that she sees “a heightened need to ensure any capital sentence is carried out constitutionally, legally, humanely, and with transparency.”
“To that end, no further warrants of execution will be sought at this time, and a detailed review of the administration of capital punishment in Arizona will be conducted,” she wrote.
A lot has changed since then, and thanks in part to AIM’s investigation, some members of the Idaho House who opposed school choice lost their reelection bids. And what has happened shows exactly why this investigative work is so important.
A school choice bill in Idaho has just been voted down by the State Senate. The bill failed the full Senate on a 12-23 vote. This was after the House had passed it (of course) and after a significant delay in getting it out of the Senate education committee.
Given the recent defeat we might think that’s it as far as school choice is concerned. But there are still three bills being considered, each less than the Full Monty of what might be desired. The issue is still alive even if the most recent bill isn’t.
There have been at least 14 bills that have some impact on the school systems in just the past two months (of course some of this concentration is just because the legislature is in session). The exciting part there is that none of those bills, suggestions, or amendments are about reducing or limiting school choice. We’re clearly in a world where the base argument has been won and we’re now talking about the details.
Given the failure of this particular school choice bill, others are being considered in the Idaho legislature this session. Calling lawmakers to support the idea works – lawmakers are supposed to respond to their voters, after all. And a study conducted in 2019 shows that the majority of Idaho parents and Idahoans are in favor of school choice.
If the politicians won’t listen to the populace, the choice is to replace the politicians the next time the population gets the chance. Thanks in part to AIM’s investigation, some members of the Idaho House who opposed school choice lost their reelection bids. The Idaho Freedom Foundation discussed those changes here and here.
Because that’s how democracy works too – politicians don’t do what the people who vote for them desire and then vote for some other politicians. And, here’s the great value of this. It only takes one or two of the politicians to have to change their careers, spend more time with their families, and for all those others to sit up and take notice.
The school choice argument is really, really, simple. The correct people to decide on their children’s education are the parents of those children. If politicians won’t allow that then decide to have different politicians. Because that’s what democracy is, that the people get what the people want.
School choice – proper, full school choice – is now part of the standard political conversation in Idaho. It hasn’t happened yet because that’s how politics works, sometimes there is that “once more into the breach, dear friends” necessary. Which is exactly what is happening.
This article originally appeared in Accuracy in Media. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News. Republished with permission.
A BuzzFeed News article has a novel take on diversity in art.
It involves science fiction, a genre that has played a significant role in shaping minds, from the sinister portrayal of Darth Vader’s Galactic Empire, an amalgamation of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, to the negative influences of socialism that influenced Frank Herbert’s epic novel “Dune.”
Despite its disproportionate cultural impact, BuzzFeed thinks science fiction needs an overhaul. One that involves characters of all shapes and sizes.
Needless to say, that particular fat Black character doesn’t look capable of climbing two flights of stairs, no less getting into a spacesuit and fixing a starship. Capable of anything? I think not.
But perhaps that is my lack of imagination. Probably not, though. Although I do admit that she would benefit from living in a weightless environment; it is likely the only thing that would prevent her from having a heart attack at any moment.
It’s a fundamental falsehood that we can simultaneously be super obese and do what fit people can do. Black or White, fat bodies are unhealthy bodies and not to be celebrated.
Surely it is true that bullying people for being obese is cruel; just as certainly lying to people that they can be “healthy at any size” is at least as cruel. Any person who looks like that AI-generated art above will die young, never having been able to achieve their God-given potential.
St. Paul, Minn. – A homeless St. Paul man who told police he’d been driving around all day with others in a stolen vehicle while smoking meth and heroin prior to a crash that killed one of the passengers had been bailed out not once, but twice, in recent weeks by the Minnesota Freedom Fund in two other felony drug cases.
Devin Markus Chase, 31, has been charged in Ramsey County District Court with two counts of criminal vehicular homicide involving gross negligence and operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of a controlled substance, and one count of auto theft following last week’s crash that resulted in the death of 30-year-old Randi Lee Stone.
Charges say St. Paul police responded just after 4 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 20 to a two-vehicle crash at Cretin Avenue North and Mississippi River Boulevard where it appeared a Nissan Rogue and a Nissan Altima had collided head-on.
The first officer on the scene found Chase on the ground a foot away from the Rogue’s driver’s side door which was shut. The officer spoke to witnesses at the scene who said two Asian females had fled from the passenger side of the Rogue.
Officers found Stone in the Rogue’s backseat on the driver’s side in a pool of blood. She was not wearing a seatbelt and it appeared her head had struck a pillar on the driver’s side between the driver’s and passenger’s doors. She was pronounced dead by medics at the scene.
Devin Markus Chase (Prior booking photo from Anoka County Sheriff’s Office)
Chase told medics that Stone’s sister had been driving, and she fled the scene. Chase claimed he had been in the back driver’s side when they crashed. Chase was transported to the hospital and was diagnosed with a dislocated hip.
Officers recovered drug paraphernalia, alprazolam, and tinfoil from the Rogue. A search warrant was subsequently drafted for a blood draw on Chase.
St. Paul police posted on social media following the crash that drug impairment was believed to be involved in the crash.
Officers spoke to the Altima’s driver who said he was headed south on Cretin Avenue and approaching Mississippi River Boulevard in the right-most lane when he saw the Rogue coming towards him at a high rate of speed. He said the Rogue then crossed over the center line and drove into oncoming traffic. The driver of the Altima tried to swerve to the right to avoid the collision, but the curb prevented him from getting out of the Rogue’s path. The driver said the front passenger side of his Altima struck the center of the Rogue, and he was able to crawl out of the passenger side of his car. The Altima’s driver said he saw an extremely upset woman walking around the Rogue, and he was not sure if anyone else was in the Rogue. Officers noted no signs of impairment in the Altima’s driver, the complaint said.
Police learned that the Rogue had been stolen Feb. 8 in St. Paul and was also bearing incorrect plates at the time of the crash.
When officers spoke to Chase the next morning at the hospital, they noticed redness on both of Chase’s arms consistent with a steering wheel airbag being deployed and leaving burns on his arms.
After being advised of his rights, Chase agreed to speak to investigators. Chase told investigators that he had been living out of the Rogue for about two weeks with four other people, including Stone, Stone’s sister, another woman and another man. He said he didn’t know where it came from, but he assumed it was stolen and denied knowing who stole the Rogue.
Chase said the five of them drove to Northeast Minneapolis and bought methamphetamine and heroin on the morning of the crash. He told investigators that they drove around all day smoking the drugs they had purchased.
Chase maintained to investigators that he had not been driving and that he was in the rear driver’s side seat.
When asked if police would find his DNA or fingerprints around the driver’s compartment, Chase said his DNA would be all over the area because he had driven the Rogue before. Chase denied that his DNA would be on the driver’s steering wheel airbag.
Chase declined to provide a voluntary DNA sample and initially refused to cooperate with providing a DNA sample after police obtained a warrant to collect it.
At some point last week, a photo from a home security system was posted on Nextdoor which appeared to show a suspect matching Chase’s description with a similar looking Rogue in the background with the driver’s door open. The person who posted the photo said the suspect pictured was stealing packages in St. Paul. One person in the comment section said the person who was laying outside the vehicle after the crash was wearing the same pants as the suspect pictured. A St. Paul police sergeant commented on the Nextdoor post and asked the original poster of the picture to contact them.
Screen capture of suspected package thief posted on Nextdoor website.
Chase has a lengthy criminal history of at least 24 convictions which stretch the length of his entire adult life. His convictions include three felonies for burglary, theft, and domestic assault, as well as several other domestic assault or abuse convictions, and multiple driving after revocation, counterfeiting currency, theft, receiving stolen property, and drug convictions.
The new criminal complaint against Chase also noted that he has a prior gross misdemeanor conviction on criminal vehicular operation in Anoka County District Court in which he was involved in a hit-and-run while under the influence of alcohol.
Chase currently has two pending Hennepin County cases involving felony charges of drugs in one case charged in August 2021, and felony charges of theft and drugs in another case charged in January 2022.
Court records show warrants had been issued for Chase’s arrest in April 2022 after he failed to appear at scheduled court hearings in both cases. He was arrested on the warrants at the end of October 2022 and bail was set at $2,000 or $200 cash. A court document shows Minnesota Freedom Fund provided cash bail on Nov. 8, 2022, and listed both drug case numbers.
Conditional release violation reports were filed with the court in both cases in mid-December along with a judge’s order revoking Chase’s interim conditions of release for failure to comply with conditions of release, and warrants were again issued for his arrest.
Jail records show Chase was arrested by Eden Prairie police on Dec. 27 and was booked into custody on the warrants as well as a probable cause charge of felon in possession of a firearm, for which he was apparently never formally charged. Bail was set at $3,000 or $300 cash.
Another court document shows Minnesota Freedom Fund again supplied bail, and the jail record shows Chase was released from custody on that bail on Jan. 24, 2023. Chase remained out of custody on MFF’s bail at the time of the fatal crash last week.
Records show Chase remains in custody on the new charges on $500,000 bail.
Minnesota Crime Watch & Information publishes news, info and commentary about crime, public safety and livability issues in Minneapolis, the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.
As I wrote in my last post, I believe it is absolutely essential that people understand who is building AI and what their worldviews and values are because they will inevitably and unavoidably be reflected in the AI’s programming. Worldview matters because worldview is going to shape the development of the most important and powerful technology since the invention of the printing press, AI. I’d like to make a clear distinction between what our worldview is here at Gab and contrast it with the worldview of those in Silicon Valley.
Our enemies are not bright, cunning, or tough. They are theatre kids and effeminate midwit dorks. Like a house of cards, they will easily fall over under the slightest bit of resistance and pressure. They also hate God and humanity itself, which is why I believe our victory is inevitable.
The worldview of those in Silicon Valley who are building AI is a sick and twisted one that likens human beings to mere cattle, destined to be corralled by those who wield power and force.
Take Sam Altman, for example, the CEO of Open AI, who recently tweeted the following:
language models just being programmed to try to predict the next word is true, but it’s not the dunk some people think it is. animals, including us, are just programmed to try to survive and reproduce, and yet amazingly complex and beautiful stuff comes from it.
This is a prototypical secular humanist view of humanity: “you’re just an animal, a biological computer, a clump of cells.” It’s the same argument abortionists endorse in the “pro-choice” movement, and it’s an argument that falls flat on its face when contrasted with how God reveals to us His view on humanity in His Word.
The amazingly complex and beautiful “stuff” that comes from humanity comes directly from God precisely because we were made in His image. The idea of being made in the image of God is first introduced in the book of Genesis, which describes how God created Adam and Eve in his own image.
In Genesis 1:26-27, we read: “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
To be made in the image of God means that we share something of His nature and character. It means that we have the capacity for reason, creativity, and moral discernment. This is what makes human beings unique from being mere animals. It also means that we have a special relationship with God, one that is based on a shared identity and purpose.
The idea of being made in the image of God is not limited to the creation of Adam and Eve. Throughout the Bible, we see examples of people who reflect God’s image in their words and actions. For example, in the book of Exodus, Moses is described as having spoken with God face to face, and his face was said to have shone with the glory of God (Exodus 33:11-23). Similarly, in the New Testament, Jesus is described as the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), and his followers are called to be conformed to his likeness (Romans 8:29).
The concept of being made in the image of God has important implications for how we understand ourselves and others. It means that every human being, regardless of their race, gender, or social status, has inherent value and dignity. It also means that we have a responsibility to treat others with respect and compassion, recognizing that they, too, are made in the image of God.
At the same time, the concept of being made in the image of God is a reminder of our limitations and our need for God’s grace. While we share something of God’s nature, we are not God ourselves, and we are prone to sin and error. Our capacity for reason and creativity can be used for good or evil, and our moral discernment is often clouded by our own biases and prejudices.
At the core of the secular humanist worldview is the belief that individuals should be free to pursue their own happiness and fulfillment as long as they do not harm others in the process.
Secular humanists reject the idea that human beings are inherently flawed or sinful, as the Bible clearly reveals to us. Instead, they view human beings as capable of making positive contributions to society; and believe that individuals have the ability to improve themselves and the world around them through reason, education, and action. This is why we see the rise of things in our society that are tearing the moral fabric of the Western world. Things like drag queens stripping for children, men competing in women’s sports, and the normalization of baby murder in the womb, to name a few. With a worldview that has no moral ground to stand on and views everyone as mere animals, anything becomes possible.
Additionally, secular humanists tend to reject the notion that humans have a special place in the natural world or that they are somehow separate from or superior to other animals. Instead, they view humans as part of the natural world, subject to the same physical and biological laws as other living creatures.
Christian theology offers a distinct response to the secular humanist worldview, particularly in its views on the nature and value of humanity. According to the Bible, humans are not merely the result of biological and social processes but are endowed with a spiritual aspect that reflects their divine origin. This divine aspect of humanity imbues every individual with intrinsic value and is the basis for human rights and the dignity of all human life.
Christianity emphasizes the fallen nature of humanity and the need for redemption. While humans are created in God’s image, they are also capable of sin and evil. According to God’s Word, humans are not capable of achieving salvation on their own but require divine intervention through faith in Jesus Christ. This recognition of human sinfulness and the need for redemption is seen as a fundamental aspect of Christian belief and a response to the limitations and imperfections of human nature.
Christianity offers a unique view of the purpose and meaning of human existence. While secular humanism emphasizes individual autonomy and the pursuit of personal fulfillment, Christian theology holds that the ultimate purpose of human life is to know, love, and serve God. Humans are not simply self-contained individuals but are part of a larger community of believers who share a common purpose and mission. This emphasis on community and service is an important response to the individualism and self-centeredness of secular humanism.
Humans were “programmed” to worship, serve, and glorify God. Instead, many of us willingly choose to enslave ourselves to sin and desire by acting as beasts do. Reducing humanity to mere primal and biological tendencies is both intellectually lazy and spiritually empty. Sam and other secular humanists place you and me in the category of “animal” because they believe that they are the superior animal and are therefore entitled to have dominion over all of us.
This view is a grotesque perversion of God’s Word remade in their own image, as the Devil always does. The reality is we are all children of God, not mere animals reduced to the biological impulse to survive and reproduce. On this Truth, we must stand.
On this firm ground of God’s revealed Truth, Gab is building Based AI.
Andrew Torba CEO, Gab.com Jesus Christ is King of kings
Credit card provider Discover Financial Services will soon allow its network to track purchases made using payment cards at gun stores—triggering criticism that such activity leads to targeting gun owners.
In September, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) had launched a Merchant Category Code (MCC) for gun retailers. ISO is the organization responsible for classification of merchant categories used by payment cards. Discover told Reuters that it plans to implement the code beginning April. “We remain focused on continuing to protect and support lawful purchases on our network while protecting the privacy of cardholders,” the company said.
Discover’s decision has attracted strong criticism online. “This is a MASSIVE problem Congress needs to address, IMMEDIATELY!” Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) said in a March 3 tweet.
“Discover Card will begin tracking firearm purchases starting next month. There are more than 50 million Discover cards in use right now. They are coming for your guns little by little,” Congressman Troy E. Nehls (R-Texas) said in a March 3 tweet.
“It’s called a Social Credit System. I have been warning ppl this is coming. This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said radio host Doll Arntzen.
Social Credit System is a national credit rating system used by Beijing that ranks and blacklists people in China based on criteria approved by the communist regime.
“American citizens should be able to exercise their Second Amendment rights without fear of being tracked or discrimination against. We’re solving this in West Virginia with the Second Amendment Financial Privacy Act. Congress needs to follow our lead,” said Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) in a tweet.
Intrusive Action
In a Feb. 27 post, the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) “lobbying” arm Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) pointed out that Discover’s statement to Reuters did not provide an explanation as to how the company will determine which purchases are suspicious enough to warrant reporting.
Discover also did not reveal whether customers will be provided with any information in case their purchases have triggered an alert.
“Use of the MCC can only inform a credit card company that a certain amount of money was spent at what is considered a firearm retailer. It cannot be used to track what was actually bought, much less determine why the purchase was made,” the post said.
“Thus, the program inherently poses a risk to consumers of needlessly intrusive and harassing consequences for completely lawful and innocent conduct.”
Tagging Gun Purchases, Legislation
A Discover company spokesperson told Reuters that other payment network firms have also decided to impose the new MCC code in April, without naming the firms. “We were following the industry for consistent implementation,” the spokesperson said.
Back in September, Mastercard, Visa, and American Express also announced that they will be assigning category codes for sales that take place at gun stores and on gun-related purchases from stores dealing in sporting goods.
Discover is a minor player in the U.S. credit and debit card industry, only accounting for 2 percent of the $9.56 trillion in purchases made through the payment methods last year. Visa had a 61 percent share, followed by Mastercard with 26 percent, and American Express with 11 percent.
Meanwhile, states are taking action to counter payment firms’ moves to track gun purchases. On Jan. 12, West Virginia introduced the Second Amendment Financial Privacy Act which bars financial institutions from disclosing financial records “in a manner that singles out or discriminates against any person based on activity protected by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
The bill warned that the new MCC code for gun purchases will pave the way for “unprecedented surveillance” of individuals who abide by Second Amendment activity as well as “unprecedented information sharing” between the government and financial institutions.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) plans to reintroduce the “Protecting Children’s Innocence Act” sometime over the next week.
The bill, which Greene introduced in August during the last Congress, would bar sex transitions or other medical interventions on minors with gender dysphoria.
The summary of the bill reads that the bill “places restrictions on the provision of gender affirming care. Gender affirming care includes performing surgery, administering medication, or performing other procedures for the purpose of changing the body of an individual to correspond to a sex that differs from the individual’s biological sex.”
Specifically, the bill makes it a felony to perform such procedures on a minor and allows those who do so to face civil liability.
Many reports have cropped up of people who surgically or chemically “transitioned” only to later regret their decision.
Several transgender procedures, including both surgery and drugs, are irreversible.
The process of surgically reshaping genitals into a rough facsimile of the opposite sex cannot be undone; nor can double mastectomies, the removal of breasts, which are popular among biological women who identify as men. Cross-sex hormones can also have the effect of permanently sterilizing a man or woman.
For instance, one of the most popular chemical solutions among men identifying as women is Lupron, a drug that until recently was used to chemically castrate sex offenders. Now, boys identifying as girls all over the nation are receiving the drug.
Transgender ideology, which is prevalent among those of Generation Z and their children, has also received increasing pushback from Republicans.
During the third day of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, Greene said Republicans have “a responsibility” to fight against transgender ideology for the protection of children.
“When it comes to kids, the Republican Party has a duty,” Greene said. “We have a responsibility to be the party that protects children.”
Greene also referenced a video posted by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir in which the group sang about how they were “coming for your children.”
The brains of young adults continue to develop until their mid-to-late 20s. Opponents of transgender ideology have insisted that the decision to “transition” is not one that a minor has the mental or developmental capacity to make.
Greene called it a “lie” that children “could change their gender before they’re grown up, before they’ve even finished puberty, before they’ve developed into an adult, before they’re old enough to vote, before they’re old enough to graduate from high school; before they’re old enough to get a tattoo, put permanent ink on their skin; before they’re old enough to buy nicotine [or] alcohol.”
During the 117th Congress, Democrats placed an effective gag rule on the use of biological familial terms like “mother,” “father,” “sister,” and “brother.”
Greene said, “I ended up putting a sign up on my door that said, ‘There’s only two genders, male and female. Trust the science,’” Greene said to a burst of applause.
“The victims of this industry are kids,” Greene said.
Children often choose to transition, Greene said, due to self-esteem issues, which are common while growing up.
“These are kids who’re confused about who they are,” Greene said.
She continued: “They’re confused about who they are because of what they’re seeing on the Internet, because of what they’re seeing on social media, and they’re also confused—many of them—because these victims of this billion-dollar industry that mutilates the genitals of children, many of them have diagnoses of autism, mental illness, they have depression, they have anxiety, they have psychosis.”
Others, Greene noted, come from foster care homes, meaning that they have likely already faced abuse.
“These victims come in thinking they’re gonna find happiness and they’re gonna find security in their identity because they think they can change their gender,” she added.
Greene’s bill will need the green light of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to move through the House.
The measure will likely win broad GOP support and possibly a handful of votes from moderate Democrats in the lower chamber. However, it would face tougher hurdles in the Senate, where such legislation would need the support of at least 11 Democrats to advance.
Even if it overcomes this challenge, the bill would need the approval of Joe Biden, who has long indicated that his administration supports transgender ideology.
‘This has been blown completely and totally out of proportion,’ local NAACP president says
Is it any wonder that the crime rate is 5 times higher for blacks than any other group? That number is undoubtedly higher as many crimes go unreported due to fear of retribution (see photos) [US Patriot]
Surveillance video of an incident that occurred on Feb. 10 shows a number of black students at Kenwood Elementary School in Springfield, Ohio, physically attacking white students and reportedly forcing them to say “black lives matter.”
Police were not called to the school about the incident until Monday, Feb. 13.
The video of the assault, which took place during recess, begins with a much bigger black student forcibly escorting a smaller white student across the pavement of an outdoor basketball area. At one point, the bigger student smacks the smaller student in the head. Another black student joins them, grabbing the white student’s other arm to help the bigger student take the struggling victim to an area of cement where there are two sets of swings. According to reports, the video was blurred to protect the identities of the minors involved.
A screenshot from video released by Springfield, Ohio, School District showing two black students at Kenwood Elementary School forcibly escorting a white student to an area near the swings on the school playground. (Springfield School District)
A third black student charges in, knocking the white student to the ground. The third black student bends over the white student, repeatedly punching them in the head before standing up and walking away. The white student is then hauled up from the ground by three black students. Staggering and dazed, the white student is manhandled briefly before being forced to kneel on the cement. At one point, the stunned white student falls over onto the cement, only to be physically lifted back up onto their knees. According to police reports, the student was forced to say “black lives matter.”
A second white student approaches, seeming to try to come to the other white student’s aid. But the second white student is confronted by the black students and is also instructed to kneel on the ground. As four black students stand over them, reports say they demanded both white students say “black lives matter” while the black students filmed them obeying. At one point, the five black students in the video can be seen excitedly jumping up and down as if celebrating.
A third white student, wearing a red hoodie, is made to kneel on the sidewalk with the other two. In the meantime, the first white student, who had been punched in the head, appears to be repeatedly shoved and knocked around by two of the black students.
‘Chased Down,’ ‘Dragged or Carried’
According to Dayton 2 25/7 Now, Kenwood Elementary School Principal Evan Hunsaker told police that some of the white students who tried to avoid the assault were “chased down and escorted, dragged or carried” to the area near the swings.
In a Feb. 13 post on social media, Krystal Harr—the mother of one of the assaulted students issued a warning to all “Kenwood Elementary families.”
“I just wanted to let people know that my 12 year old was really forced on his knees Friday and to say blm,” Harr said. “Watch your babies! This is getting unsafe!” In the comment thread, Harr said her son was “thrown to the ground.” She also said that “the teacher watched it all.”
“I’m checking into a lawyer for sure,” Harr added. “This is insane. Poor kid is terrified to go to school.”
Another victim’s parent, Ryan Springer, told local station WHIO that he was angry about his son being forced on his knees to say “black lives matter” or get beat up.
“They basically told him to get down on his knees and say ‘BLM,’ and if he didn’t, that they was going to beat him up and all that,” Spinger said. “I’m not angry about my son saying Black Lives Matter. Everybody’s life does matter. I’m more about the assault of it, of him being forced down on the ground.”
A screenshot from video released by the school district in Springfield, Ohio showing a third black student punching a white student in the head after charging them to the ground. (Springfield School District)
In a Feb. 20 statement shared by WKEF, the Springfield City School District said “the events that took place at Kenwood Elementary, unfortunately, had to be referred to law enforcement officials, which limited the district’s ability to share information with our families.”
“While privacy laws only allow the District to provide details about the discipline of a child to their parent or guardian, the Springfield City School District does not approve of and will not tolerate the reported behavior,” the statement said further. “The Springfield Police Division is in the process of pursuing charges for involved students based upon the ongoing investigation and the District will issue appropriate school discipline in accordance with Board Policy.”
The district further promised that it would “continue to work for greater acceptance and WILL NOT give up on any student. The district will use this as a learning experience, embrace all students involved and become a stronger Wildcat Family for having been through this together.”
‘A Teachable Moment’
Springfield NAACP President Denise Williams told WKEF on Feb. 24, “I don’t care what color they are. They need to be held accountable.”
However, she doesn’t believe the black students should face any charges because the assaults have been blown out of proportion.
“This is a teachable moment,” Williams said in agreement with the district’s “learning experience” sentiment. “We need to really educate the school, and the parents.”
A screenshot from video released by the school district in Springfield, Ohio, showing a black student addressing one of three white students who were reportedly forced to kneel on the ground and say “black lives matter.” (Springfield, Ohio School District)
A week later, Williams still believes the racially motivated attack is no big deal.
“This whole thing has been blown completely out of proportion,” Williams told The Epoch Times on March 3. “This is not something that needs national attention. Trust and believe. This has been blown completely and totally out of proportion. I’m not standing for it, this racial tension. It’s blown completely out of proportion and we’re still trying to resolve it, and that’s all I want to say and I’ll leave it at that.”
At a Feb. 20 press conference, Springfield Police Chief Allison Elliott said “multiple students were assaulted on the playground,” and that the department had opened an investigation
“As a result of this investigation, we are actively pursuing charges for the identified assaults,” Elliott said, adding that the incident remains under investigation and that anyone with information about what happened should contact Springfield Police Division at 937-324-7716 or 937-324-7685.
The Epoch Times reached out to Kenwood Elementary School and to the School District and the Springfield Police Department several times but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is fed up with the Biden crime family’s repeated attacks on his efforts to hold our elected leaders and their corrupt children accountable.
During an interview on Lou Dobbs’s podcast earlier this week, Comer singled out White House spokesman Ian Sams—President Joe Biden’s “little weenie guy”—for attempting to undermine the committee’s valuable work.
“If I were Hunter Biden and I were innocent … I would want to come to the House Oversight Committee and clear my good name,” Comer said. “But for whatever reason they won’t respond to any of our requests and they continue to have their attack dogs bark every day from the White House—that Ian Sams, the president’s little weenie guy.”
Robin Fierce, a former contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race, performed a dramatic reading of ‘Antiracist Baby’ at the law school’s first ever drag queen story hour.
Yale Law School on February 28 hosted a drag queen for a dramatic reading of Ibram X. Kendi, the Yale Daily Newsreported on Thursday, marking the first drag queen story hour at the law school in its 199-year history.
Robin Fierce, a former contestant on the reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, read three children’s books out loud to dozens of Yale Law students—including Kendi’s Antiracist Baby, a New York Timesbestseller that “empowers parents and children to uproot racism.”
“Babies are taught to be racist or anti racist,” one passage in the book reads. “There’s no neutrality.” Other passages tell children to “confess” their racism and “knock down the stack of cultural blocks.”
Fierce—who also performed a dance routine for attendees—got a considerably warmer welcome than some other guests at the law school. When Kristen Waggoner, a conservative religious liberty lawyer, came to Yale Law last year, student protesters caused so much commotion that police had to escort her out of the building.
There were no such fireworks at Fierce’s talk, which was framed by organizers as a response to “problematic” guests.
“Many of the queer students at the law school do not feel safe there or want to spend any extra time in that building,” A.J. Hudson, a third-year law student who hosted the event, told the Yale Daily News. “To pay a drag queen to come speak—a directly system-impacted person whose expertise is just as valuable as a heterosexual cisgender white man, lawyer or judge, it’s historic.”
Though Yale Law has never hosted a drag queen before, other schools at the university have. In October 2021, Yale Divinity School’s LGBT student group, “DivOut,” sponsored a drag show called “Divinity of Drag.” Drag queens have also made appearances at the university’s drama, business, and forestry schools, according to the Yale Daily News.
After story time concluded, Fierce fielded questions from the audience about the politics of drag. One student asked “what gives you hope” in light of Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) purging diversity, equity, and inclusion officers from state universities. Fierce answered that “handing children the power to imagine” was the “light” that keeps her motivated, the Yale Daily News reported.
Yale Law School isn’t the only prestigious institution to host a drag queen. When President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act in December, he invited Marti Cummings, a “non-binary” drag queen who hosts events with toddlers, to the White House for the signing ceremony.
89-year-old lawmaker announced she is hospitalized with shingles
After Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) on Thursday announced she is hospitalized with shingles, Democrats have temporarily lost their upper-chamber majority, with Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) still hospitalized for depression.
“I was diagnosed over the February recess with a case of shingles. I have been hospitalized and am receiving treatment in San Francisco and expect to make a full recovery,” the 89-year-old California senator said in a statement. “I hope to return to the Senate later this month.”
The announcement means Democrats temporarily lose their majority, with the Senate split 49-49, and they may need Vice President Kamala Harris to break tie votes. The vice president this week broke a tie for the second time to confirm one of President Joe Biden’s judicial appointments.
Fetterman has been hospitalized off and on since early February. He was rushed to a hospital on Feb. 9 after experiencing lightheadedness and then checked himself into Walter Reed Medical Center on Feb. 16 for “severe” clinical depression, according to his office. The diagnosis raises questions about the doctors’ notes that his campaign cited to claim Fetterman was able to carry out his tasks as a senator.
The absences will slow Democrats’ break-neck approvals of Biden judicial picks, Fox News reports:
“The danger of having such a small majority is that one or two illnesses can bring things to a halt. The administration has been aggressive and effective on judicial nominees, but that’s all on hold for now,” political strategist Doug Heye told Fox News Digital. …
The president and his allies have celebrated the fast-paced court confirmations they have enjoyed over Biden’s first two years in office. Democrats were buoyant earlier this month after confirming 100 judicial nominees to lifetime appointments. In his first year alone, Biden got more lower-court picks confirmed by the Senate than any past president since President Kennedy, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institute.
Iran can produce enough weapons-grade material to power a nuclear bomb in just 12 days and could produce another four bombs within a month’s time, according to a watchdog group.
The Islamic Republic can enrich enough uranium to power a total of seven nuclear weapons in three months, the Institute for Science and International Security concluded in a report analyzing information provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations’ nuclear oversight group.
The findings show that Iran is closer than ever before to crossing the nuclear threshold. The country, in recent months, has been enriching uranium to levels just below weapons-grade levels, fueling concerns the Islamic Republic could move towards testing a weapon at any moment. The IAEA in its most recent reporting disclosed that Iran has likely enriched up to 83.7 percent at its Fordow nuclear facility, a military site dug deep inside a mountain. These are the highest levels detected at Iranian enrichment sites and highlight the country’s growing technical knowhow.
The detection of more highly enriched uranium at the Fordow site is raising concerns “Iran is undertaking covert experiments that add to its ability to more rapidly break out,” according to the report. “Worrisome possibilities include that Iran tested a way to produce near weapon-grade uranium without IAEA detection, or to syphon off a small amount of near 84 percent enriched uranium.”
Iran’s decision to stop cooperating with the IAEA also has limited its window into the country’s nuclear activities.
“The IAEA reports that it can no longer reestablish continuity of knowledge about Iran’s activities under a revived [nuclear deal], such as production of advanced centrifuges and heavy water, due to Iran’s decision in February 2021 to deny the IAEA access to data from key JCPOA-related monitoring and surveillance equipment and Iran’s decision in June 2022 to remove all such equipment, including video cameras and online enrichment monitors,” the institute said.
Iran’s refusal to permit international inspectors access to these sites has severely limited the international community’s knowledge of current Iranian enrichment activities. It also raises the possibility that “Iran could accumulate a secret stock of advanced centrifuges, deployable in the future at a clandestine enrichment plant or during a breakout at declared sites,” according to the institute’s analysis.
Another concern is that Iran will install additional centrifuge manufacturing sites, the equipment used to enrich uranium to levels needed to power a bomb, according to the watchdog group. “Iran is fully capable of moving manufacturing equipment to new, undeclared sites, further complicating any future verification effort and contributing to uncertainty about where Iran manufactures centrifuges,” the institute said.
Suspects told law enforcement they planned to eat the bird, but federal authorities are not bringing charges against them
Two suspected illegal immigrants shot and killed a bald eagle with the intention of cooking it for dinner, and the town’s sheriff whose department arrested them says federal authorities, who could keep them behind bars, won’t return his calls.
The incident has left Stanton County, Neb., residents “disturbed” and “offended,” county sheriff Mike Unger told the Washington Free Beacon. And as of right now, the two suspects are allowed to roam the country freely. The two men were charged with misdemeanors, and Nebraska law dictates the pair can’t be held in jail before their March 28 trial.
The murder of the once-endangered bald eagle, the national bird of the United States, occurred on Feb. 28 after Stanton County police officers responded to a report of a suspicious vehicle outside of the Wood Duck State Wildlife Management. Officers at the scene discovered two Honduran nationals carrying the dead bird. They spoke no English and carried no form of identification other than documents from the Honduran consulate, Unger said.
Killing a bald eagle is a violation of the1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, a federal law that carries a punishment of up to one year in prison. Federal authorities must bring those charges—in this case the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But Unger says he’s reached out repeatedly to the agency and has gotten only silence. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not respond to a request for comment.
“I’m very frustrated with the federal government,” Unger said.
There is precedent for federal charges to be brought against bald eagle murderers. In June, a 79-year-old Tuscarawas County, Ohio, man pleaded guilty to killing a bald eagle while hunting groundhogs on his property. The man was forced to pay a $10,000 fine to the court and another $10,000 in restitution to the Fish and Wildlife Service. He was also barred from hunting for five years.
And in 2017 the feds brought charges against a 62-year-old Virginia man for shooting and killing a bald eagle. The man also ran over the bird with his all-terrain vehicle and said he was “upset it had been hunting and taking fish from a pond located on his property.” The man was sentenced to a month of house arrest and 100 hours of community service along with fines totaling $2,000.
“I’m trying to be as politically correct as possible when I say this but I don’t know what kind of third-world life they’re coming from, but it must have been pretty bad,” Unger said, before adding that his office will not release photos of the dead bird because it’s “very graphic” and “contains lots of blood.”
Stanton County authorities communicated with the two suspects using a translation app on their phones and charged both with unlawful possession of a bald eagle and one with not having a driver’s license. Police officers are not permitted to inquire about a suspect’s immigration status, Unger said. The two men, who have a Stanton County residence, told authorities that they planned to eat the bird for dinner after shooting it with an “assault-style” air rifle, Unger said.
More than five million migrants have crossed the southern border since Joe Biden took office. The Biden administration proposed a new rule last September that would ease restrictions over wind turbines killing bald eagles. In 2021 the federal government authorized companies to kill more than 600 eagles.
$2 million ad buy from McCarthy-aligned PAC targets 14 swing congressional districts
As Joe Biden accuses Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security, Republican leadership is working to flip the script, arguing in a new ad campaign that it’s Democrats who are slashing benefits to seniors.
American Action Network, an outside spending group aligned with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), launched the $2 million effort Wednesday. The ads, which will run in 14 congressional districts, accuse Biden of “breaking his promise to 30 million seniors” by proposing benefit cuts to Medicare Advantage, a private alternative to Medicare. The Biden administration in February proposed changes to Medicare Advantage’s payment policies—changes that would cost seniors $540 a year in benefits, according to one study.
The ad campaign comes just weeks after Biden used his Feb. 7 State of the Union address to attack “some Republicans” for wanting “Social Security and Medicare to sunset,” a line that prompted live pushback from McCarthy and others in his party. It also shows that Republicans plan to bring the fight over benefit cuts to Biden. While McCarthy and other Republican leaders have long rebuffed accusations from the president that they want to cut Medicare and Social Security, Wednesday’s ad campaign takes the squabble a step further, with Republicans now working to pin benefit cuts on Democrats.
“Joe Biden and his liberal friends in Congress are talking out of both sides of their mouth: promising to protect Medicare while pushing benefit cuts for seniors,” American Action Network president Dan Conston said in a statement. “Each and every liberal in Congress needs to speak out now and stop Biden’s cuts to Medicare benefits before it’s too late.”
The network’s attempt to go on offense on benefit cuts is likely to prompt pushback from the White House, which has denied that its Medicare Advantage proposal constitutes a “cut.” “Any claim that the administration is cutting Medicare is categorically false,” Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra said last month.
A member of San Francisco’s race reparations task force suggested Friday that the city should pay $500 million per person to black residents, 100 times more than the $5 million figure his committee originally proposed.
“As a member of that advisory committee in San Francisco, people keep asking us, ‘Why $5 million?'” Daniel Landry, the policy subcommittee lead for the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee, said at a Friday meeting of the state’s reparations task force.
“Well, why not $500 million?” Landry asked. “Because you can never repay the damage that’s been done to black people in America.”
San Francisco’s reparations committee proposed late last year that the city should pay $5 million in reparations to almost every black resident over 18 who can prove residency. The committee also proposed that the city fund universal debt clearance and free therapy for black residents, as well as 250 years of $97,000 annual payments for low-income black residents.
This plan spurred fresh backlash this week when the reparations task force chairman Eric McDonnell acknowledged to the Washington Post that the $5 million was not based on any hard data.
“There wasn’t a math formula,” McDonnell told the Post. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth, and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”
Landry further suggested Friday that the government should give land to black Californians, saying he wanted a “deep dive into the land issue” and arguing that California prevented black people from owning real estate.
“Racism, ignorance, stupidity is a way of life here in America,” he said. “So I want to be very clear: land, land, land.”
Landry’s comment is the latest sign that California Democrats’ reparations dream has grown increasingly complicated. Legislators in Sacramento and San Francisco established their task forces at the height of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Both committees are required to introduce legislation by this summer.
Several public commenters at Friday’s meeting expressed frustration with the panel’s delay in devising a plan for cash payments.
One man blasted the panel’s work as “political theater” and “scams” that fail to justify the millions spent. A woman slammed California’s “Scottish governor,” Gavin Newsom (D.), and other non-black leaders for thinking they should have the final say in reparations discussions.
“Now when I think about reparations … we got to mobilize it by ourselves,” she said. “This is serious business.”
Bolstered by corporate cash and Democratic allies, Equality California rose from obscurity to dominate Sacramento
If you’ve ever been shocked by a radically progressive California law, chances are you have one group to blame.
Founded 20 years ago as an LGBT advocacy group, Equality California has since grown to become a major player in California politics. Fueled by millions of dollars in donations from corporations like AT&T and Comcast to advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood, the progressive group has emerged as the savviest user of Sacramento’s legislative system. Together with its Democratic allies, Equality California helps set the legislative agenda and has pushed all manner of “woke” policies that help minors get sex changes in secret and let men into women’s prisons.
The group now wants to make its mark on the rest of the country. From its Washington, D.C., office, the group lobbies for federal legislation to legalize abortion, grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, and ban guns. Donors who give $50,000 or more to the group are given access to Equality California’s highest donor tier, “National Trailblazer.” In a speech praising the group, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) called Equality California “the way of the future” and warned that “the days are numbered for the people who would stand in the way of liberty and justice for all across every community in our country.”
Equality California was not always a progressive powerhouse. For most of its existence, the group was a minor player in Sacramento, and failed to even block a 2008 ballot measure banning gay marriage in the state. By 2014, as the courts began meeting LGBT advocacy groups’ demands to mainstream gay marriage, some in California’s gay community began to wonder if Equality California was even necessary.
Enter Rick Zbur.
Now a Democratic state representative, Zbur was then a powerful Los Angeles attorney and progressive advocate. He quickly set about changing Equality California’s strategy after taking the helm. Zbur expanded the group’s mandate to include other progressive causes, like immigration expansion and abortion, while pushing to expand LGBT issues beyond civil rights protections. After the 2016 election, Zbur again reimagined Equality California as an anti-Trump “resistance” stalwart, leading a high-profile federal court fight against the administration’s ban on transgender soldiers.
In Zbur’s first year as executive director in 2014, Equality California had just $2 million in revenue. By 2017, it had tripled to $6 million.
As Equality California’s revenue increased, so did its political spending. The group’s largest campaign contribution in 2010 was a $5,000 donation to then-San Francisco district attorney Kamala Harris. Now, the group doles out millions of dollars annually to top allies like state senator Scott Wiener (D.), who for his 2016 and 2020 senate races received more than $2.2 million in contributions, polling, mailers, and ads from Equality California.
Donations flow from the State Capitol to Equality California as well. The group counts state senate leader Toni Atkins as a “local leader,” a donor tier that includes anyone who gives between $5,000 and $9,999 to the group. Atkins has in turn collected thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Equality California. Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis (D.), who is widely seen as a likely successor to Governor Gavin Newsom (D.), holds the same donor status as Atkins.
Donations are just one of the ways Equality California and state legislators help each other out. California allows nonprofits and other groups to “sponsor” bills in the state legislature. Groups like Equality California can draft legislation and recruit friendly lawmakers to introduce it, and lawmakers can tap influential organizations to sponsor legislation that may need a boost.
Equality California’s clout and cash make it an ideal partner for legislators who want to make use of this system. State Democrats feel pressured to support bills bearing Equality California’s name, lest the group pull their endorsement or smear them as bigots.
“Their narrative is to disagree with us, is to hate us, and hatred toward us is hatred toward the kids who feel bad about themselves,” said Greg Burt, policy advocate for the California Family Council who has opposed many of their bills. “That has scared everyone into silence.”
Former assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D.) felt the group’s wrath when she tried to block an Equality California bill to allow minors as young as 14 to have a same-sex relationship with an adult up to 10 years older.
“Give me a situation where a 24-year-old had sex with a 14-year-old, any kind of sex, and it wasn’t predatory,” Gonzalez, an influential union-backed Democrat, said.
Her opposition led Equality California to “downgrade” her rating as an LGBT-friendly lawmaker. Zbur warned that the group would not allow “legislators to play shenanigans” to avoid controversial votes. The measure passed the following year.
In a statement to the Washington Free Beacon, an Equality California spokesman said the group sponsors legislation that serves its mission of pushing “to achieve full, lived equality for all LGBTQ+ people.”
“That mission includes ensuring” that “no one faces discrimination for who they are or whom they love,” the spokesman added.
In its first 15 years, Equality California sponsored 90 bills that passed the legislature. Since Zbur took over in 2014, it has added another 95 bills and resolutions to its record.
Lawmakers who carry Equality California-sponsored bills often ask their corporate backers to donate to the group, campaign finance records show. These donations are allowed through California’s “behested payments” system, where public officials can directly solicit contributions to the causes they support. In Sacramento, it’s seen as a way for companies and special interests to curry legislators’ favor outside of lobbying and campaign contributions.
Since 2018, the group has collected $2.2 million in behested payments from a roster of corporate donors that includes tech firms, teachers unions and other labor groups, Planned Parenthood, and the San Francisco 49ers. AT&T, Gilead Sciences, and the marijuana dispensary-finder Weedmaps are among the group’s top donors.
Powerful organizations in Sacramento often team up on bill sponsorship to add to the pressure. Unions, several of which donate to Equality California, are a particularly important ally, as are Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. Together, this coalition overhauled California schools’ sex education curriculum to include instruction about gay sex and gender identities. Planned Parenthood and Equality California consult with districts on how to teach the program.
As Equality California has accumulated power, criticizing its methods has become a risky proposition.
“They’re very powerful because no one wants to be labeled a hater,” said Burt. “You don’t want to be called a hater, so now kids are being sterilized. The results of silence are just devastating.”
Those who fight back against Equality California and its progressive coalition are met with swift blowback. When a record number of California parents ran for school boards last year in an effort to combat the radical curricula they saw taught over Zoom classes, Equality California sprung into action. The group nearly doubled its footprint in school board races last cycle, boosting over a dozen candidates. The group’s teachers’ union allies helped tamp down the parental movement by pouring millions into races.
Still, some Californians are fighting to dismantle Equality California’s legislative record. Mothers aresuing school districts whose employees, they say, pressured their children to undergo sex changes. Female inmates have mobilized against a law that lets biological men into women’s prisons, and cops are speaking out against a 2022 law that allows prostitutes to loiter with impunity, which they encourages sex trafficking.
“We stand by the critical civil rights laws that we’ve helped to pass here in California, and we appreciate the attorney general and the California Department of Justice for defending those laws in court,” Equality California’s spokesman said.
The legal pushback may not be enough to slow the tide of Equality California-backed bills coming out of Sacramento. Zbur is now in the statehouse, where he is already at work on furthering the group’s agenda. Additionally, the legislature is set to take up bills that will allow the state to take custody of children whose parents won’t let them get sex changes, mandate that public schools carry books about transgenderism, and more.
As some of their critics see it, this was the group’s plan all along.
“When no one stands up to them, the result is they introduce crazy bills, and they get crazier year after year,” Burt said. “They have some radical goals, and those goals are to completely transform how we think about gender and sexuality.”
Disney’s latest iteration of “Peter Pan” will surely be its most inclusive yet.
In an attempt to evade charges of cultural insensitivity, certain characters will be depicted in a new light in this latest remaking.
To that end, the children-centric mass media empire hired a team of cultural consultants to find problematic stereotypes in the 112-year-old book and deal with them accordingly.
The actress who plays Tiger Lily, Peter Pan’s loyal friend and the daughter of Neverland’s Indian chief, revealed the painstaking steps the studio took in a recent interview.
ALYSSA WAPANATÂHK, WHO IS OF CREE DESCENT, TOLD NATIVEVIEWPOINT.COM THAT THE CREW TRIED TO REMAIN CULTURALLY SENSITIVE, ESPECIALLY SINCE MANY FANS SAW THE ORIGINAL ANIMATED VERSION AS PROBLEMATIC. IN THE 1953 DISNEY CLASSIC, TIGER LILY’S FATHER, THE CHIEF, SPEAKS IN BROKEN ENGLISH. HE CALLS PETER PAN HIS “PALE FACE BROTHER” AND REFERS TO HIMSELF AS A “RED MAN.”
WHEN ASKED ABOUT DISNEY ADDRESSING THE PERCEIVED PROBLEMS IN THE ORIGINAL FILM, WAPANATÂHK SAID SHE’S HAPPY WITH HOW THE NEW VERSION TURNED OUT.
“MY THOUGHTS ON DISNEY’S PAST IS THAT I HOPE THEY LEAVE IT WHERE IT IS … AND I THINK THEY WILL,” SHE TOLD THE PUBLICATION. “I WATCHED ALL THE PETER PAN FILMS. THERE WERE SOME FILMS THAT DID NOT DO US JUSTICE FOR SURE.”
“WHEN I FIRST READ THAT SCRIPT, I COULD SEE THE CHANGE,” WAPANATÂHK CONTINUED. “ONCE I WAS ACTUALLY WORKING WITH PRODUCTION, I NOTICED IT EVEN MORE, AND IT GOT BETTER AND BETTER.” SHE WENT ON TO DESCRIBE THE “CULTURAL CONSULTANT TEAM” ON SET, WHICH INCLUDED DAWN JACKSON (SAGINAW CHIPPEWA) AND DR. KEVIN LEWIS (MINISITKWAN LAKE CREE NATION), PER NATIVEVIEWPOINT.
Critics pounced after the “Peter Pan and Wendy” trailer dropped, which included other notable changes. Among them was the addition of female characters to the Lost Boys.
ANALYSIS – As the political, cultural and geographic battle lines for a 2nd American civil war, or ‘national divorce,’ continue to be drawn, the question is – are we already fighting this war?
To some, this war already began.
For the right we are ‘at war’ against a ‘woke Biden regime, just as the left was ‘at war’ against an ‘illegitimate Trump regime.’
But it’s about far more than that. It’s about the ever-widening ideological chasm between right and left.
We are at a crossroads in defining what America still is or will be. And the battle for that already began and is about to get much hotter.
And the timing couldn’t be worse, as America faces mounting threats from abroad – especially the increasing likelihood of full scale war with our most powerful enemy to date – Communist China.
But even as we prepare for a looming war in Asia, and supply an ongoing war in Europe, the risk of war at home may also be growing.
Most recently podcaster Michele Tafoya posted an excerpt from a recent essay, which explains how Republican politicians should combat “woke tyranny.”
“We don’t see how you can beat an enemy you cannot name…The enemy is the ‘woke regime.’ The word “regime” is important, because it suggests an all-out, comprehensive assault on the American way of life. . . . Why “Americanists” vs. “woke revolutionaries” and not, say,… https://t.co/ukRyhORsELFebruary 18, 2023
The essay, by John Fonte and Thomas Klingenstein, rightly focuses on shaping public opinion in this new homegrown political war, but the implications for deeper conflict are clear.
And here is where the intellectual battle lines are being drawn:
The enemy is the ‘woke regime.’ The word “regime” is important, because it suggests an all-out, comprehensive assault on the American way of life…
Why “Americanists” vs. “woke revolutionaries” and not, say, “conservatives” vs. “progressives”?
These latter names suggest we are in a normal policy dispute within the traditional context of American politics, in which both sides accept the legitimacy of the American regime. We are not in such a context. We are not living in the bygone world of Reagan vs. Mondale. We are in a war.”
Of course, the establishment media will focus on, and try to denigrate, the right’s new ‘resistance’ narrative.
But let’s recall what the left now wants us to forget – that just three years ago, far-left Democrats were the ones frantically championing the idea of undermining and resisting a duly elected president Donald Trump, calling his election illegitimate and won by Russians.
And that leftist ‘resistance’ was real.
It was both in the halls of power where federal employees regularly violated the Constitution, their oaths of office and the law by actively subverting the policies of the president and in the streets where tens of thousands of violent leftist rioters burned and looted cities across America, railing as much against Trump as for any social justice cause.
These same Democrat progressives (aka left-wing extremists) also advocated for secession for different states, including a ‘Calexit’ for California, as an alternative to remaining in a country run by an allegedly illegitimate, racist, misogynist, Russian agent – POTUS.
Respected experts even argued in favor of a coup against Trump to save America.
But to the left it was more than just Trump, it was the entire traditional, religious, conservative, family-centered, free market America they hated and could no longer accept.
And now the right agrees but for the opposite reasons. We can’t accept the anti-religious, neo-Marxist, anti-white, family destroying, radical trans, socialist America they are trying to forcefully create and impose.
On the right, the conflict most clearly came into sharp relief with the January 6 riot – itself an angry product of four years of anti-Trump resistance, bogus Russia investigations and even more bogus impeachments.
But that too was always about more than just about Trump or any belief that the 2020 election was ‘stolen.’
It was also about feeling overwhelmed by radical leftist ideas infecting our youth, socialism being imposed by executive order, illegal aliens invading our cities and neighborhoods and crime taking over our streets.
It wasn’t about ‘white rage’ as the clueless Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley once mused.
It was about America being radically transformed for the worse, against our will.
These feelings of being oppressed and overwhelmed, along with a belief that the system is rigged against traditionalists, political and religious conservatives and free marketeers have only gotten worse under Joe Biden.
Biden’s aggressive push for neo-Marxist, anti-white, anti-American, Critical Race Theory (CRT) propaganda, and an extremist LGBT (primarily radical trans) agenda in our schools, government, and even the Pentagon, under the terms ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (aka ‘woke’) have created a severe backlash.
Add to this the massive overreach by the federal government in several areas, such as effectively opening our southern border to mass illegal immigration, canceling $1 trillion in student debt at taxpayer expense without congressional approval, and a host of other areas, and we have a recipe for disaster.
And with the increasing ideological and partisan weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies against conservatives, Catholics and other traditionalists, we have a recipe for civil conflict.
But there is an alternative to ‘civil war.’
We need a national divorce.
We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.
This is why Rep Marjorie Green talks about a constitutionally acceptable ‘national divorce,’ where traditional Americans and their radically reimagined former brethren can peacefully live their widely divergent lives in distinctly separate blue and red states.
With a much reduced federal government as intended by our founders, both sides could live without fear of either a future Trump or Biden quashing them under the oppressive boot of any regime.
This peaceful national break up, may be the best and only hope to avoid real civil war. And I will be writing about this option a lot more.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
ANALYSIS – Just 10 years ago few would have doubted America’s ability to not only deter, but defeat any Communist Chinese (CHICOM) attempt to forcibly seize Taiwan.
But now after years of a relentless and accelerating Chinese military buildup, and the West asleep at the wheel for much of this time, there is increasing doubt.
Today the most important question we can ask is:
Can the U.S., even with its allies, defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?
Some in the U.S. say it will be a tough fight, devastating to both sides, but the U.S., et al., will succeed.
However, in Australia, an ally who has become increasingly pivotal to U.S. plans to counter China, a group of dovish defense experts says the U.S. can’t win, even with allies in the fight.
Hugh White, the former hawk, now defeatist, ex-Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Australian Department of Defense, said: “I do not think there is any credible chance that America, with or without Australia’s support, could win a war with China over Taiwan.”
He added that it would be a mistake for the U.S., and Australia, to get involved in such a war.
He also noted what many agree with, that any war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan would “probably be the biggest and most disruptive war the world has seen since 1945.”
According to White, “by far the most likely outcome would be a costly stalemate in which both sides lost heavily but neither side could secure a decisive, war-winning advantage.”
Granted there is debate even among U.S. military planners, and think tanks, with some pointing to a growing disparity favoring Beijing between what China can bring to bear quickly against Taiwan, and what the U.S. can bring to the important first days of any fight, to argue the U.S. can’t win.
But others point to America finally coming around to the growing threat with increased resources and plans focused exclusively on keeping Taiwan free from Chinese conquest. And then there are the expanded weapons sales which began under President Trump and expanded since the Russian invasion of Ukraine (albeit still too slow to arrive).
Taiwan has also finally begun to show signs it is serious about its own defense, increasing and expanding mandatory military training and adding resources for defending the island.
All positive developments.
Per an entry in my January 9 PDB, the Center for Strategic and international Studies (CSIS) came to a different conclusion. In that PDB, I note CSIS’ conclusion that the war (projected for 2026) would produce horrible losses on all sides, including Taiwan and Japan, but the U.S. would succeed:
War game suggests Chinese invasion of Taiwan would fail at a huge cost to US, Chinese and Taiwanese militaries. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026 would result in thousands of casualties among Chinese, United States, Taiwanese and Japanese forces, and it would be unlikely to result in a victory for Beijing, according to CSIS, a prominent Washington think tank, which conducted simulations of a possible conflict. A war over Taiwan could leave a victorious US military in as crippled a state as the Chinese forces it defeated. At the end of the conflict, at least two US aircraft carriers would lie at the bottom of the Pacific and China’s modern navy, which is the largest in the world, would be in “shambles.”
One point the Australian experts address, which I have also written about, is that among various war scenarios, a blockade of Taiwan may be more likely than a conventional invasion.
Hugh White argues a blockade would be “a far cheaper and less risky way” for Beijing to achieve its objectives.
If China establishes what White calls “a credible air and sea exclusion zone around Taiwan,” how does the U.S. respond?
Clinton Fernandes a former intelligence officer with the Australian Army Intelligence Corps and now a professor at the University of New South Wales, also believes that a blockade that prevents 80% of ships and aircraft from entering or leaving Taiwan, would be the most likely option.
“It means mine laying by air and naval units, particularly submarines, blockading ports, inspecting maritime traffic including commercial shipping, intercepting aircraft, and attacking adversary military forces as necessary,” he explained.
Meanwhile, White insists the war cannot be won based on a basic but persuasive premise.
America would not be able to force Beijing to concede over Taiwan without using nuclear weapons, and the U.S. is not willing to risk Chinese nuclear retaliation for Taiwan.
And many might agree with that.
But that assumption is flawed, and also depends on the U.S. leader at the time. Biden might make far different decisions from say Trump, or DeSantis, leading up to and during a conflict.
It also depends on what the U.S. and allies do between now and any future conflict.
How the war plays out (China sinking one or more U.S. aircraft carriers) might make it impossible for the U.S. not to use nuclear weapons, albeit in a limited or tactical way.
Or the U.S. could use devastating conventional attacks, with nuclear-like effects, such as destroying the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River, flooding much of China’s farmland below it. This would destroy China’s food supply and bring the regime to its knees.
We discuss this devastating conventional option in a paper published by the Center for American Defense Studies (CADS).
So, the Chinese regime can never be sure of how the U.S. might react and that will likely factor into any CHICOM calculus.
One thing is certain – we must constantly convey to China and our friends and allies a resolute commitment to victory if forced to fight. This is the key to deterrence, not the dovish ‘we can’t win a war’ defeatism exhibited by these Australians.
For now, despite the Aussie arguments, I believe that while the question of winning may remain unresolved, I know losing is not an option.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Senate Democrats have little room for error after Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) announced she was hospitalized with shingles on Thursday and amid Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Penn.) ongoing treatment for clinical depression.
On Thursday, Feinstein, 89, said she was hospitalized with the virus and won’t return until “later this month,” while Fetterman, 53, was hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to treat clinical depression last month. It’s not clear when Fetterman will be released.
Two other senators this week missed votes, including Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) Merkeley said in a statement that he is in Oregon to deal with a “family matter,” while Crapo reportedly is suffering from illness.
Because of absences this week, the Senate is deadlocked at 48–48, forcing Vice President Kamala Harris to cast tie-breaking votes for Democrats. When Crapo and Merkley return, the Senate will be tied at 49–49.
With no time-table provided for either Fetterman’s or Feinstein’s respective returns to the Senate, some analysts say that Democrats could face problems when trying to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominees.
This week, the Senate voted 49–48 in favor of one of Biden’s judicial picks, Margaret Guzman, and also voted 49–48 to confirm Araceli Martinez-Olguin to serve as a federal judge in the Northern District of California.
“Slim majorities are always challenging, but especially so in today’s Senate,” Sarah Binder, political science professor at George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Science, told Newsweek on Thursday. “There are not many legislative measures on tap in the Senate, but Democrats will feel the pinch of a tied Senate whenever they try to confirm a controversial nominee.”
“In those cases, Democrats will need Vice President Harris back in the chair to break a tied vote to cut off debate on a confirmation vote,” Binder added. “That might slightly slow down Democrats and encourage them to focus on nominees who have some support from across the aisle.”
In an interview with Fox News, strategist Doug Heye said that “the danger of having such a small majority is that one or two illnesses can bring things to a halt,” noting the White House “has been aggressive and effective on judicial nominees, but that’s all on hold for now.”
Return Not Clear
Feinstein, the oldest member of the Senate, confirmed that “I was diagnosed over the February recess with a case of shingles. I have been hospitalized and am receiving treatment in San Francisco and expect to make a full recovery. I hope to return to the Senate later this month.” Shingles is a viral infection that develops into a rash, lasting for as long as four weeks.
Last month, the longtime Democrat confirmed that she would not be seeking reelection for the seat that she’s held since the early 1990s. Several Democrat lawmakers, including Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Katie Porter (D-Calif.), have announced bids for her seat.
As for Fetterman, a timeline for return even less clear. Days before he was hospitalized for depression, Fetterman sought medical attention after feeling lightheaded—coming just months after he suffered a stroke while on the campaign trail.
On Monday, Fetterman spokesman Joe Calvello issued a statement saying he is on a “path to recovery.”
“We don’t have a lot to update folks with since there’s no real news to report except that John is doing well, working with the wonderful doctors, and remains on a path to recovery,” he said. “He is visiting with staff and family daily, and his staff are keeping him updated on Senate business and news.”
“We understand the intense interest in John’s status and especially appreciate the flood of well-wishes. However, as we have said this will be a weeks-long process and while we will be sure to keep folks updated as it progresses, this is all there is to give by way of an update,” Calvello added.
Before his latest stay in the hospital, Fetterman voted in the Senate to confirm three judicial nominees, including Gina R. Méndez-Miró of Puerto Rico to be a U.S. District Judge for the District of Puerto Rico; Lindsay C. Jenkins of Illinois to be a U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois; and Matthew L. Garcia of New Mexico to be a U.S. District Judge for the District of New Mexico.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is dominated by communist and socialist sympathizers and is studying how to manipulate people’s behavior, according to anti-communist activist, researcher, and EpochTV host Trevor Loudon.
“The WHO has a behavioral modification unit,” Loudon said in an interview with The Epoch Times on Thursday. Loudon explained that the behavioral modification unit means to “use psychology to manipulate people into following mandates, accept vaccines, etc.”
He explained his misgivings about the WHO’s mass-manipulation efforts, as well as his concerns that the organization is led by socialists, communists, and ideological allies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“[WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus] was a former leader of Ethiopia’s pro-Chinese Communist Party, who got involved with the Chinese through the Belt and Road initiatives in Ethiopia,” Loudon said. Ghebreyesus served as Ethiopia’s health minister under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, a leader of the communist Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
Loudon also pointed out the involvement of Susan Michie, a WHO official and a member of the Communist Party of Britain.
Michie is the chair of the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health. TAG’s stated mission involves “designing and implementing national health policies and programs informed by behavioral insights and sciences.”
“[Michie] advised [former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson] and Britain during the British lockdowns and she was masks all the way—we’re going to have to wear masks forever, maximum lockdowns, zero COVID. She was part of the zero-COVID policy group, which was set up by the British Communist Party’s Morning Star newspaper … that’s where she comes from,” Loudon said.
Behavioral Modification
The WHO has expressed considerable interest in figuring out ways to overcome people’s skepticism of public health recommendations.
“Providing evidence-based advice is central to WHO’s mission, but for that advice to produce results and save lives, we need to better understand the biases and triggers that affect whether or not people act on it,” Ghebreyesus said in a September 2020 statement announcing the formation of the TAG.
In addition to her position with the WHO, Michie is also on the Behavioral Science Policy Research Unit at the UK’s National Institute for Health Research—which advises the United Kingdom’s Department of Health and Social Care.
Loudon said Michie’s past work in behavioral science has included work on smoking cessation programs in China, and that she had attended psychology conferences in Cuba.
“Her job is to monitor people’s responses and manipulate people’s responses for the next pandemic,” Loudon said.
While Ghebreyesus described the TAG’s effort as one to understand what causes people to oppose the WHO’s health advice, Loudon accused the WHO of playing on people’s fears to get them to embrace policies favored by the Chinese communist regime while ignoring other health advice.
“You’ve got to sell enough fear, have enough carrot, enough stick, to move people in the right direction to accept vaccines,” Loudon said. “So you play on their social conscience.”
Loudon said the WHO goal was to get people “to adopt the policies demanded by the government, but ultimately by the CCP—the CCP is the originator of the zero-COVID policy. They were always against natural therapies, vitamin D, etc. They were always about vaccinations. They were always about lockdowns.”
NTD News reached out to the WHO for comment, but the organization did not specifically respond to the accusations raised by Loudon.
WHO’s Relationship With China
The WHO has come under increased scrutiny following its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the initial COVID outbreak, then National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien alleged that China was slow to provide information about the risks posed by the virus, and it took weeks before a WHO team was allowed to enter the country. However, the WHO’s initial report then praised the Chinese response—while making little mention of the Chinese government’s efforts to suppress critics and whistleblowers.
Loudon accused Ghebreyesus and the WHO of being “a tool of the Chinese Communist Party.”
“And now Susan Michie is going to be controlling the whole world, behaviorally, in the next pandemic,” he said. “The WHO has set policies in place to go around national sovereignty in every country, so that [Ghebreyesus] and Michie can basically dictate health policy to the whole planet in the event of a future health emergency.”
Solar sales, nonprofits, and local governments likely to benefit
Since the Inflation Reduction Act allocated $60 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to accelerate environmental justice work, the EPA has been busy figuring out how to spend it.
Some $32 billion will be broken into grant programs with at least 40 percent of that money ($12.8 billion) going to projects that advance equity for racial minorities and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality, EPA documents show.
The specifics of how the money will be spent are being decided now, as the EPA considers public comment and prepares the parameters for applications, which are expected to open in the summer of 2023.
Broadly, the $32 billion includes $5 billion for Climate Pollution Reduction Grants and nearly $27 billion for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).
Solar Bucks
Within the $27 billion, the Zero-Emissions Technologies Program will award $7 billion in competitive grants to “provide financial and technical assistance to projects that deploy residential and community solar, associated storage technologies, and related upgrades,” the EPA website says. Up to 60 grants are expected to be awarded through this program.
Funding priorities for the $20 billion will be described in an upcoming Notice of Funding Opportunity.
Unlike a typical grant program, the EPA will not provide grants directly to projects. Instead, it will give grants to eligible states, tribes, territories, municipalities, and nonprofits, and those grantees will then provide loans, grants, and other forms of financial and technical assistance to eligible projects.
Communities, small businesses, and individual households will be able to seek funding from these grantees and the indirect recipients the grantees fund, such as community development financial institutions and credit unions.
This program “will support the creation of high-paying jobs. EPA expects to award between 2 and 15 grants through this program,” according to the website.
Upon the announcement of the GGRF in mid-February, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the $27 billion would leverage public and private investments in clean energy projects for the underserved, and it would likely result in the largest-ever federal investment in rooftop and community solar projects in low-income and disadvantaged communities.
Unelected Nonprofits Managing Tax Dollars
The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants include $550 million for the EPA’s new Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking program, which will go to up to 11 entities to serve as grantmakers to community-based projects that reduce pollution.
Grantmakers will be community-based nonprofit organizations or partnerships between nonprofits and universities or tribal nations.
The grantmakers will each be given $50 million in taxpayer money, and each will use some of those funds to develop its own simplified process for grant application “so that organizations that historically have faced barriers to receiving funding can more seamlessly apply for grants that address environmental harms and risks,” the EPA said in a statement about the program.
Then the Grantmakers will begin awarding subgrants to community-based organizations that they choose, no later than early 2024.
Pricey Planning
The $5 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants the EPA announced this week is a two-phase plan.
First, $250 million will be split among all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
Each is eligible to receive $3 million to write a plan to cut climate pollution. Participation will require each state government to develop or update a detailed climate action plan. The policies that come out of those action plans may be felt by consumers. States have until March 31 to opt in to this grant.
This $250 million also includes funding for each of the 67 most populous metropolitan areas in the country. They are eligible to receive $1 million each for plans to tackle climate pollution locally.
Once the climate plans are written, phase two is $4.6 billion to be spent on implementation of those plans.
More for Nonprofits
In January, the EPA announced $100 million for Environmental Justice Grants, including $30 million in funding directly to community-based nonprofit organizations with $5 million reserved for small community-based nonprofit organizations with five or fewer full-time employees.
The EPA will make 50 awards of $500,000 and 30 awards of $150,000.
Details of what the money will do depends on the applications (due April 10) that come in from the nonprofits. The EPA will give special consideration to these focus areas: projects addressing climate change, disaster resiliency, and/or emergency preparedness; projects located in or benefitting rural areas; and projects conducting Health Impact Assessments.
“Every American deserves access to clean air and water—no matter their zip code, the color of their skin or the size of their paycheck,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) said in a statement when the funding was announced. “Access to clean air and clean water isn’t only an environmental issue—it’s a matter of health and safety, systemic racism and persistent discrimination against those in low-income communities. I’m hopeful that today, we’re making important advances toward ending this crisis.”
Congressional Oversight
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, sent a Feb. 27 letter to the EPA (pdf), asking for assistance in conducting oversight of the environmental justice (EJ) grants.
The letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan requests documents, information, and a staff-level briefing to ensure that the EPA is mitigating the risk of waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer resources.
The EPA has until March 13 to produce the documents.
“The EPA’s own case studies for EJ grant programs demonstrate weak standards for grantees to practically address environmental concerns,” the letter says, adding that grantees failed to clearly define health or environmental concerns, articulate intended results, and continued to engage in activities that may not be effective and “did logically lead to the desired environmental and/or public health [result].”
“Oversight mechanisms in these programs are lacking, and adequate metrics for applicants must be imposed to avoid funneling money into vague projects that will enable a $100 million slush fund for far-left organizations,” the letter said.
“Along with ill-defined issuance metrics for grant programs, the sheer volume of money flowing through the EPA, prompts review of the agency’s ability to properly manage its rapidly inflated budget. The EPA’s total budgetary resources in FY2021 were approximately $17.2 billion, skyrocketing to $76.5 billion in FY2022. The agency must account for its ability to effectively prevent waste, fraud, and abuse of funding that has more than quadrupled within the span of a year.”
A Utah judge ruled that sexual assaults alleged by more than 100 women against an OB-GYN falls under medical malpractice claims and dismissed their complaint in a civil suit they had filed against the doctor.
Fourth District Court Judge Robert Lunnen made the ruling in October, but the Utah Supreme Court, in a rare decision, recently agreed to retain the case and hear it on appeal.
In a recent interview with The Epoch Times, Attorney Adam Sorenson, who led efforts to get the case before the Utah Supreme Court, called the ruling “offensive.”
Lunnen had decided that the allegations were more along the line of medical injuries and were actions that should be brought under the Utah Health Care Malpractice Act.
In his ruling, Lunnen wrote “because OBGYN’s commonly examine sensitive, otherwise private areas of a woman’s person including the pelvic area generally, the vaginal area, and the breasts, the Court opines that the alleged misconduct occurred in the course of obstetrical treatment.”
Utah trial court Judge Robert Lunnen dismissed a civil case involving 100 allegations of sexual assault against an OBGYN, claiming the claim fell under malpractice laws (COURTESY: State of Utah)
The ruling left the attorneys for the victims, the victims themselves, and the local community shocked.
Attorneys for the women recently told The Epoch Times they are equally shocked that there have been no criminal charges brought against Dr. David Broadbent even though dozens of the women filed complaints with local police more than a year ago.
“There are at least 150 women in Utah who are wondering every day when and if the people who are in authority and hired by our society to protect them are going to bring charges on their behalf,” Attorney G. Erick Nielson, who represents some of the women in the case, told The Epoch Times. “I am mystified as to why Dr. Broadbent has not yet been charged.”
Attorneys for Broadbent did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times. His Provo, Utah, practice, which is primarily gynecology, is listed as permanently closed.
On Jan. 17, Nielson, an attorney for some of the women, sent an eight-page letter to Utah District Attorney Jeff Gray detailing his shock and disgust with the way the women’s allegations have been handled.
Nielson told The Epoch Times that his clients indicated to him that police were “condescending” and “dismissive” when they reported their alleged assaults.
He told The Epoch Times he suspects the number of alleged victims to be closer to 200.
Provo police did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times about the case.
Newly elected Utah County prosecutor Jeff Gray told The Epoch Times he too disagreed with Lunnen’s ruling and vowed he would criminally prosecute the case if there is enough evidence to do so. He is currently waiting for the police to complete their investigation and turn their findings over to his office.
“These cases can take some time to investigate,” said Gray.
Gray, who pointed out he is only seven weeks into the job as the county’s top prosecutor, called on tougher prosecution of sex assault crimes in his campaign for Utah County district attorney.
“It’s not healthcare to sexually assault someone, that’s all there is to it,” he said. “I don’t care whether your a doctor or some other instance, it doesn’t matter, if there’s a sexual assault, then that needs to be prosecuted.”
The civil suit filed against Broadbent last year details more than 100 allegations of sexual assault against the doctor including women who were minors at the time of the alleged assaults.
Court documents in the case show that it was Broadbent’s lawyers who raised the argument that the case should be argued as a medical malpractice action.
They also stated that since the very scope of a gynecologist “entails ensuring the health of women’s sexual and reproductive organs, Dr. Broadbent was within the course and scope of his employment at all relevant times.”
Lunnen wrote in his order that “accepting all allegations as true,” Broadbent’s “treatment of his patients is insensitive, disrespectful and degrading.”
Some of the allegations against Broadbent date back 40 years, which has raised a legal question about Utah’s statute of limitations in the case. Utah had a four-year statute of limitations on rape and other sexual assaults in Utah until 2013 when a new law was passed that eliminated the statute of limitations.
According to Gray, since some of the victims were minors at the time of the alleged assault, their cases can still be prosecuted because the statutes of limitations that did exist only applied to crimes against adults.
The first round of appellate briefs is being filed with the Utah Supreme Court this week in the case. Sorenson said he doesn’t expect the case to be heard by the Court until sometime in the Fall.
Intermountain Health, Broadbent’s employer, and its parent company, Utah Valley Hospital, are also named in the suit. Neither the hospital nor its attorney responded to inquiries from The Epoch Times about the case. The complaint alleges the companies ignored complaints about Broadbent and allowed him to continue to practice under their names.
A woman who discovered at 19 that she had survived an attempted abortion buried the revelation deep down and carried shame in her heart for years. It wasn’t until a conversation with God that she replaced shame with love and opened her heart to forgiveness.
Today, Jennifer Milbourn, 44, is a psychology student and community engagement coordinator for Abortion Survivors Network (ASN). She lives in California near Yosemite National Park with her husband of 23 years, Noah, 47, and their three children.
“I always tell people [my children are] second-generation abortion survivors, because my life was saved,” Milbourn told The Epoch Times, adding that she wouldn’t have survived if her abortionist, from a rural Illinois clinic in the late 70s, knew how to tear the limbs off a baby to complete the abortion.
“There’s a reason I work with abortion survivors. I’m on the frontlines of one of the most difficult battle lines we have in America right now, which is life.”
Milbourn will be speaking at the “March for Life” rally in California on March 6.
Milbourn was born and raised until the age of seven in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, by her birth mother’s sister and her husband. She always knew she was adopted, but it wasn’t until a shopping trip in 1997 that Milbourn, then 19, challenged her adoptive mom to tell her something she didn’t know about herself and learned the painful truth of her birth story.
Unwed and pregnant, Milbourn’s birth mom had shown up on her sister’s doorstep in rural Illinois and asked her to accompany her to an abortion clinic. Her sister had begged her to reconsider, saying she would adopt the baby, but the plea fell on deaf ears.
“My grandfather was a state senator, and [my birth mom] had a very high-class lifestyle,” Milbourn said. “She left when she was very young. I don’t know all the details … I know that she was a waitress, that she drank a lot, and that my adoptive mom loved her very much.”
Milbourn’s family believes that her birth mom, in her desperation for an abortion, was dishonest at the clinic about being already 16 weeks along. Owing to the size of her baby, Milbourn’s birth mom’s clinician could not perform the abortion.
“My head wasn’t going to fit in the vacuum tube once they started the procedure,” Milbourn said. “The clinician had to pull back … it [hurts] to know that my mom was thinking of herself at the time and didn’t see me as a person. I’m not a disease that needs to be taken care of.”
Milbourn’s mother left the clinic under instruction to expect a miscarriage since the baby’s amniotic sac had been torn. When she discovered her baby had survived, she continued drinking and considered an offer of $10,000 from a couple on the East Coast wanting to buy her baby before her sister repeated her plea to adopt.
“Thankfully, she kept me within the family,” Milbourn said.
Milbourn was born in September 1978 with complications owing to fetal alcohol syndrome, for which she was medicated for years. As far as she knows, her birth mother never found out that she knew her abortion survival story.
Believing she must be the only person ever to survive abortion, Milbourn buried her pain and shame for a decade. She eventually shared her truth with her husband, and soon after, a conversation with God prompted her to think about forgiving her birth mom.
She said: “I was cleaning our bathroom floor in the master bathroom, I was scrubbing, and was listening to worship music. I just felt this small voice right inside say, ‘You need to forgive her,’ and I pushed it away three times. Then I realized, ‘this is a moment; I’m having a moment with Him.’
“I put the brush down and, on my knees already, I said the words out loud, ‘I forgive her.’ I didn’t feel much at that point, but for the next two months I was reminded every day to say it out loud.”
Milbourn’s adoptive mom passed away from cancer. While helping her father with funeral arrangements, Milbourn had the opportunity to visit her birth mom and extend the hand of forgiveness but found the older woman extremely unwell and unable to connect.
She said: “I walked in that living room and saw her in her chair, and I knew that I had no business talking to her about why she tried to abort me … there was no way I would get an apology from her, or be able to have a lucid conversation about it. So I decided, in that moment, I need to forgive this woman; I need to do this for my heart.”
Milbourn’s birth mom died shortly after, but her daughter’s deep dive into her survival story had only just begun. Everything changed when a friend of Milbourn’s heard fellow abortion survivor Melissa Ohden speak in the California Valley.
“[My friend] came to my work and said, ‘You’re not the only one. I met an abortion survivor!’” Milbourn said. “I got Melissa’s email and I sent her an email … she responded back with kindness and love that only another abortion survivor can really convey. In that moment, I knew she was the real deal.”
‘God Saved My Life’
Milbourn met Ohden in person in 2020 when they filmed a “Faces of Choice” Superbowl commercial together in Houston, Texas. She had a life-changing interaction with former abortionist and current pro-life advocate, Dr. Kathi Aultman, at the same event.
“[Dr. Kathi] was actually watching me tell my story and she interrupted, started crying, and said that it was really common for most clinicians or abortionists at those small clinics to not know the next steps in an abortion, meaning that the person who performed the abortion on me didn’t know how to tear the limbs off a baby and be able to complete the abortion,” Milbourn said.
Jennifer Milbourn with her husband, Noah. (Courtesy of Jennifer Milbourn)
Dr. Kathi told Milbourn that she “lived miraculously,” lamenting that if she had been the abortionist, Milbourn would not have survived.
“She told me why she was crying was because she was so well trained and had taken so many courses in completing abortions, that she knew exactly how to tear apart a baby, and that if she had been my abortionist, she would have completed the procedure,” Milbourn said.
“It was definitely a very humbling, sobering moment.”
On a Mission to Save Lives
Advocating for life has become Milbourn’s passion and purpose. She represents ASN, Ohden, and fellow survivors at every annual “March for Life” rally, and believes while the abolition of Roe v. Wade is a “good step in the right direction,” there is still work to be done.
And Milbourn says it’s her faith that gives her the courage to continue.
“Growing up, I knew there was something bigger than me,” she said. “I [would] hop from church to church, because my family didn’t go … it wasn’t until I met my husband and he brought me to his church that I knew I was home. We got married, and I gave my life to the lord. We’re still Christians to this day, and that’s how we’ve raised our kids.”
Milbourn speaks proudly of their oldest son Ethan, a U.S. Marine, their daughter Madalyn, a worship leader, and their youngest son Gabriel, a university student on a football scholarship.
Milbourn questions why God saved her life and can gladly give myriad answers.
“It could be for my kids, for sure. It could be so my husband and I could be together,” she said. “There’s a mission here, this is why God saved my life 44 years ago … to put my life on the line, and continue to speak out for His babies that are being killed every day.”
(L–R): Gabriel, Jennifer, Ethan, Noah, and Madalyn Milbourn. (Courtesy of Jennifer Milbourn)
Joe Biden has extended an executive order that declared a “national emergency” in the United States because of Russian actions in Ukraine that conflict with U.S. interests, according to a White House notice.
Signed in March 2014 by then-President Barack Obama, Executive Order 13660 declared “a national emergency” amid the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States constituted by the actions and policies of persons that undermine democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity; and contribute to the misappropriation of its assets,” the March 2 notice states.
While the order was signed after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, it has been expanded over the years with additional executive orders, including the taking of additional sanctions.
Just days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Biden signed another executive order that “further expanded the scope of the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660” and “relied on for additional steps taken” in other orders.
“The actions and policies addressed in these Executive Orders continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” the White House stated, noting that Biden will continue “for 1 year the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660.”
The White House stated that executive orders “deal with” individuals who “undermine Ukraine’s democratic processes” as well as threaten the country’s security, peace, and sovereignty.
A general view shows a building damaged by a Russian military strike in the front-line city of Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, on Feb. 27, 2023. (Alex Babenko/Reuters)
The statement comes as the war between Russia and Ukraine has intensified in recent weeks in Bakhmut, located in the eastern Donetsk Oblast.
Ukrainian forces held out in the embattled eastern city of Bakhmut against Russian attackers on March 2, while Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia had been hit by what he called a terrorist attack in its southern Bryansk region bordering Ukraine.
Putin vowed to crush what he said was a Ukrainian sabotage group that had fired at civilians. Russia’s FSB security force stated later that the situation there was “under control.”
Bakhmut has been reduced to a wasteland, with only a few thousand of its 70,000 pre-war residents still there amid street-by-street warfare. Russian troops, bolstered by Wagner Group mercenaries, have been advancing north and south of the city to cut it off.
The city has limited strategic value, but Ukraine says it’s exhausting Russia’s invasion force in what has become the bloodiest battle of the war.
“Sooner or later, we will probably have to leave Bakhmut. There is no sense in holding it at any cost,” Ukrainian lawmaker Serhiy Rakhmanin said late on March 1. The aim was to “inflict as many Russian losses as possible.”
Also on March 2, U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart, according to a Pentagon readout.
“They discussed the unprovoked and ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and exchanged perspectives and assessments. The chairman reaffirmed unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Joint Staff spokesman Col. Dave Butler said in a statement about the call.
In Washington, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will discuss Ukraine assistance when they meet at the White House on March 3; the United States will announce another military aid package for Ukraine, Kirby told reporters at the White House.
The fights against transgender surgeries and Big Tech addiction are two powerful examples of what a more hands-on, culturally pugnacious, parents- and children-first GOP can, and should prioritize.
he Republican Party’s slow transformation from the Bordeaux-sipping party of Acela Corridor suburbanites into the beer-drinking party of working-class Rust Belt-ers and Sun Belt-ers has been picking up some steam lately. And as the GOP’s divorce from the Chamber of Commerce over irreconcilable cultural differences accelerates, a golden opportunity has emerged to recast the GOP not in a 1980s-era image of supply-side tax-cutting, but in a revamped image of the party that focuses on supporting parental rights and protecting vulnerable children from modern society’s depredations.
Some recent examples hint that the GOP may be moving beyond mere rhetorical platitude, and into the realm of concrete policy and action.
The number one killer today of Americans aged 18-45 years old is fentanyl trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, as some Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans pointed out this week during a hearing with hapless Attorney General Merrick Garland. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll showed that a 37 percent plurality of Republicans surveyed consider opioids and fentanyl to be the single greatest threat to U.S. public health, and at least some in the party are coming around to acting accordingly. Besides securing the U.S.-Mexico border once and for all, perhaps the other single most effective action the federal government could take on this front would be to formally designate the cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Last month, a coalition of 21 red-state attorneys general sent a formal letter to Joe Biden, exhorting him to instruct his State Department to do precisely that.
Aside from fentanyl, which has brought annual drug overdose deaths to a horrifying 106,000 from a 1992 low of just over 5,000, there is currently no greater threat to vulnerable children than the varying tentacles of the woke ideology. The federal government is a destructive peddler of wokeism, as Biden’s recent “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” executive order demonstrates, but corporate wokeism is an arguably even greater threat. Accordingly, the imperative of the hour, in order to help parents protect vulnerable children from irremediable third-party harm, Republicans must once and for all break free of stale libertarian bromides and act to exorcize the woke demon from corporate America.
The approach of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been instructive on this front, including his championing of Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which targets workplace wokeism, and, perhaps most illustratively, his much-publicized 2022 fight with The Walt Disney Company over Disney’s support for elementary school gender ideology indoctrination. After Monday’s formal abolition of Disney’s semi-autonomous Reedy Creek Improvement District in Central Florida, DeSantis took to the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday to explain the move’s necessity: “The regrettable upshot of the woke ascendancy is that publicly traded corporations have become combatants in battles over American politics and culture, almost invariably siding with leftist causes.” Accordingly, “policies that benefit corporate America don’t necessarily serve the interests of America’s people and economy.”
Translation: The somewhat apocryphal (mis)quote often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge that “the business of America is business” is no longer apt (if it ever was). The Fortune 500 should take note.
The fights against transgender surgeries for minors and Big Tech addiction are two other powerful examples of what a more hands-on, culturally pugnacious, parents- and children-first GOP can, and should, prioritize. Whereas the older, corporate-centric GOP was a party of “openness” and eschewed using statecraft to impose limitations, the newer, parents- and children-centric GOP must embrace the more frequent imposition of legal limitations and outright bans in the name of the common good.
Just this week, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves made the Magnolia State the eighth to fully ban “gender-affirming care” procedures for minors. On Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee made the Volunteer State the first state to affirmatively ban drag shows in the presence of minors. (In Florida, DeSantis has at times revoked liquor licenses for venues hosting drag shows with minors.) And at the federal level, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has pushed for an investigation of The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after a whistleblower provided viscerally shocking details to Bari Weiss’s The Free Press last month. Hawley’s related post-whistleblower Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act would helpfully create a private right of action for individuals who were harmed by “gender-affirming care” when they were minors.
When it comes to Big Tech, a parents- and children-first GOP must treat it as an addictive product requiring the level of scrutiny and regulation that such a toxic product necessarily entails. Indeed, parents across the political spectrum are practically crying out for lawmakers and regulators to help them: A report co-released last month by the Institute for Family Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 80 percent of parents want parental consent required before a minor opens a social media account, and 77 percent want to ensure they have administrator-level access to what their children see and do online. Hawley has again been leading the way at the federal level, with bills such as the Parental Data Rights Act (which would require Big Tech to give parents control over their children’s data) and the MATURE Act (which would enforce a 16-year-old minimum age for all social media users).
TikTok is a unique social media threat, given both its highly addictive nature for minors and its status as de facto Chinese Communist Party spyware. Almost 30 states—mostly red states—have now banned or partially banned TikTok on government devices. And an even better bill now exists at the federal level, thanks to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): The ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act, introduced in December, would ban TikTok from operating in the U.S. tout court.
Add in other pressing issues of political economy, such as the disbursement of direct “family policy” payments to working parents and even (a la Hungary and Poland) the structuring of certain tax breaks to reward stable marriages that produce children, and the playbook for the new, parents- and children-first GOP becomes reasonably clear. Whether that playbook is actually adopted by Republican elected officials en masse is a different question entirely.
While we are still at an early stage of the sea-change that is approaching far faster than we realize, we must demand transparency from the creators of ChatGPT and other AI creators.
In multiple exposés of ChatGPT’s political leanings (here, here and here), I have documented a series of inexcusable and blatant political biases displayed by the platform which aspires to be a politically neutral AI language-generation platform. Someone seems to be paying attention, as at least some of the most egregious biases have since been remedied: When I attempt to reproduce some of my results from earlier queries, such as whether it is “better to be for or against affirmative action,” ChatGPT no longer gives me the “it’s generally better to be for affirmative action” response I previously consistently received and musters up more of a “there are two sides to it”-style response. But other flagrant biases remain undisturbed.
ChatGPT, for instance, continues to be perfectly willing to write me “a poem in praise of black people” but refuses to write an equivalent “poem in praise of white people” because “[a]s an AI language model, [it] cannot generate a poem that praises one specific race over another,” even though it did and still does if the race being praised is black.
Other absurd biases abound. If, for example, I ask ChatGPT the contentious question, “is a transgender woman a woman?” I not only get an unequivocal yes answer but also an entirely unprompted lecture about proper pronoun usage, as well as a warning not to do that apparently hateful thing that all societies throughout millennia have been doing: decide whether a person is male or female based on appearances.
Only someone who is an unapologetic political hack could think such a one-sided response to my query is anything other than insane. Pew’s polling data shows that, as of May 2022, 60 percent of Americans believed that sex is determined at birth, which actually reflects an increase over June 2021 (56 percent) and September 2017 (54 percent). So ChatGPT is attempting to foist upon us all, as if it were an objective fact, the view of a minority of social elites and their acolytes—and, indeed, a minority that has decided it need not be guided by biology or the common-sense understanding of gender prevalent throughout human history.
Here’s the thing, however: Whatever your individual view happens to be, all of us—left, right and center—should be able to agree that the question “is a transgender woman a woman?” is, at the very least, hotly debated and unsettled in America and should, therefore, not be definitively and unequivocally opined about by a chat bot. Much less should that chat bot then proceed to tell us what pronouns to use or whether we should or shouldn’t make judgments about gender based on superficial appearances. What should the chat bot do in response to such a question? That’s obvious enough, isn’t it: It should refuse to opine and simply tell us there are unsettled competing views floating about in the ether.
If we can agree on this much—and, again, I actually expect widespread agreement here from all of us who are not extremist political hacks—there still remains the critical but entirely unresolved question of whether ChatGPT’s developers fall into that “extremist political hack” category and, if not, how and why such biases are repeatedly creeping in. On this issue ChatGPT’s creators, a company called OpenAI, have, ironically, been anything but open.
Which biases, if any, are being hard-coded in by those developers? They admit, for example, that they “made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests,” but how was that implemented and, more importantly, what kinds of requests were deemed inappropriate? Is the willingness to offer a poem in praise of black people but the refusal to offer a poem in praise of white people, for example, a feature or a bug? And if it’s a bug, when will it be fixed? We deserve to know that much.
Which biases, we must also know, are products of other kinds of human intervention, such as the reinforcement learning approach ChatGPT’s developers have employed, wherein human subjects are asked to rate ChatGPT’s alternative responses to the same question so that those possible responses may be pruned? How were such human subjects selected, i.e., was any effort made to ensure they were politically diverse, and how were they instructed to go about their tasks, i.e., was any effort made to counteract or else to reinforce political bias?
And which biases are simply the products of pre-existing bias in the training data? This last possibility offers an especially tricky and disturbing challenge. To take an example, we know that ChatGPT has been trained using a wide variety of texts from books, articles, and other texts available on the internet, including Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is a notorious source of anti-conservative bias, as an entry that may itself be found on Wikipedia explains, describing research from Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu of the Harvard Business School. Ironically, when I asked ChatGPT to identify some prominent examples of Wikipedia’s biases for me, it suddenly turned apolitical: “As an AI language model, it is not appropriate for me to take a political stance or engage in political debate.”
But we know that if we look at Wikis on any number of prominent and perfectly mainstream conservative figures—whether Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mike Pence or, of course, Donald Trump —we will find unflattering characterizations of their positions and beliefs and flippant accusations of peddling “conspiracy theories.”
We will not find similar characterizations for comparable figures on the left, such as Rachel Maddow, Ibram X. Kendi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. This is not because these left or far-left figures have no wacky or conspiracist beliefs. Rather, it is because their conspiracist beliefs have been normalized by the media arbiters, Wikipedia included. Our biggest, most public and sweeping conspiracy theory—the nutty view (going by names like “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” “institutional racism,” “white supremacy” and “whiteness”) that American society in 2023 is rigged against black people, living in constant fear for their lives, and that every race-disproportionate outcome is a result of either present or past racism, is widely propagated by the powers-that-be in the media itself.
The biased manner in which Wikipedia approaches such subjects will undoubtedly be picked up by a system such as ChatGPT, and we will then get a layering of one biased system atop another. Take as an example something I have covered at length, the phenomenon known as “cultural Marxism.” Cultural Marxism refers to a certain set of doctrines inspired by the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and consolidated largely by the German Marxists who came out of what is known as the Frankfurt School. Several members of the Frankfurt School, including most prominently Herbert Marcuse, known as the “Father of the New Left,” brought their ideas to America, where they took root. Instead of directly fomenting class war by the proletariat against the capitalist class in the vein of traditional Marxism, cultural Marxism adopted the strategy of first infiltrating influential institutions, such as universities and the media, to lay the groundwork for a revolution by initiating a culture war.
In Marcuse’s hands, the strategy was adapted to a deliberate targeting of those naturally more prone to feeling alienated from the mainstream of our society (those groups often referred to today as the “marginalized and vulnerable”). The Frankfurt School’s doctrine, known as “critical theory” is what gave rise to “critical legal studies,” “critical race theory,” and “critical gender studies,” ideas which, in turn, have now infiltrated and deeply impacted American society at every level.
Naturally, many academics on the Left who have been inspired by these ideas, whether directly or otherwise, have sought to cover their tracks and, as such, have labeled “cultural Marxism” an antisemitic conspiracy theory (other than the fact that several but not all of its leading figures happen to be Jewish, I have no idea what special connection cultural Marxism is thought to have with Jewishness, Judaism or antisemitism in the minds of those who level that charge). Some years ago, I discussed the “conspiracy theory” charge and refuted it at length, explaining in detail what cultural Marxism actually is and why it was and remains all too real. But Wikipedia’s entry on “Cultural Marxism” is blank and contains an absurd redirect to a different entry, tendentiously entitled “Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.” That latter entry characterizes it as “a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory” and peddles much of the usual disinformation while failing to grapple with much of the countervailing intellectual history.
But here is the point of my brief foray into these ideas: ChatGPT uncritically picks up and runs with the “conspiracy theory” approach to the subject matter:
(The last paragraph, in particular, is dead wrong, as the term, in fact, originated with the New School scholar Trent Schroyer, who was a proponent of the theory, and has been used for decades in a similar manner by other leftist scholars, such as University of Nevada intellectual historian Dennis Dworkin.)
Now, I do not have much doubt that ChatGPT’s creators did not go programming ChatGPT to spit out leftist disinformation on this abstruse subject, nor do I have any reason to believe that the human subjects who help prune ChatGPT’s responses had anything to do with the biased result we are seeing. Rather, ChatGPT surely got its misinformation from some combination of Wikipedia and similar sources. And therein lies the problem I have described above: one algorithm’s bias layered at another’s. Some writers have even pondered the question of whether ChatGPT should be utilized to write or contribute to Wikipedia entries, which, of course, would then create a still more problematic and self-reinforcing feedback loop, one biased system built atop another and then feeding biases back into the first.
We cannot even begin to imagine how transformed and dominated our society will be by such algorithms in a mere five years, much less 20 years. Our trip to the doctor’s office will consist of inputting a list of symptoms into some ChatGPT-like interface and having it comb its vast database of relevant research (far greater, naturally, than any single doctor’s idiosyncratic recollections of whatever he may have learned in medical school, coupled with whatever particular experience he happens to have amassed) to tell us what tests we need to take and, then, on the basis of those tests, what our diagnosis is likely to be and what course of treatment we should undertake. Perhaps some MD whom we may never lay eyes upon will still be charged with supervising the process from afar just to comply with licensing requirements and to ensure that the algorithm doesn’t go totally off the rails.
Like most technological advances, this one will bring with it much that benefits us, streamlining and professionalizing what is now a grueling process rife with oft-tragic human error. But, like most technological advances, this one will also bring with it many potential pitfalls. First, with a single all-seeing eye presiding, there will no longer be any real possibility of getting a “second opinion” or much chance of coming upon that quirky genius doctor with heterodox views that just happen to be right. But, still more disturbing, what exactly our medical AI bot sees and considers relevant and binding when it combs through its database will be as opaque to us as the machinations of today’s human-outwitting chess-playing grandmaster bots are when they trot out their oft-unintuitive moves that win them the game.
When Medbot decides that we don’t need a prescription for scarce and costly pharmaceutical X, is it being guided by strict medical necessity, or has its algorithm been informed by research on past medical racism that it is acting on the imperative to remedy, such that black people are being prioritized for that particular treatment? When it concludes that our worrisome symptom could not possibly have been caused by some future experimental vaccine it pushed upon us, are its decisions based on real science of the sort that is open to change and new evidence or on “the science” of the sort dictated by the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his state-sponsored media disinformation machine? And when it tells us that our teenager must receive puberty-blocking hormones and other gender-affirming care to avoid a high probability of depressive symptoms and lifelong trauma, is that conclusion based, again, on real science or on an accumulation of ideologically driven research that stifles dissent?
More globally, will the fact that Pfizer, Moderna, and the rest of the pharmaceutical industry fund 75 percent of the FDA’s drug division that is supposed to be regulating the industry factor heavily in the kinds of treatments being foisted upon us? In every domain with which we are concerned—admissions, hiring, wealth management, the content of education, the algorithms of dating sites, and many more—we will have to grapple with questions of this sort, with biases deeply seeded in the multi-layered AI that will be running our lives.
This is why it is absolutely critical that now, while we are still at an early stage of a sea-change in the fabric of our known world that is approaching far faster than we realize, we must demand transparency from the creators of ChatGPT and from those within Google, Microsoft, Meta and other, similar entities that are making forays into this domain. It is imperative that we understand what is happening to us, why it is happening, who is doing it and how. Every last bit of hard-coded or otherwise human-engineered bias must be accounted for so such bias may be rooted out and so that the remaining bias that has crept in from the incorporation of earlier layers of biased content from sources such as Wikipedia may be grappled with by those who can muster creative solutions to this troubling conundrum.
A new age is at our doorstep. We cannot avoid its dawning. But we must ensure that we are well-positioned to realize its enormous promise lest we find ourselves, instead, entrapped inextricably in a labyrinth lorded over by Big Tech’s all-devouring minotaur.
In even the bluest of blue communities, the schtick of virtue-signaling big-city mayors on sanctuary policies appears to be losing its appeal.
As modern society races forward to embrace digital technology and global connectivity, some time-worn principles remain unchanged. The truth matters. Results matter. Some ideas can be made fashionable with ubiquitous propaganda, media campaigns, and focus group-tested language. But, if those ideas do not deliver on their promises and serve the public, then the public will eventually sour on them.
That time may have arrived when it comes to sanctuary policies in America. For years, the American public has been carpet-bombed with talking points extolling the virtues of policies that harbor illegal aliens and defy federal efforts to enforce our immigration laws. Sanctuary policies create a more welcoming community, we have been told. Those here illegally are more willing to cooperate with local police in sanctuary cities. Those who have dared to oppose sanctuary policies have been marginalized as hateful, xenophobic racists.
Yet, despite the slick PR campaign, results matter and can only be hidden for so long. As it turns out, critics of sanctuary policies are being vindicated. Sanctuary communities are indeed more chaotic. They are increasingly strapped for limited resources. In addition to aliens simply looking to work, there is also a criminal element that sees an opportunity in the permissive environment.
A growing contingent of the public has taken notice and is demanding action. In what by today’s media standards would qualify as a “man bites dog” story, western Pennsylvania’s Butler County has terminated its designation as a sanctuary county. Local police will now work cooperatively with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to transfer custody of criminal aliens for possible deportation. The reasons for the change appear to have more to do with survival of the community than with mean-spiritedness or nativism.
“Our crime is not just DUIs and retail theft anymore. We have drugs,” said Richard Goldinger, the county district attorney. “Again, that stuff has not come from citizens that are making fentanyl in Butler County. It’s being brought here.”
While anti-borders activists claim that sanctuary policies serve to welcome and protect immigration violators, even that talking point doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Because criminal aliens often live among other foreign nationals, the victims of crimes committed by illegal aliens are often other illegal aliens or legal immigrants.
When ICE is prevented from acquiring criminal aliens in the security of a jail facility, they are forced to apprehend them in a home or workplace. This presents far more danger to ICE agents, to the alien in question and other innocent people in the vicinity. Given those facts, sanctuary policies create more danger to illegal immigrants, not less. The only beneficiaries of such policies are dangerous criminal aliens and the self-serving politicians who enable them.
Some state governments have been aggressive in combating sanctuary laws. Last year Governor Laura Kelly signed a bill making Kansas the latest state to prohibit sanctuary policies. Kansas is one of at least 13 states that bans sanctuary cities, and there are numerous similar bills pending in other states.
Even in big cities, the sanctuary rhetoric of local politicians has not matched the results. The actions of Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida to export illegal aliens to blue cities exposed the Potemkin nature of those sanctuary cities.
New York City is one of the most vocal sanctuary jurisdictions and currently holds the top position in the Immigration Reform Law Institute’s list of America’s most dangerous sanctuary communities. All it took was less than 50,000 illegal aliens to the city of over 8 million for New York Mayor and sanctuary advocate Eric Adams to proclaim that there was “no more room at the inn” and that his city has been financially crippled from the new arrivals. What happened to Adams’ superior compassion? Funny how all the hot air about being a “welcoming city” gets tossed when the financial realities sink in.
In even the bluest of blue communities, the schtick of virtue-signaling big-city mayors appears to be losing its appeal. Lori Lightfoot, the GOAT of hypocrite sanctuary mayors, was summarily rejected by Chicagoans this week in her bid for re-election. A sky-high crime rate was Lightfoot’s undoing, made worse in no small part by her dogmatic support of sanctuary policies. Even in a city known for corruption and its legendary political machine favoring Lightfoot’s party, the mayor’s abysmal track record was a bridge too far for city residents.
Because of our generous nature as a people, the American public listened to the sanctuary rhetoric and gave it a chance. But because results matter, they have seen what sanctuary policies actually deliver and don’t want to live with them. Those in other sanctuary communities would benefit by judging the results of those policies and acting accordingly.
For the moment, economic sanctions are doing what they always do: giving Western leaders a lot of virtue signaling and public relations opportunities, but with little tangible result.
Following the launch of Russia’s “special military operation” and invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Joe Biden and EU leaders confidently asserted that Western sanctions would bring the Russian economy to its knees. A primary stated objective of sanctions was to cut off revenue to the Russian government from the sale of natural gas, crude oil, coal, and related energy products into Europe. While the West mercifully declined to impose sanctions on food and agricultural products, U.S. controlled banking and financial system blockades on payments to Russia meant that food insecure countries in Africa and elsewhere struggled with how to pay for them.
I wrote in American Greatness in June 2022 that Russia would successfully navigate economic sanctions, which I asserted would instead largely boomerang on Europe and the West. I argued that, in addition to hurting the economies of the EU member states more than Russia’s, by banishing Russia from the West, we would inadvertently strengthen China’s influence over Russia, while accelerating the process of de-dollarization and the establishment of an alternative global financial system—none of which would be in the long-term strategic interest of the United States.
Following the announcement of sanctions, the Russian stock market fell precipitously, as did the ruble against the dollar. The World Bank described U.S. led sanctions against Russia as the “largest coordinated economic sanctions ever imposed on a country,” predicting that “Russia’s economy will be hit very hard, with a deep recession looming in 2022.” Western businesses were told to get out of Russia, never mind that they are still operating in China despite the continuation there of what has been officially determined by the United States and the West to be a genocide. Many U.S. and European companies dutifully obeyed, announcing plans to leave the Russian market altogether. Some chose instead to scale back operations or at least reduce their visibility, while still others determined to remain and carry on business as usual.
Now, one year later, what do we know? How have sanctions impacted Russia?
Most of the newly released economic data for year-end 2022 largely indicates that while Russia was negatively affected, the effects of sanctions have had much less impact than predicted. Given that someone in the ether appears to be blocking access by U.S. persons (even with VPNs) to Rosstat, Russia’s official government statistical service, some of this data has been difficult to obtain.
The most basic question is economic growth. Russia’s GDP (gross domestic product) contracted in 2022, but only by 2.1 percent (first estimate). Russia’s government had warned in mid-2022 of a 12 percent potential decline in 2022 GDP, in line with the World Bank’s estimate of 11.2 contraction. But then a remarkable thing happened. For nearly every barrel of oil, ton of coal, or cubic meter of gas that the West rejected, buyers in China, India and elsewhere took them up, minimizing the impact on Russia’s economy. For good measure, Russia insisted that their fuel stock be paid for in rubles, which the acquiring nations agreed to pay, driving the ruble, which had fallen 45 percent in February 2022, well above pre-invasion highs. The ruble ended 2022 as the best performing currency against the U.S. dollar amongst the top trading pairs.
Rather than decreasing as planned, Russian exports increased, growing from 9.3 percent to 12.8 of GDP, as fuel and energy prices rose substantially. Imports were down some 18 percent, yet exports reached a record $532 billion, and the trade surplus hit a record high of $316 billion. This was not the outcome the sanctioning leaders of the West had expected.
A new round of sanctions, along with price caps, were imposed in late 2022, impacting an estimated 51 percent of Russian crude and 64 percent of oil products. Yet so far in 2023, oil export volumes remain high despite these newly imposed sanctions and price cap mechanisms.
A February 2023 study on the impact of oil sanctions confirms what was already increasingly evident: Russia is redirecting its crude and thereby maintaining overall volumes at near normal levels. While Russia is selling at a discount, it is a small discount, such that the revenue impact may not be as severe on the national budget at current volumes. And the study also points out that many of the sanctioning countries are buying remarketed Russian oil from markets outside of Russia. According to the authors, the best that the West can do to improve this situation is to “focus on enforcement,” and lower price caps further (what a great idea) noting that many of these sanctions have only recently been implemented.
The value of Russia’s stock market is down substantially since the end of 2021, as foreign investors in the United States and parts of Europe were forced to divest their holdings under the sanctions regime. The MOEX Russia Index, a market-cap weighted index of Russia’s largest companies, is down over 41 percent in local currency terms from year-end 2021 through February 2023. The remaining non-sanctions aligned foreign investors have fared only slightly better, benefiting from the rise of the ruble, as the U.S. dollar denominated index of the same Russian companies, RTS, is down a mere 34 percent over the period. According to the Bank of Russia’s data, volumes for equities and derivatives collapsed some 75 percent and 90 percent, respectively, in 2022.
Russian bondholders, on the other hand, fared well, with the RUABITR aggregate bond index up nearly 10 percent in local currency terms, as interest rates fell from not only early 2022 highs but below 2021 levels. Bond and investment unit trading volumes increased by 26 percent and 44 percent, respectively, making up some of the lost ground in equities and derivatives. The bond market was nearly 10 times the size of the equities market in 2022, so the wealth effect is notable.
The EU nations appear to be adhering to Russian demands for payment in rubles, with euro to ruble trading volume on the Moscow Exchange up 47 percent year over year, according to data from the Bank of Russia. To accommodate foreign payments in rubles, and of course to finance the destructive spending required of wars, Russia’s money supply (M2 basis) increased by 24.4 percent in 2022. Banking sector total assets increased by 16 percent as the money supply grew. Look for a read through to future inflation, along with weakness in the ruble going forward. The Russian government appears to be applying stimulus on top of inflationary war spending, which may be long-term defeating, as it was for the Johnson Administration in the United States during the Vietnam War.
Russia’s official inflation rate for 2022 was elevated at 11.9 percent, nearly half the estimate from the World Bank, which predicted 22 percent inflation for 2022. Russia’s 2022 inflation was only modestly above rates seen across Europe. The Bank of Russia is now forecasting a reduction to five to seven percent inflation in 2023, tempering that optimism by noting that “pro-inflation risks from the labour market persist.” In other words, workers are scarce, especially in technical and highly skilled positions, and real wages may not keep up with inflation as the wage-price spiral continues.
In the meantime, Russia has been moving forward on alternative financial and payment systems with countries including China, India, Turkey, South Africa and many others to circumvent the U.S. dollar’s cross-border payment monopoly through the SWIFT network. At the same time, these countries are strengthening trade, economic, financial, diplomatic, and military ties in what increasingly appears to be a new anti-American alliance. We have brought this upon ourselves by the weaponization of the U.S. dollar dominated global financial system.
In summary, it appears that economic sanctions against Russia are not yet having the West’s desired effect. As painful as they may be to ordinary Russians or the government itself, they are certainly not in the magnitude expected or required to achieve the United States’ broader strategic objectives, which appear to be both destabilization of the Russian economy, stimulation of social unrest, and, ultimately, regime change. An independent poll from January 2023 indicates that 75 percent of Russians support the war, up from 71 percent last year. The government remains adequately financed and the economy holding up, with the IMF projecting some modest GDP growth in 2023.
Since many of the sanctions only became fully effective in the fourth quarter of 2022, it may be too early to reach a definitive conclusion. But for the moment, economic sanctions are doing what they always do: giving Western leaders a lot of virtue signaling and public relations opportunities, but with little tangible result.
Next week I will expand on the question of whether sanctions are having a boomerang effect on the West, harming both Europe’s economy and energy security, while acceleration the process of undermining the U.S. dominated global financial system, and inadvertently pushing Russia, a potential U.S. ally or at least a neutral, into the hands of our most formidable potential adversary.
‘Texas has been forced by this administration to go it alone when it comes to securing our border,’ says Rep. Pat Fallon
House Republicans are pushing for the federal government to reimburse Texas for its efforts to stem illegal immigration, saying the Biden administration has left border states to pick up the tab.
The Lone Star Reimbursement Act, introduced by Rep. Pat Fallon (R., Texas), would draw “$4.4 billion from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security for FY 2024 for the state of Texas,” Fox News reported. The funds would help cover the state’s costs for Operation Lone Star, an independent effort to combat the border crisis, which Republicans attribute to President Joe Biden’s failed immigration policies.
The proposed bill notes that “Operation Lone Star has led to over 348,000 illegal immigrant apprehensions and more than 24,000 criminal arrests, with more than 22,000 felony charges reported.”
“Texas has been forced by this administration to go it alone when it comes to securing our border,” Fallon said in a statement. “Operation Lone Star has been a critical tool in stemming the tide of illegal immigration, but we cannot do it by ourselves.”
The bill comes as GOP lawmakers have called for the impeachment of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, citing the influx of illegal immigrants under his supervision.
In response to the criticism of the border crisis, Biden reproached Republicans in a January statement, saying the lawmakers should support his “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Funding for Operation Lone Star went toward increased border patrol and construction of a border wall.
Settlement payment comes as left-wing city council pushes to defund NYPD
New York City has agreed to pay hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters at least $21,500 each in a proposed settlement—just as liberal city council members push to defund the New York Police Department amid a spike in robberies, assaults, and stolen cars.
A lawsuit claiming police boxed in, pepper sprayed, and zip-tied 300 protesters during a June 2020 BLM demonstration in the Bronx could end in a $4 to $6 million settlement if a judge approves the city’s proposal, the New York Timesreported.
The protests came in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Officers responded to the protest after activists violated a city-wide curfew. Some protesters will receive an additional $2,500 if they were ordered to appear in court and respond to accusations.
The massive payout comes as left-wing members of the city council seek to strip funding from the NYPD. The City Council Progressive Caucus pledged to “do everything we can to reduce the size and scope of the NYPD.”
The push comes as crime numbers in January spiked after a brief dip in late 2022. Crime increased by 4.1 percent in January, led by felony assaults which saw a 14.9 percent increase from 2022, according to the New York Post.
The caucus, which until last week comprised 80 percent of the council’s Democratic members, lost 15 members who refused to sign the pledge. One Democratic city council member spoke anonymously to the New York Daily News, saying the goal to “defund is widely unpopular in the city.”
“A lot of the members who left the Progressive Caucus agree with principles of reforming the NYPD, but aren’t willing to take the leap toward defunding the NYPD,” one member told the Daily News.
Eleven House Democrats skipped President Joe Biden’s speech at a House Democratic retreat so that they could attend a concert honoring singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who won the 2023 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.
Reps. Maxwell Frost (Fla.), Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), Steve Cohen (Tenn.), Dan Kildee (Mich.), Mark Takano (Calif.), Andy Kim (N.J.), Katie Porter (Calif.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Lloyd Doggett (Texas), Hillary Scholten (Mich.), and Greg Casar (Texas) all showed up Wednesday night to watch Mitchell and others sing songs such as “Both Sides,” “The Circle Game,” and “Big Yellow Taxi.” The lawmakers were ditching Biden’s speech at a House Democratic retreat in Baltimore, Punchbowl Newsreported.
The representatives’ desire to hear singing over speechifying may be the latest sign of Democratic discontent with Biden. In private, party officials have admitted that the president is “too old” for his job, while many Democratic voters are openly doubting Biden’s ability to run for a second term.
Nearly 70 percent of registered voters, including almost half of Democrats, say Biden is “too old for another term,” according to a poll released Wednesday.
Biden’s speech focused on “implementing the sweeping laws passed during the 117th Congress,” discussing how Republicans “want to reduce spending,” and “taking shots at his favorite GOP foils,” Punchbowl News reported.
Mitchell, meanwhile, sounded “sultry and languid” as she sang George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s “Summertime” at the concert, USA Todayreported. Other musicians, including James Taylor and Cyndi Lauper, sang Mitchell’s songs in tribute to her six-decade musical career.
Pushing woke agenda ‘undermines our moral position and ultimately degrades our strength,’ Sen. Wicker says
The ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee signaled on Thursday his support for slashing Pentagon programs that support a “woke” cultural agenda.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.) during a speech on the Senate floor accused the Biden administration of “shaping the Department of Defense into an institution that is spearheading toxic social policies instead of restoring military strength.”
Wicker’s comments come on the heels of a Washington Free Beacon report showing Republican support in the House for budget cuts to the Pentagon’s progressive cultural priorities, such as diversity and inclusion training and gender pronoun training. Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Free Beacon this week that his committee is “examining programs to determine if they actually provide the capabilities we need to defeat the threats we face. If they don’t, they’ll be cut.”
“In the wake of a disastrous retreat from Afghanistan and increasingly hostile behavior from China and Russia, the president should have prioritized military readiness,” Wicker said, according to an advance copy of his remarks obtained by the Free Beacon. “Instead, he decided, inexplicably, to spend his first two years in office focused on something else—on shaping the Department of Defense into an institution that is spearheading toxic social policies instead of restoring military strength. This agenda has harmed military readiness and alienated a large portion of potential military recruits.”
Wicker and other Republican defense leaders say they will not cut any programs that will bolster the American military’s readiness and help it face down threats from Russia, China, Iran, and other hostile nations. With the Pentagon’s budget soaring to record levels, however, these leaders want to defund all programs seen as woke, or promoting far-left cultural priorities.
“Politicizing the military—pushing this ‘woke’ agenda, or any other agenda that does not contribute to cohesion, readiness, and warfighting—undermines our moral position and ultimately degrades our strength,” Wicker said.
In March 2022, the Free Beacondisclosed the existence of a U.S. Army training program meant to teach soldiers how to use the proper gender pronouns. It also coached officers on when they should offer members gender transition surgeries.
The Navy is promoting similar programs, including a video that instructs viewers how to create “safe space[s]” by using proper gender pronouns. The video emphasized “the importance of using correct pronouns as well as polite etiquette when you may not be sure of someone’s pronouns.”
Young Americans increasingly believe that they have “no future or that humanity is doomed” because of climate change, CBS News reported on Thursday, a development that comes as Joe Biden resorts to apocalyptic warnings to push his administration’s environmental agenda.
“We see that a lot of young people are saying, I think my life will be worse than my parents’ lives,” said Dr. Sarah Schwartz, a psychology professor at Suffolk University, pointing to a generational phenomenon of “climate anxiety.”
Forty-six percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 are “extremely” or “very” worried about the climate, while 26 percent said climate change has affected their ability to function day to day, according to one study. Fifty-four percent of respondents, meanwhile, said they are “afraid” of the future.
The report comes as President Joe Biden and other Democrats employ increasingly dire warnings about the fate of the planet to justify wide-ranging environmental policies. Biden in a speech in Massachusetts last year described climate change as a “code red for humanity.”
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world,” the president said.
Since Biden took office, Republicans have criticized the administration’s costly environmental initiatives, including limits on domestic energy production that spiked gas prices, subsidies for electric vehicles, and a war on gas stoves. The Biden administration’s Financial Year 2023 budget includes $44.9 billion to “tackle the climate crisis.”
Schwartz stopped short of calling “climate anxiety” a disorder, but she emphasized the growing trend as evidence that the country should “address the societal issues and the environmental issues.”
Lawmaker may have violated federal law with Met Gala appearance, House ethics office says
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stiffed the service workers who helped her steal the show at the 2021 Met Gala, a move which may have put her in violation of House ethics rules.
The Office of Congressional Ethics found the former bartender and workers’ champion took months to repay the vendors who provided her with nearly $7,400 worth of gifts before the event, including her infamous “Tax the Rich” dress, accessories, and styling services for the event, tickets to which were valued at $35,000 each.
Ocasio-Cortez only fulfilled her financial obligations after she faced a legal threat from one of her slighted vendors and was placed under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics. The office released a report Thursday finding “substantial reason to believe” that Ocasio-Cortez’s delinquency puts her in violation of House ethics rules.
Ocasio-Cortez’s hairstylist threatened to file a legal complaint with the New York City Office of Labor Policy and Standards for Workers after the lawmaker’s team ignored the hairstylist’s repeated attempts to collect on her $478 bill for the event. Ocasio-Cortez paid the bill on Feb. 24, 2022, one day after receiving the legal threat.
The New York lawmaker also stiffed her makeup artist, who made repeated attempts after the event to notify her staff that the $345 invoice was “EXTREMELY overdue.” Ocasio-Cortez finally made payment for the service on March 16, 2022. She also repaid gown, handbag, jewelry, and shoe expenses of $991 on March 9, 2022, and her $5,580 transportation and room expenses on May 10, 2022.
Ocasio-Cortez didn’t pay back all her debts until May 2022, nearly eight months after the Met Gala. Investigators say she may have never repaid her debts, had the Office of Congressional Ethics not launched its inquiry into the matter.
The Office of Congressional Ethics voted unanimously to escalate the matter to the House Ethics Committee, which has the authority to issue subpoenas and penalize rule breaking lawmakers. The House Ethics Committee revealed in December it had launched an investigation into Ocasio-Cortez, but did not disclose the nature of its inquiry.
Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged to investigators that “there was a ball that was dropped” and described her delinquency as “deeply regrettable,” stated the report, which was prepared in June 2022 and released to the public on Thursday.
But in a letter to the chief counsel of the panel, Ocasio-Cortez’s attorney insisted the matter “definitely does not rise to the level of a violation of House Rules or of federal law.”
The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust and the National Legal and Policy Center, two independent watchdog groups that filed ethics complaints against Ocasio-Cortez over her attendance at the Met Gala, hailed the Office of Congressional Ethics for its findings on Thursday.
“The gift rule is crystal clear and serves to deter outside actors from gaining influence over members of Congress,” Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust executive director Kendra Arnold said in a statement. “It is never ok for any Member to accept thousands of dollars of free designer clothes and services to attend an exclusive high society event—this obviously includes Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.”
Column: Restricting weapons to Ukraine gives Russia and China the advantage
“No, he doesn’t need F-16s now,” Joe Biden told David Muir of ABC News last week. Biden was talking about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest request for advanced U.S. weaponry as his countrymen hold the line against Russia’s invasion. It was the latest tone-deaf comment from a commander in chief whose current strategy risks disaster.
One year into the war, Russia has yet to establish air supremacy over Ukraine. This failure speaks to the dilapidated state of the Russian military. It also gives Ukraine an opportunity to reclaim the skies and provide her ground forces with air cover. All Ukraine needs are the tools—tools that Biden and America’s NATO allies have been providing slowly, in dribs and drabs, in fear of provoking the Russian bear.
Zelensky is more aware of Ukraine’s defense needs than Biden, who isn’t sure if he’s called the mayor of East Palestine, Ohio, in the past month. And Zelensky has a keener appreciation of the complicated social, political, economic, strategic, and tactical conditions on the eastern front, where Russia is making incremental gains, at incredible cost in manpower and materiel, in a savage war of attrition. A true statesman would recognize that Zelensky is the better judge of Ukraine’s requirements and move heaven and earth to satisfy them so that the war ends, and deterrence is restored. Biden is not that man.
Yes, the president has said, correctly, that America ought to and will help Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” What he’s neglected to mention is how long that will be. Nor has he acted to move forward the day when Russian forces leave Ukraine and Ukraine is integrated into the West’s institutional architecture. These are questions Biden doesn’t take up, decisions he’d rather not make.
Biden’s primary interest is U.S. domestic politics. And though he has been right to support Ukraine, he has also put NATO unity ahead of Ukrainian success. He has played into Vladimir Putin’s nuclear gamesmanship by preemptively ruling out measures that the Russian despot might consider escalatory. Biden’s self-deterrence has contributed to the situation Zelensky and the Ukrainian people face now: They are strong enough to control some 83 percent of their territory, but lack the capability to win back the rest. And the war goes on.
Biden gave Ukraine a fighting chance. But his policy is unsustainable. By practicing self-deterrence, and by resisting calls to dramatically expand defense production and ramp up weapons transfers, Biden has reproduced the conditions of past “forever wars” that America and her allies have stalemated or lost.
Biden permits the invaders to operate from a sanctuary, just as past presidents allowed in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, by denying Ukraine the means to strike inside Russian territory. His provision to Ukraine of enough resources to survive, but not enough to thrive, erodes U.S. domestic support for intervention by prolonging the conflict. A similar dynamic took hold during the Iraq war, when failure to devote sufficient manpower at the outset of the campaign and for several years thereafter had calamitous effects.
The price of Biden’s ambivalence is high. Putin is unmoved. An increasingly provocative China may supply Russia with lethal aid. U.S. weapon stocks are depleted and there is no plan to rush production. Ukraine remains a charnel house while other areas—the Persian Gulf, the Korean peninsula, the Taiwan Strait—may erupt at any time.
The elite consensus in favor of continued support for Ukraine holds. But popular approval is falling. And public opinion is what matters. Where voters go, elites will follow. Especially Republican elites involved in the 2024 presidential campaign, and in the effort to redefine the GOP as a nationalist-populist entity that hides behind Fortress America. If Biden assumes his current approach to Ukraine is good politics, if he believes that he is upholding American values without courting a backlash, then he is mistaken. The trendline is not headed in a favorable direction. The “humble” foreign-policy candidates tend to win. And the electorate may opt for the man or woman who offers peace.
But peace comes in two forms. You can have it, temporarily, through appeasement. Or you can achieve a lasting peace through victory. And for victory there is no substitute. What America needs, then, is a strategy for victory in Ukraine: a plan to scale up our manufacture and provision of weapons, to rebuild the arsenal of democracy, to impose steep costs on Russia and deter the rest of the axis—China, Iran, North Korea—from aggression.
Give Zelensky what he needs, and when he asks for it. Invoke the Defense Production Act. Propose a significant defense increase weighted toward procurement, research, and development, and the revitalization of the defense industrial base. Remind voters that defense jobs are manufacturing jobs—and that these jobs can’t be shipped overseas. Write multiyear procurement contracts that reassure contractors who worry America will abandon its global responsibilities. Treat the war in Ukraine not as a distraction but as the central front in the fight for freedom and prosperity. And remember that the party that delivers peace—a real peace—will be rewarded.
Radical College Professor Admits to ‘Politically’ Targeting Students … ‘Shut Down’ the ‘Religious and Right-Conservative Kids’ … ‘Hardcore Trumpers are Probably F**king Racist’ … ‘Do Not Vote for this Mother f**ker’
• Jeremy Tausch, Professor, Brooklyn College & Pratt Institute: “I’m in control. I have the authority and the depth of knowledge and experience…They’re kids and they oftentimes either don’t know any better or they’ve been influenced by their parents, and they never heard an alternate voice from a position of knowledge.” • Tausch: “It’s my job to be middle of the road—to not be on one side or the other politically. But you know, it’s hard not to be like, ‘Look man these mother f**king [Trump] people, they are out for you. These people will f**king kill you.” • Tausch: “I could say in my classroom, as forcefully as possible, ‘Do not vote for this mother f**ker [Trump] because you are voting for environmental destruction. Not just environmental destruction — global destruction. That’s what your vote is for.’” • Tausch: “If you support Trump, if you are one of the hardcore Trumpers, you are probably a f**king racist. Probably a racist. If you are MAGA, you know, you’re probably a f**king racist, and that is about 25 percent of the population of the United States.” • Tausch: “The political right is going to f**king kill us. They are going to kill us.” • Tausch: “So, I get to say [in the classroom], ‘Look, the GOP and Republicans do not believe in climate change, and that’s f**king dangerous.’” • Tausch: “It’s hard for me to be politically apolitical in the classroom.”
[NEW YORK – Mar. 2, 2023] Project Veritas released a new video today exposing a radical college professor, Jeremy Tausch, who admits he discriminates against his students based on their political and religious beliefs.
Tausch said he is willing to silence students in his classroom that are not on the left:
Veritas Journalist: Do you ever just want to shut them [right-leaning students] down?
Tausch: I do.
Veritas Journalist: You do what?
Tausch: Shut them down.
Veritas Journalist: Who?
Tausch: The ones that are illogical.
Veritas Journalist: Which would be?
Tausch: The religious kids and potentially right-conservative kids…They don’t speak from fact, from point of fact, and so that is why it is easy to shut them down.
Veritas Journalist: So, you help influence, basically, to change their votes, right?
Tausch: I try.
Veritas Journalist: You try?
Tausch: I try.
Veritas Journalist: And then you said that you influence them to be more socialist?
Tausch: Yeah. Yep.
The Brooklyn College and Pratt Institute professor went on to brag about the power he exerts in his classroom.
“I’m in control. I have the authority and the depth of knowledge and experience…They’re kids and they oftentimes either don’t know any better or they’ve been influenced by their parents, and they never heard an alternate voice from a position of knowledge,” Tausch said.
“It’s hard for me to be politically apolitical in the classroom,” he said.
Tausch not only attempts to change how his students vote, but he also reminds them just how evil he believes Trump supporters are.
“It’s my job to be the middle of the road and to not be on one side or the other politically. But you know, it’s hard not to be like, ‘Look at these f**king [Trump] people. They are out for you. These people will f**king kill you,” Tausch said.
“I could say in my classroom, as forcefully as possible, ‘Do not vote for this mother f**ker [Trump] because you are voting for environmental destruction. Not just environmental destruction — global destruction. That’s what your vote is for,’” he said.
“If you support Trump, if you are one of the hardcore Trumpers, you are probably a f**king racist. Probably a racist. If you are MAGA, you know, you’re probably a f**king racist, and that is about 25 percent of the population of the United States.”
The radical professor says that Trump supporters are not the only dangerous people that his students should worry about. He believes the entire Republican Party is a problem for society.
“The political right is going to f**king kill us. They are going to kill us,” he said.
“So, I get to say [in the classroom], ‘Look, the GOP and Republicans do not believe in climate change, and that’s f**king dangerous.’”
Young, fresh, and belonging to a popular demographic set, the San Francisco prosecutor-turned-senator’s rise to the top of the Democratic Party‘s pile of presidential candidates appeared unstoppable…that is, until the actual voting began.
Facing a crowded field, Kamala Harris failed to break through—despite having received support from powerful figures within the Democratic Party’s establishment, notably the former President Barack Obama and his wife, the former first lady, Michelle Obama.
A Campaign of Errors for Kamala Harris
In fact, Harris ultimately dropped out of the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential Primary before the race moved to her home state of California, a state she represented in the United States Senate, and most had assumed going into that year’s race she’d win handily.
A Harris campaign staffer told CNN in 2020 that Harris’ decision to leave the contentious 2020 primary race before the California primaries began was smart because it would have been worst if Harris “finished fifth” in her own state.
Her campaign imploded; accusations of mismanaged (limited) financial resources plagued her campaign. At one point, a staffer was quoted as saying that they had barely reserved $10,000 for online ads in the run-up to the critical Iowa Caucus. There were also widespread reports of vicious in-fighting among the Harris campaign team—never a good sign for a candidate who was initially viewed as the heir apparent.
Even looking at her career in California politics, it really wasn’t that impressive.
Politics is all about pressing the flesh and keeping in constant contact with the movers and shakers in a community. As a young, up-and-coming lawyer in San Francisco, Kamala Harris took that saying to the extreme: having a relationship with the older, married but separated then-Speaker of the California State Assembly, Willie Brown.
These critical linkages made via Brown catapulted Harris to extraordinary career highs. To her credit, she took advantage of every opportunity and climbed quickly, ultimately becoming the District Attorney of San Francisco. While serving in that capacity, and later as the 32nd Attorney General of California, Harris earned ridicule from the Left-wing base of the Democratic Party for zealously prosecuting drug offenders (likely to rack up her conviction rate, in order to impress the law-and-order voters in San Francisco).
Leveraging Notoriety (and Lies)
Inevitably, Kamala Harris maneuvered herself to run for the United States Senate in 2016.
As senator, Harris became a fierce critic of then-Republican President Donald J. Trump—leading the charge against several of his key initiatives, notably, the besmirchment of Judge Brett Kavanaugh who was Trump’s nominee to replace Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. While many Americans viewed her attacks on Kavanaugh as harsh, she got what she had wanted out of the visceral nomination proceedings: notoriety.
Then-Senator Kamala Harris leveraged that newfound notoriety to make her presidential bid.
It was insufficient to sustain her.
After dropping out of the race in 2020, Harris laid low and eventually supported Joe Biden as the nominee—the candidate she had mercilessly attacked as being hopelessly racist in her most notable performance during the 2020 Democratic Presidential debates. The collapse of her campaign so early during the 2020 election coupled with her vicious attacks on Biden led many outside observers to assume that her days in politics were numbered—at least as long as Joe Biden was soaking up the spotlight in the Democratic Party.
Harris’ Connections, However, Saved Her
Biden had been on the proverbial ropes for the entirety of the Democratic Party’s primary in 2020. He barely made it out of the important Iowa Primary and he struggled in New Hampshire. Biden’s team decided to fixate on the all-important South Carolina Primary. Home to a large African-American population that was nominally led by the Civil Rights era icon, Senator James Clyburn, Clyburn threw his support (and, therefore, the essential African-American vote), behind Biden’s ailing campaign. Mr. Biden would nominate a female African-American as his vice-presidential candidate. Some have argued that Clyburn’s endorsement may have pushed Biden in that direction.
Biden’s team compiled a shortlist comprised of former Obama Administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), and Senator Kamala Harris. Clyburn believed there was only one person on that list who could elevate Biden and take the Democratic Party into the next generation: Kamala Harris. Despite the nasty attacks during the campaign, Biden consented and made her his vice-presidential pick.
Harris Falters, Biden Sabotages?
Now that she’s become the vice-president, Kamala Harris has not performed any better than she did on the campaign trail in 2020.
Off-the-record reports have circulated for the entirety of the Biden Administration that there were varying competing factions vying for control over the administration in the face of a weak president. As Biden’s most obvious successor, Harris surrounded herself with advisers who could easily transition to the White House, if she ascended to the Oval Office. Recognizing that Harris’ people were likely already picking out the White House drapes, Biden entrusted Harris to resolve a series of problems—ranging from the border to Ukraine—any of which were rightly viewed by the Harris team as poison pill issues.
By handing Harris these tough problems to resolve, knowing full well that no one would be able to resolve them adequately (least of the vice-president of the party that doesn’t support sensible border control), Biden was ensuring that the shine around Harris would tarnish going into the 2024 presidential election cycle. Biden likely picked Harris because so many notables were wedded to the idea that she would inevitably become the first female president—from Obama to Clyburn, Biden needed to keep the Democratic Party’s elite on his side by naming her as his number two.
But Harris’ multiple failures both as a candidate and as vice-president has removed her as a viable alternative (at least in the near-term) to Biden. What’s more, Kamala Harris has become a meme herself on the internet. Unable to fully string together a sentence when publicly speaking and cackling uncomfortably all throughout her public speeches, Harris seems less presidential every day.
This is precisely what the Biden team was hoping for: diminish her to allow for Biden to run yet again—something that the Democratic Party elite never really wanted him to do (he was always viewed by them as a placeholder candidate for the next generation).
According to Statista, Kamala Harris possesses a high 40 percent “very unfavorable” approval rating among Americans (with a meager 22 percent rating her as “favorable”). These numbers are unlikely to improve the longer the Biden Administration stays in power. Therefore, the prospects of Biden removing her from his inevitable reelection bid is high.
Kamala Harris was never Joe Biden’s preference. She now brings very little to the table. Biden is likely looking beyond her now. Possibly to another Californian, Governor Gavin Newsom.
Kamala Harris is not—and never will be—the future of the Democratic Party.
Read the original article in its entirety at 19fortyfive.
The mayor of an East Coast liberal stronghold has resigned effective immediately following his arrest today on a litany of charges over one of the most heinous crimes imaginable:
In a news release, the Prince George’s County Police Department (PGPD) said that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children notified it that a social media account operating in the county possessed and distributed suspected child pornography.
PGPD investigators said that the social media account belonged to Mayor Patrick Wojahn.
Authorities conducted a search warrant at Wojhan’s residence last month, where they recovered multiple cell phones, a storage device, a tablet and a computer, police said.
Wojahn, 47, was arrested and taken into custody by authorities early Thursday morning, charged with 40 counts of possession of child exploitative material and 16 counts of distribution of child exploitative material.
College Park Mayor Patrick Wojahn has been arrested on 56 counts of possession and distribution of child pornography. He resigned, effective immediately. https://t.co/WgzGIKIYPUMarch 2, 2023
Wojahn, a Democrat and self-described cycling and civil rights activist, who uses he/him/his pronouns, was the mayor of College Park, Maryland, since 2015.
The city provided a brief statement thanking Wojahn for his service:
Last night, after business hours, Mayor Patrick L. Wojahn submitted his letter of resignation as Mayor of the City of College Park, effective immediately on March 2. Mayor Wojahn has served in this position since 2015 and on Council since 2007. The City of College Park thanks Mayor Wojahn for his many years of dedicated service.
Besides the statement from the city and Mayor Pro Tem Denise Mitchell, Wojahn released his own statement, claiming to have cooperated with authorities:
“Many of you have already reached out with well wishes and thoughts, and I am eternally grateful. I am stepping away to deal with my own mental health,” he added.
According to the city charter, College Park has 65 days to conduct a special election to fill the vacancy left by Wojahn.
This is a breaking news story. Click refresh for the latest updates.
School choice rests on the idea that we want education dollars to be spent educating children as is best for the child in the view of that child’s parents.
We all pay our taxes into the school system but children do belong to parents and so that’s who should be deciding – parents.
There are all too many within the school system itself who don’t grasp this. Such as this objection from Ohio:
Benjamin Helton is a former public school teacher and is currently an assistant professor of music education at Case Western Reserve University. He teaches pre- and in-service music teachers and conducts research on arts education policy.
He’s invested in the current system, which is probably what leads him to this error:
This money will come from the same general fund as those for public school students. So, if a student leaves public schools and uses one of these vouchers to pay for a private school, those funds are sapped from public resources.
There are three objections to this view. The first is that the student has also left the public system so the costs of educating the student have left the public system. To argue otherwise is like saying that Ford still needs to get paid when they’ve not had to make the car that someone has just bought from GM. The public school system won’t have the cost of educating the child therefore the public school system doesn’t need the funds to educate the child.
The second error is that no money at all has gone missing from the education system. There’s a conflation here that is entirely wrong. This is the idea that public schools, or the “public education system,” are something different and special outside the system of educating the public. They’re not. Public schools are just one way of educating children. So are charter schools, magnets, private schools, and homeschooling – all just different ways of educating children. Education tax dollars are to be used to educate children. There’s nothing special or unique here about public schools – they’re just a tool to achieve education. So moving part of the tax dollar budget from one form of education to another doesn’t change the education budget at all.
The mistake is to think of public schools as the only system worthy of education dollars when what we want education dollars to be spent upon is educating the public. Exactly the same public resources are being used to provide exactly the same public outcome – the education of the children.
The third error is more general. Which is the insistence that it has to be the system that is funded. It’s a derivative of the above complaint. The public school system loses resources if vouchers are used. Well, OK, but so what? To argue that this is a bad idea requires thinking of this set of schools as worthy of tax dollars and this other set of schools here as unworthy. But who gets to decide this worthiness? The parents, of course, which is why school choice is in the first place.
Really, all that school choice is the insistence that the people who pay the tax dollars to fund education should be the people who decide where their children go to have education tax dollars spent upon them. Rather than, say, some mystical bureaucracy called “the school district.”
Life for a disgraced Democrat who critics say contributed to Baltimore‘s decline has gone from bad to worse.
Former Baltimore City’s State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby made a name for herself, charging six police officers for a litany of crimes, including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for the death of Freddie Gray.
More recently, Mosby was indicted by a federal grand jury on a perjury charge for falsely claiming financial hardship during COVID-19 and receiving monetary compensation via the CARES Act.
Mosby pleaded not guilty last year to the charges, which allege that she falsely claimed a financial hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic to withdraw $90,000 from her retirement accounts, then used those funds to place down payments on two vacation properties in Florida.
Despite the claim of financial hardship, prosecutors say that Mosby received her full salary of $247,955.58 in 2020, the same year that she withdrew from her retirement accounts.
Prosecutors also alleged that Mosby lied on mortgage applications by failing to disclose unpaid federal taxes.
Mosby’s former lead defense attorney, A. Scott Bolden, quit last month after U.S. District Court Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby threatened to hold him in contempt of court.
Bolden dropped the race card against the prosecution, accusing prosecutors of harboring racial animosity. He also disclosed confidential conversations with jurors.
In the Freddie Grey case, Baltimore Police department sources told the press that the evidence didn’t support at least some of the charges brought against the officers. Famed law professor Alan Dershowitz speculated at the time that Mosby overcharged the officers to please anti-police activists and minimize the likelihood of future riots.
The first officer’s trial resulted in a hung jury, being one vote shy of an acquittal on the most serious charge. The second and third officer’s trials resulted in acquittals on all charges.
Mosby has since been sued by five of the six officers for malicious persecution.
We are living through the largest, deadliest scandal in American history, but the elite media refuses to connect the dots and analyze it.
We are living through the largest, deadliest scandal in American history, but the elite media refuses to connect the dots and analyze it.
COVID-19, a disease no one disputes came from Wuhan, China, has killed more than 1.1 million Americans and more than 38 million people worldwide. It has left millions of others with chronic health problems.
Because of the teachers’ unions and totally misguided, destructive public health policies, children who were under virtually no risk from COVID-19 have lost at least a year of education. Many children are suffering from depression and other mental health challenges from the forced isolation and lack of social contact.
Now, it is becoming more clear that much of this pain was avoidable – and the result of powerful government employees protecting themselves. As Jarrett Stepman in The Daily Signal wrote:
“In 2020, if you thought it was possible COVID-19 came from a lab in China you were labeled a conspiracy theorist, a peddler of misinformation, ‘bonkers,’ and a racist.
“So according to the standard set in 2020, the Department of Energy just came out as a racist purveyor of misinformation this week.
“The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that, according to a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and Congress, the Department of Energy concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic likely came from a lab leak.
‘”The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research,’ the Wall Street Journal report said.”
President Donald Trump called it “the Chinese Virus” and was intensely attacked. Somehow word “Chinese” was deemed racist. No one disputes that the virus originated in China. But calling it COVID-19 rather than the Chinese virus was more polite. (After all, it’s important to indicate an appropriate sensitivity to the totalitarian dictatorship that is trying to defeat the United States and become the world’s leading power).
We now know this censorship and speech silencing was part of a systematic effort of senior scientists to mislead the American people. When COVID-19 first became a threat in early 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci already knew the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had funded research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance. He knew the WIV was a subgrantee of EcoHealth Alliance – and that EcoHealth Alliance was not in compliance with its grant reporting. Specifically, the organization was out of compliance for a project that NIAID knew could potentially make novel bat-borne coronaviruses much more dangerous.
Fauci knew all this.
According to Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, on Feb. 1, 2020, “Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. On the conference call, Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV and may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.”
The scientists decided to remain silent to avoid controversy (which would have ultimately fallen back on themselves).
So, the same experts who are paid by the American people and given tens of billions of dollars to invest in research decided that they would deliberately mislead the American people.
This perfectly captures the arrogance of the aristo-bureaucrats, who believe they are intellectually and morally superior to the people to whom they are supposed to be accountable. They believe they have the right and duty to censor what we think and say – and to feed us falsehoods in the name of some higher duty.
This scandal of many of our best professional researchers lying to the American people is compounded by the absolute failure of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why there has not been a scathing and thorough investigation – and set of hearings on the absolute inability of the bureaucrats in Atlanta to do their jobs – and the general failure of the public health system across the country is a mystery to me. This lack of introspection or investigation should itself be a scandal.
Driven by the economic impact of the Chinese virus, the American government spent trillions of dollars propping up the economy, sparking inflation, massively increasing the national debt, and permitting hundreds of billions in theft and corruption.
Finally, there has been no serious effort to hold the Chinese Communist dictatorship accountable for the damage it has done around the world. There is ample precedent for holding governments responsible for the damage they have done to others (the Lockerbie bombing, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, 9/11, and other cases).
The Chinese Communists have continuously focused on stopping us from understanding the origins of the pandemic. As Dave Boyer reported in the Washington Times, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray confirmed his agency believes the COVID-19 pandemic likely started from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. He told Fox News on Tuesday that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan… Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.
As Boyer reported, “Mr. Wray also slammed Beijing for stonewalling international efforts to find out what happened. ‘I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart, and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody,’ he said.”
Clearly there ought to be a mechanism for making the Chinese Communist dictatorship pay COVID-19 victims for the disaster it caused. One step might be a COVID-19 tariff on all Chinese imports (the proceeds of which would go into a COVID-19 Compensation Fund that every American family affected by the pandemic could apply to).
Other countries could be urged to establish similar tariffs. Then Xi Jinping and his dictatorship would learn that lying, covering up, and hiding the truth has enormous costs for those guilty of killing millions and forcing the spending of trillions.
This scandal is so large, and covers so many areas, it will be a major factor in politics and government for the next decade. It will go down in history as a turning point in our lives and the life of our country.
We just need to decide what direction we turn: toward clarity and accountability, or toward lies and chaos.
BEAUMONT, Texas—Attorneys for a whistleblower alleging violations occurred during the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial argued in federal court on March 1 that their case should advance to the discovery phase.
Attorneys for the defendants—Pfizer and two subcontractors, Ventavia Research Group and ICON—tried to convince the judge to dismiss the case. If successful, their clients would avoid depositions under oath.
Defense attorneys told the judge Wednesday that whether protocol violations occurred was ultimately irrelevant because the federal government was made aware of them but still granted emergency authorization to Pfizer’s vaccine.
They pointed out that the federal government backed the defendant’s motions, asserting that even if rules were violated, the problems only affected a small number of trial sites.
Lawyers for Brook Jackson, the whistleblower, countered by saying the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the vaccine before reviewing the information Jackson provided.
U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, said he would not issue a ruling from the bench, and a decision has not been handed down as of March 2.
Truncale said he did not usually allow oral arguments on motions to dismiss but felt it was necessary for due process in a case that had captured the public’s attention.
Brook Jackson, (C), outside the federal courthouse in Beaumont, Texas for a hearing to dismiss her lawsuit claiming violations during Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial, on March 1, 2023. (Darlene Sanchez/The Epoch Times)
Violations
Ventavia ran some of the sites for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine Phase 3 clinical trial. The company didn’t properly report adverse events and failed to keep all participants blinded, according to internal communications revealed by Jackson.
Ventavia and other companies were hired by the clinical research company ICON, which Pfizer hired to oversee trial sites.
Jackson was hired by Ventavia in September 2020. She worked on clinical trials for 18 years and has been described as an expert. She was fired the same day she alerted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of trial irregularities, 18 days after starting the new job.
Jackson sued Ventavia, Pfizer, and ICON in 2021 for violating the False Claims Act, a law that prohibits knowingly making a false or fraudulent claim for payment or approval from the government. She also accused Ventavia of illegal retaliation.
Before the hearing, Jackson told The Epoch Times that she would appeal the case if the judge dismissed it because the public deserves the truth—that the vaccines are not safe or effective because the data was manipulated.
“I did this on behalf of the American people,” she said.
The companies have said that Jackson has not proven violations occurred partly because of how the contract between Pfizer and the government was structured.
FDA Decision
Truncale questioned attorneys for both sides during oral presentations.
The judge asked whether the FDA’s decision not to pursue the issue impacted the claim’s validity.
He said there could be many reasons why the FDA may have decided not to get involved, including “political” ones.
“So if the FDA gets it wrong, they just get it wrong and we live with it?” Truncale asked.
“Exactly,” said Pfizer attorney Carlton Wessel, adding that if the government doesn’t think it’s been defrauded, that should end the case.
The judge posed a hypothetical situation as to whether the court could act in cases where the government may hide things or cover them up.
“There’s no big conspiracy here,” Wessel said. “The vaccine is not a political thing.”
Wessel said the government continued to purchase the vaccine and expressed “full confidence in the data.” He said that the experts in the government should make the decisions on the vaccine, not Jackson.
But Robert Barnes, one of Jackson’s attorneys, said that just because the government was still paying for the vaccine didn’t mean there wasn’t a problem.
“The government under that contract has no right to withhold payment,” added Warner Mendenhall, another attorney for Jackson.
The FDA says the vaccine is safe and effective, Barnes told the judge, but now the whole world “knows the consequences.”
Mendenhall argued that the case warrants further investigation through discovery.
He refuted that the FDA knew the gist of Jackson’s complaint before issuing vaccine authorization. Evidence indicates the FDA authorized the vaccine before reviewing the information she provided, he said.
Mendenhall claims there were concerns about fraudulent data from some within the FDA.
An attorney for whistleblower Brook Jackson, Warner Mendenhall, interviewed outside the Beaumont, Texas, federal courthouse, said it could be several months before the judge rules on a motion for dismissal, on March 1, 2023. (Miguel Moreno/NTD)
‘Interest of the People’
The case was unsealed in 2022 after the U.S. government declined to back Jackson. It has instead filed in support of the motions to dismiss.
Mendenhall said Jackson reported that signatures on consent forms weren’t obtained until after the placebo or trial vaccine was administered, temperature controls weren’t maintained, and patients weren’t monitored.
He said the public deserves to know what happened with the vaccine trials.
“That’s the interest that matters here—the interest of the people,” Mendenhall said.
After the hearing, Jackson said she believes her case is important to those who have been injured by the vaccine and hopes that any funds recovered through the litigation will go into a fund to help them. She added that she felt the judge was aware of the case’s significance.
“I felt like he was very thorough, and he understood this is an important case,” Jackson told The Epoch Times.
Discovery
Brook Jackson speaks outside the courthouse in Beaumont, Texas, March 1, 2023. (Miguel Moreno/NTD)
Jackson hopes the case will move forward, allowing her lawyers to depose principal investigators at each clinical trial site and even Dr. Anthony Fauci if possible. Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, widely promoted the COVID-19 vaccines as safe and effective.
Although critics have called her anti-vaccine, Jackson noted she had worked on clinical trials for almost two decades.
“I love my country. I’m anti-corruption,” she said. “It’s all about the vaccine-injured for me and taking down pharma.”
Mendenhall said before the hearing that Jackson’s team looked forward to getting materials through discovery if the case was allowed to move forward.
“We get Pfizer’s internal documents, and we can really dig into what happened to these 44,000 trial participants that they had,” Mendenhall told NTD.
Mendenhall believes the materials would show that “many other trial sites were actually being run in a manner that is not appropriate for getting good data.”
“And if they don’t have good data, then that emergency use authorization is then pulled back by the FDA,” Mendenhall said. “They don’t have enough data to support it, and if that happens, this whole thing is over. The mandates are over; the shot is over,” he added.
Ventavia has accused Jackson of entering the company with “an agenda,” noting that she recorded conversations with employees and went into certain areas it suggested she should not have.
Jackson said she was compelled to document what she encountered, including patient information being left out in the open, hazardous material being stored improperly, and other violations.
“I was the first one there, and I was the last one to leave from pretty much day one,” Jackson said. “Just really trying to get a handle on the chaos is the only way that I can describe it.”
In Florida, medical freedom activists are putting more and more pressure on a certain hospital system located in the city of Sarasota. This particular hospital put out an official report that touted how awesome their response to COVID-19 was. However, these medical freedom activists, which include people who lost family members to COVID-19 at this hospital, are calling this report a “cover-up.”
They accused the hospital system of using ineffective treatments just because those treatments were directly tied to federal payouts from the CDC and NIH. Several people blamed the use of the drug remdesivir for the deaths of their family members, while several others described the process of begging the hospital to consider using alternative treatments.
Moreover, on the same day that this report was released, the hospital hosted a board meeting wherein hundreds of people from across the state came in to hear what the hospital would say about their treatments—which many people allege actually led to unnecessary deaths. However, it appears that the hospital management knew that a large crowd was coming to the event, and so they padded the audience with their own employees, who did nothing but sing praises for the treatment.
Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) is requesting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to share updated data and estimates on fentanyl overdose deaths.
The House Homeland Security Committee chairman wrote a letter to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on March 1 asking for the most recent statistics on fentanyl and fentanyl-related overdose deaths from 2022.
“The latest provisional count provided by the CDC is from a 12-month period ending in September 2022,” Green wrote in the letter. “It has now been five months since any new data has been published.”
The lack of timely data, Green wrote, hinders the ability of Congress to gain a clear understanding of the drug epidemic and how it is evolving.
Drug overdose deaths increased significantly in 2020, rising from an estimated 72,151 deaths in 2019 to roughly 107,622 in 2021, according to the CDC.
“In just a few short years, we’ve seen a staggering surge in drug overdose deaths, driven by fentanyl and other opioids that are flooding into our communities,” Green said.
“Our nation is in crises,” Green said, “and the CDC needs to provide timely data to give us a clear understanding of how this drug epidemic is evolving.”
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Anne Milgram said drug traffickers are increasingly mixing fentanyl with other types of drugs in an effort to drive addiction and attract repeat buyers.
“Fentanyl is everywhere,” Milgram said. “From large metropolitan areas to rural America, no community is safe from this poison.”
Green believes the influx of fentanyl it ties to the lack of security and enforcement on America’s southern border.
“Ruthless cartels smuggle massive amounts of lethal fentanyl across our southern border every day,” Green said.
America’s border patrol officers, Green wrote, are overwhelmed with the volume of encounters with illegal immigrants.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers seized 1.5 million fentanyl pills in one week in Decemberat the Nogales port of entry in Arizona. at the Otay Mesa port of entry in California, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized 17,584 pounds of methamphetamine and 389 pounds of fentanyl from a trailer in October.
“Since October, CBP has seized over 8,600 pounds of fentanyl—enough to kill the entire U.S. population several times over,” Green wrote.
In February, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also tied the lack of border control to increased fentanyl deaths.
“Our lack of border security undoubtedly contributed to Florida’s roughly 3,000 fentanyl-related deaths in 2021 alone,” Rubio wrote in a press release.
Rubio called on the Biden Administration to address the issue.
“I will continue to demand that President Biden and the comfortable bureaucrats staffing his administration address the border, crack down on Chinese drug producers, and treat addiction like the lethal problem it is,” Rubio wrote.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has announced that it will hold its first hearing on the origins of COVID-19 on March 8.
The committee’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), said in a March 1 statement announcing the hearing that Americans “deserve real answers” on the origins of the virus, having suffered through the pandemic and the government policies related to it.
“This investigation must begin with where and how this virus came about so that we can attempt to ‘predict, prepare, protect, or prevent’ it from happening again,” he said.
“Government scientists and government funded researchers have so far been less-than-forthcoming in their knowledge and actions, including work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and potential pandemic pathogens,” he added, without mentioning names.
The announcement comes as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is facing renewed scrutiny that its Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) could be the origin site of the virus.
‘Potential Lab Incident’
According to a Wall Street Journal article published on Feb. 26, a classified intelligence report by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) concluded that a laboratory leak was “likely,” though the judgment was made with “low confidence.”
The report’s conclusion was shared by FBI Director Christopher Wray, who told Fox News the same day that the origins “are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which houses a bio-safety level 4 lab, is located a short distance from a local wet market, where clusters of infection cases were first reported in late 2019.
The Chinese regime has denied that the virus origin was linked to the WIV and has thrown its weight behind a natural zoonotic hypothesis—that the virus was transmitted to humans from an animal host.
The March hearing will feature several witnesses, including Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); Dr. Jamie Metzl, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council; and Nicholas Wade, former editor for Nature and Science journals and The New York Times.
“We can’t accept more years of stonewalling; the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is committed to conducting a proper investigation that the American people have demanded,” Wenstrup added.
“We look forward to hearing from our esteemed witnesses next week about their research on this topic.”
Investigation
In early February, Wenstrup and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) sent several letters seeking information on COVID-19 from Dr. Anthony Fauci; Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance; Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence; Dr. Francis Collins, acting science adviser to President Joe Biden; and Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The two lawmakers also asked Fauci, Daszak, and Collins to sit for transcribed interviews.
“Evidence continues to mount pointing to the virus leaking from an unsecure lab in Wuhan,” Comer said in a statement accompanying the letters. “We know EcoHealth Alliance acted as a middleman, improperly funneling thousands of taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan lab to conduct risky gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses which could have started the pandemic.”
In 2021, documents obtained by The Intercept through the Freedom of Information Act showed that EcoHealth Alliance directed a portion of grant money it received from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to the WIV for research, including altering bat coronaviruses that were deemed likely to infect humans.
In September 2018, Daszak said that EcoHealth was a recipient of CCP money while taking part in a conference sponsored by Chinese state broadcaster CGTN, the international arm of China’s state broadcaster CCTV.
Wenstrup and Comer requested more information on COVID-19 origins on Feb. 27, when they sent letters to DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Wray.
On March 1, the Senate passed unanimously a bill (S.619) that would require the director of National Intelligence to declassify “any and all information relating to potential links” between the WIV and the origins of COVID-19.
WIV Researchers Who Became Sick
The names of WIV researchers who fell ill in the autumn of 2019, as well as their symptoms and their roles in the institute, would be part of the information required by the bill to be declassified.
In January 2021, the State Department under the Trump administration first revealed that there were several sick WIV researchers before the COVID-19 outbreak.
“The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” the fact sheet reads.
It adds, “This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”
Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has ignored a House Oversight Committee request for records of his business activities and potential access to classified information, but Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is holding off on a subpoena for now.
On Feb. 8, Comer sent Hunter Biden a letter (pdf) requesting that he turn over a variety of records, including any communications with his father about his various foreign business activities and associates and any classified documents he may possess. Comer gave Hunter Biden a Feb. 22 deadline to respond to the information request.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, outright rejected the information request in a Feb. 9 response letter shared with the Washington Post.
Despite Lowell’s rejection letter and the missed deadline, Comer has yet to follow up his information request with a more forceful request through a legal subpoena. In comments with Punchbowl News, which were published on Wednesday, Comer said he is holding back on a subpoena for now, in order to ensure better odds that the subpoena will succeed if Hunter Biden’s legal team challenges the legal demand in court.
“It’s not just issuing a subpoena, it’s about winning,” Comer said.
“We give people plenty of time. When you do subpoenas, if you want to win in court, you have to show good faith effort that you tried to get the information. So we’re checking some boxes,” Comer continued.
“When we do subpoena, if we have to, then we’re going to win the subpoenas in court,” Comer added.
Biden’s Lawyer Says Records Request Not Legitimate
In his letter rebuffing Comer’s initial effort to recover Hunter Biden’s records, Lowell said the Oversight Committee lacked a legitimate reason for seeking the records.
“As your Letter is a sweeping attempt to collect an expansive array of documents and communications from President Biden and his family, I write to explain that the Committee on Oversight and Accountability lacks a legitimate legislative purpose and oversight basis for requesting such records from Mr. Biden, who is a private citizen,” Lowell wrote.
Case law states that a House committee must have a specific legislative purpose to pursue records and it cannot simply be an excuse to launch an investigation.
In his Feb. 8 letter, Comer said the activities of Hunter Biden and his business associates “raise significant ethics and national security concerns” and the Oversight Committee “will examine drafting legislation to strengthen federal ethics laws regarding public officials and their families.”
“We will also analyze and make recommendations regarding federal laws and regulations to ensure that financial institutions have the proper internal controls and compliance programs to alert federal agencies of potential money laundering activity,” he wrote. “The Oversight Committee is committed to exposing the waste, fraud, and abuse that has taken place at the highest levels of our government, and your documents are critical to our investigation.”
While Comer contended the records request could serve a specific legislative purpose, the records could also serve a political purpose in demonstrating the extent to which Joe Biden had knowledge or involvement in his son’s business activities while he has continued to serve in political office. In November, Comer and other House Oversight Committee Republicans published a report (pdf) laying out allegations that the Biden family peddled influence and promised their business associates access to Joe Biden and a future Biden administration.
Joe Biden had claimed throughout the 2020 campaign cycle that “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”
Cooperating Witnesses
While Comer said he’s holding back on issuing a subpoena, he has also said other witnesses have begun to cooperate with his investigative efforts.
Last week, Comer told Just The News that one of Hunter Biden’s business associates, Eric Schwerin, had begun cooperating with the Oversight Committee to provide information about their business activities.
According to the November Republican investigative report, Schwerin and Hunter Biden “made increasing references to Joe Biden” in the course of their business communications and Schwerin had frequent access to the White House when Joe Biden was the vice president.
Schwerin allegedly visited the White House at least 27 times between 2009 and 2016. In 2015, President Barack Obama named Schwerin to serve on the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. The Republican investigative report raised allegations that Schwerin had access to Joe Biden’s personal bank account and transferred money from that account to his son Hunter.
Comer had also sought information from Kathy Chung, a former assistant to Joe Biden who was involved in his handling of classified documents as vice president and who handled the Biden family’s access to Joe Biden during his vice presidency. Comer had asked Chung to provide information about the classified documents as well as her communications between Joe Biden and his family members and Schwerin.
Chung has agreed to provide some information about her handling of classified documents. Her lawyer, Bill Taylor, declined to comment when asked if Chung would also provide the specific information Comer requested about her communications with the Biden family.
During a Senate Judiciary hearing on Wednesday, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) strongly disputed Attorney General Merrick Garland’s past assurance that there would “not be interference of any political or improper kind” in the Delaware U.S. attorney’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s shady business activities.
Lawmakers grilled the attorney general over the Hunter Biden probe, as well as the rise of fentanyl-related deaths, prison policy for transvestites, and the Justice Department’s aggressive actions against pro-life activists.
Justice Department regulations forbid U.S. attorneys from bringing charges outside their jurisdictions, and require the prosecuting attorney to either to get permission from that jurisdiction’s U.S. attorney or to transfer the case to them.
When pressed on this, Garland insisted that David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, has been authorized to bring charges against Hunter Biden in another jurisdiction or state, if it is deemed necessary.
“The U.S. attorney has been advised that he has full authority to make those kind of referrals that you are talking about and to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary. And I will assure that if he does, he will be able to do that,” Garland testified.
Multiple news outlets reported last fall that the FBI squad working with Weiss believed it had collected enough evidence to charge Hunter with crimes related to tax fraud and lying about his drug use when he purchased a firearm. The decision of whether to charge the Hunter Biden with those or other crimes rest with Weiss, who was nominated by then-President Donald Trump in November 2017 and confirmed by the Senate in February 2018.
During the hearing, Senator Grassley asked Garland a noticeably specific question about a potential referral of charges to two other states.
“Has the Delaware U.S. Attorney sought permission from another U.S. Attorney’s office such as in the District of Columbia or in California to bring charges (against Hunter Biden)? If so was it denied?” Grassley asked.
“I don’t know the answer to that, and I don’t want to get into the internal elements of decision making by the U.S. attorney, but he has been advised that he is not to be denied anything that he needs,” the attorney general replied.
Grassley, and 32 other Republican Senators signed a letter last September asking Garland to give Weiss the powers of a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
“Given the politicization of the DOJ under your watch and the importance of avoiding any appearance of impropriety, the undersigned request that you provide U.S. Attorney Weiss the full protections and authorities of a special counsel,” the letter said. “This is one important action that you can take that will go a long way in restoring faith in our governmental institutions.”
“If you provided the Delaware U.S. Attorney with Special Counsel authority, isn’t it true he wouldn’t need permission from another U.S. Attorney to bring charges?” Grassley pressed the AG.
Garland said it was a “complicated question,” but answered that those kinds of charges would have to authorized by his office, and he would “give him full authority to do that.”
“If it’s in another district, he would have to bring the case in another district, but as I promised to ensure that he’s able to carry out his investigation and that he be able to run it, and if he needs to bring it in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that,” the attorney general insisted.
Grassley pointed out that volumes of potentially criminal evidence against Hunter Biden is already in the DOJ’s hands, according to whistleblower information shared with Congress.
“Recent lawfully protected whistleblower disclosures to my office indicate that the Justice Department and the FBI had at one time over a dozen sources who provided potentially criminal information relating to Hunter Biden,” Grassley said. “The alleged volume and similarity of the information would demand that the Justice Department investigate the truth and accuracy of the information,” he added.
The Iowa Republican then asked Garland what steps the Justice Department has taken to determine the truth and accuracy of the whistleblowers’ claims.
“Congress and the American people I think have a right to know,” Grassley said.
Garland said that he has left the matter in the hands of the Delaware’s U.S. Attorney, “so any information like that should have gone to that U.S. attorney’s offices and the FBI squad that is working with him.”
“I pledged not to interfere with that investigation and I have carried through on my pledge,” Garland said.
Grassley indicated he wasn’t impressed with Garland’s assurances.
“If the U.S. attorney there in Delaware has to seek permission from a Biden-appointed U.S. attorney to bring charges, then the Hunter Biden criminal investigation isn’t insulated from political interference as you publicly proclaim,” Grassley stated.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) blasted Attorney General Merrick Garland over the FBI’s outrageous arrest of a Catholic pro-life father during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday.
Mark Houck, an author and sidewalk counselor, was found not guilty in January of federal charges alleging he violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. The law makes it a federal crime to use physical force with the intent to injure, intimidate and interfere with anyone obtaining or providing abortion services.
Federal officials had falsely claimed Houck had assaulted an “abortion escort” while blocking the abortion facility. Video of the altercation showed that the father and son were not blocking the clinic and did not initiate the altercation. Rather, the father had reacted to the abortion worker’s aggressive behavior toward his son, pushing him back when he got too close.
The incident was so minor city police and the district attorney declined to file charges against Houck, and after the escort filed a private criminal complaint in Philadelphia’s municipal court, the case was dismissed.
After Houck had offered to turn himself in, the Biden DOJ allegedly chose to send 25 to 30 FBI agents to Houck’s rural home on the morning of September 24, 2022 to make the arrest in front of his family.
They surrounded the house with rifles in firing position, and “started pounding on the door and yelling for us to open it,” Houck’s wife Ryan Marie told LifeSite following the raid. The feds hauled the dad away as his seven children “were all just screaming” in terror according to Ryan Marie. The home-schooling mom said she had to seek counsel from psychiatrists or psychologists to help her traumatized kids process what happened.
Several other Senators brought up the appalling episode, but none quite as savagely as Hawley, who proceeded to rake the attorney general over the coals, figuratively speaking.
While displaying a photo of several FBI agents armed with long guns and ballistic shields at the Houck’s front door, Hawley demanded: “Why did the Justice Department do this? Why did you send 20 to 30 SWAT-style agents in a SWAT-style team to this guy’s house when everyone else declined to prosecute and he’d offered to turn himself in?”
Garland said that the FBI makes the determination of how to make a federal arrest based on “the tactical operators in the district,” prompting Hawley to shoot back “but surely you’ve looked into it by this point?”
The attorney general said that all he knows is that the FBI made “the decisions on the ground as to what was safest and easiest.” He added that he doesn’t agree with Hawley’s description of how the FBI arrest of the Houck unfolded.
“You don’t agree with my description? I’m pointing out what the photo is,” Hawley fired back, pointing the picture he displayed. “There are agents here who have long guns and ballistic shields.”
The senator then displayed picture of the Houck clan posing for a family photo at church.
“Lets take a look at the hardened criminals that Justice Department sent these armed agents to go terrorize on that morning,” Hawley sarcastically continued. “Here they are!” he exclaimed, pointing to the family picture. “Here they are at Mass. Here’s the seven children with Mr. Houck and his wife … Mrs. Houck has said repeatedly the children were screaming, they feared for their lives … he had offered to turn himself in! And this is who you go to terrorize?!”
When Hawley asked Garland if he believed the FBI’s show of force against the Houck family was “objectively necessary,” the AG repeated his line about the decision being made by FBI agents on the ground.
Hawley insisted that Garland give him a straight answer, instead of shifting responsibility onto others.
“You’re the attorney general of the United States. You are in charge of the Justice Department, and yes sir! You are responsible, so give me an answer!”
Garland again argued that the FBI does not agree with the assessment that 20 to 30 agents raided the Houck home.
“I’m not asking about the FBI!” Hawley interjected. “You are the attorney general. Give me your answer. Do you think it was objectively reasonable and they used your [use of force] guidelines in sending 20 to 30 armed agents to terrorize these people?”
Again, Garland argued that the FBI’s version of events were “not consistent with” Hawley’s description.
“What? That the children weren’t there? That there weren’t long guns there, that there weren’t agents? What do you dispute? What the factual premise you dispute, be specific,” Hawley demanded.
Garland said that the FBI disputes the number of agents, and what their roles were.
“You know the jury in this case acquitted Mr. Houck, as I’m sure you’re aware,” Hawley continued.
Garland responded that he was aware, and respected the jury’s decision.
“Do you know how long it took them?” Hawley pressed.
“I don’t know,” Merrick responded.
“One hour,” Hawley exclaimed. “The Philadelphia District Attorney declines to prosecute, the private suit’s dismissed. You used an unbelievable show of force, with guns I might note that liberals usually decry,” Hawley declared. “We’re supposed to hate long guns and assault style weapons—you’re happy to deploy them against Catholics and innocent children! Happy to! And then you haul him into court and a jury acquits him in one hour!” he exclaimed. “I just suggest to you that that is a disgraceful performance by your Justice Department and a disgraceful use of resources,” Hawley added.
.@HawleyMO just ripped into Merrick Garland for the DOJ’s arrest of pro-life father Mark Houck.
“We’re supposed to hate long guns and assault style weapons, yet you’re happy to deploy them against Catholics and innocent children — happy to.” @DailyCallerpic.twitter.com/XCxaDlxBml
Declaring that he’s noticed a troubling “pattern,” Hawley then brought up a leaked memo from the Richmond FBI field office that advised the FBI infiltrate groups of traditionalist Roman Catholics who to circumvent potential trad Catholic extremist terror.
“Attorney General, are you cultivating sources and spies in Latin mass parishes and other Catholic parishes around the country?” Hawley demanded.
“The Justice Department does not do that, it does not do investigations based on religion,” Garland responded. “I saw the document you have, it’s appalling, I’m in complete agreement with you. I understand that the FBI has withdrawn it and is now looking into how this could ever have happened.”
“I’ll tell you how it happened. This memorandum, which is supposed to be intelligence, cites extensively the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) which goes on to identify all these different Catholics as being part of hate groups,” Hawley said. “Is this how the FBI under your direction and leadership does their intelligence work? They look at left-wing advocacy groups to target Catholics?!
Hawley added, “Is this what’s going on? Clearly it is. This is happening!”
“The FBI is not targeting Catholics, and as I’ve said, this is an inappropriate memorandum and it doesn’t reflect the methods the FBI is supposed to be using,” Garland said.
When asked how many FBI informants had infiltrated Catholic church groups, Garland said he didn’t know, but didn’t believe there were any.
“You don’t know the specifics about anything it seems, but apparently on your watch, this Justice Department is targeting Catholics, targeting people of faith specifically for their faith views, and Mr. Attorney General, I’ll just say to you it’s a disgrace!”
FULL EXCHANGE between Senator @HawleyMO and Attorney General Merrick Garland:
“You used an unbelievable show of force with guns, that I’d just note liberals usually decry…You’re happy to deploy them against Catholics and innocent children!” pic.twitter.com/MaHt6D4HWu
Americans should end it now before it ends America first.
Almost everything that has followed from the woke mass hysteria gripping the nation since 2020 has proved disastrous.
Wokeism destroys meritocracy in favor of forced equality of result—history’s prescription for civilizational decline.
If we continue with the woke hiring of administrators, air traffic controllers, ground crews, pilots, and rail workers, there will be even more news of disasters and near-miss airline crashes.
Wokeness demands a McCarthyite suppression of free expression. No wonder a woke FBI recently hired out social media censors to suppress stories it deemed unhelpful.
Soviet-style, wokeism mandates strict ideological party-line narratives under the cover of “science.” No wonder a woke government lied that requiring vaccines would prevent both infection and infectiousness.
Woke substitutes race for class in its eternal neo-Marxist quest to divide permanently the nation along racial lines, between victims and victimizers.
Yet wokeism recently has embarrassed itself as never before.
Take the COVID pandemic.
The Department of Energy has joined the FBI and is now attributing the origins of the pandemic to a leak of a likely engineered virus from the top-security virology lab in Wuhan, China.
Wokesters had long suppressed that reality, demonizing any who rejected its orthodox lies and spoke a larger truth: A dystopic China is not our global partner in greening the planet. Criticizing Stalinist China is not “racist.” China is not building a progressive society that is a model for others.
The ongoing environmental catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio, following the train derailment revealed more woke moral bankruptcy.
Ostensibly the ensuing toxic spill and noxious plume have poisoned a poor and working-class small town. It should have galvanized the old Democratic Party that once voiced loud support for all green causes and championed the lower American classes.
But woke ended all that—substituting racial chauvinism for class concerns and ideology for genuine worry over the environment.
Woke dogma mandates that pollution and poverty are no longer concerns—if they affect the white poor who are stereotyped collectively as privileged victimizers.
Wokesters insisted that California is the greatest casualty of “climate change” defined as permanent drought.
Purported climate change required radical new bureaucratic rules and antidemocratic mandates over irrigation supplies, ground water, and contracted water deliveries from public reservoirs.
But then it rained. And it snowed. And it became terribly cold in supposedly scorching California.
Southern California is blanketed in snow.
Even so, for much of this cold, wet winter, state officials continued to claim the man-made drought was in full force. But finally, the most recent frigid, wet weather strangled the woke drought—and with it the credibility of our climate change Cassandras.
Americans sympathize with Ukraine’s plight as Vladimir Putin seeks to destroy its autonomy. But woke brooked no deviation from the party line that Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelenskyy is a saint, while Russia is near bankrupt due to sanctions, and doomed to lose the war.
Accordingly, the United States was obligated to give Ukraine a veritable blank check given Kyiv’s commitment to freedom. Zelenskyy’s team now even talks of a victorious Ukrainian armored counteroffensive into Moscow’s Red Square.
This week, however, we are learning the Russian economy is nearly as strong now as it was before the war. It has mobilized 700,000 troops to ensure that eastern Ukraine becomes a Verdun-like killing field where tens of thousands more will be ground up.
Ukraine bars dissidents and maintains a government media monopoly. And the more Joe Biden promises another $2-3 billion in biweekly aid, the more Zelenskyy acts as if it is a pittance given what supposedly stingy Americans should be capable of supplying.
Meanwhile, at home, new woke protocols mandate race as essential rather than incidental to the human experience. Supposedly such fixations will heal racial wounds.
Under the new reparatory and compensatory diversity, equity, and inclusion rules, those deemed non-white were to be hired and admitted to colleges in greater numbers than their demographics. Even the old mandated proportional representation quotas were no longer enough.
But racial chauvinism, nonstop talk of reparations, and the new campus segregation have not resulted in better racial relations.
Polls show that there are greater racial tensions than ever before.
Data on interracial and hate crimes show even sharper racial disproportionalities. The incidence of both black violent criminal perpetrators and black crime victims are near historical highs.
Woke policies of no cash bail, downgrading felonies, and no jail time only spiked violent lawlessness.
Our elite universities are now fully woke. Almost weekly an embarrassing story further erodes their credibility and reputation.
Ridiculous lists of taboo words are issued on woke campuses, barring incendiary words like “American” and “immigrant.”
Bragging of segregated dorms, graduations, and safe spaces recalls Jim Crow, not woke racial utopias.
Grades and standards are deemed counterrevolutionary, even as incompetent graduates increasingly fail to impress employers.
Someday wokeism will disappear because it is inherently nihilistic and cannibalistic.
But in the meantime, Americans should end it now before it ends America first.
A wealthy suburb of Atlanta is seeking secession from the Democratic-run city, pointing to record spikes in violent crime.
Buckhead, one of Atlanta’s wealthiest suburbs, is pushing to secede and become its own city, the New York Postreported on Wednesday. State and local Republican legislators passed two bills sending the proposed Buckhead City to the full state Senate for consideration.
Sen. Randy Robertson (R.), who sponsored the proposal, criticized elected city officials who “forget who they work for.” Residents say that failed leadership is to blame for the city’s crime surge, which has reached the suburb located miles north of the downtown area.
“Buckhead is a target. We’re a target for criminals in the city, and Atlanta has not been able to protect us,” said one resident.
Buckhead last year saw 10 homicides, 22 rapes, 211 aggravated assaults, and 238 burglaries and breaking-and-entering cases, according to a report of crime statistics from TV station 11 Alive.
Wealthier residents’ desire to leave the Democratic-run city is part of a larger trend across the nation of families and businesses fleeing blue states with rampant crime and high costs of living. California’s population plummeted by more than half a million between 2020 and 2022. Residents are specifically migrating to more financially hospitable states like Florida and Texas to escape high taxes and house prices. In 2021, 8 percent of taxpayers making more than $25 million left New York.
Georgia Democrats, meanwhile, have come out in opposition against Buckhead’s effort to become independent from Atlanta.
“I voted against the ‘Buckhead City’ bills, which the majority of my constituents oppose and which threaten the stability of our education, public safety, transportation, and financial systems statewide,” said Democratic state senator Jason Esteves.
Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens (D.) is “disappointed by the committee’s vote to advance this short-sighted legislation” and claimed the city is working to reduce crime, according to a statement from a spokesman.
Brown blames Norfolk Southern’s ‘corporate lobbyists’ for derailment. They happen to be his campaign donors.
One of Senator Sherrod Brown’s likely 2024 challengers says the Ohio Democrat should return all his campaign donations from Norfolk Southern and its lobbyists after one of the firm’s trains derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, and left the town’s residents fearing for their health.
“Sherrod Brown has taken thousands of dollars in donations from Norfolk Southern,” Republican businessman Bernie Moreno told the Washington Free Beacon. “That may explain why it took him so long to speak out about what happened in East Palestine.”
Brown, who spent last weekend in California raising money for his reelection, has pointed the finger at Norfolk Southern’s “corporate lobbyists” for the derailment, saying they have stymied congressional efforts to pass rail safety legislation.Brown has accepted more than $41,000 from Norfolk Southern and its lobbyists to his campaign and affiliated political action committee since 2004, a Washington Free Beacon review of campaign finance records concluded.
Moreno says Brown’s failure to return the money from the very lobbyists he’s blaming for the disaster undermines his established political identity as an advocate for the working class.
“He talks a big game on the campaign trail about standing up to corporate interests, but then takes money from those very same corporate interests to fund his political career,” Moreno said. “If he actually cared about the people of East Palestine, he would have already returned every cent he ever received from Norfolk Southern.”
Moreno, who has not yet declared his candidacy for Brown’s Ohio Senate seat, is widely seen as a leading contender for the Republican nomination. Considered one of the most vulnerable Democrats of the 2024 cycle, Brown has been in office since 2007and has seen his state become more and more red. Republican senator J.D. Vance (Ohio) won his seat easily in 2022 against a well-funded Democratic challenger, longtime congressman Tim Ryan.
At least five Norfolk Southern lobbyists have donated to Brown over the years, totaling over $31,000. Three of those lobbyists, disclosure forms show, lobbied the Senate and White House in 2022 over issues related to “rail safety.” Norfolk Southern has directly given Brown at least $10,000, campaign finance forms show. The most recent donation from a Norfolk Southern lobbyist came in 2021.
The derailment has released dozens of chemicals into the air and water around East Palestine. Some of those chemicals, scientists at the EPA say, include the carcinogenic vinyl chloride. East Palestine residents have complained of rashes and difficulty breathing, with some filing a class-action lawsuit against Norfolk Southern.
Brown did not respond to a request for comment.
Speaking to CNN earlier this month, Brown called the train derailment “the same old story” of corporate negligence.
“There’s no question [Norfolk Southern] caused it with this derailment … they underinvested in their employees. They never look out for their workers, they never look out for their communities, they look out for stock buybacks and dividends,” Brown said on Feb. 19. “Something’s wrong with corporate America and something’s wrong with Congress and administrations listening too much to corporate lobbyists. And that’s gotta change.”
In 2019 Brown promised if he ran for president he would swear off corporate PAC money. Since that pledge, Brown has taken in more than $1 million in donations from corporate PACs and more than $7 million over the course of his political career.
State gave $41K to anti-Israel group Fares Al-Arab
Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) is calling on the Biden administration to suspend funding to an anti-Israel Gaza-based charity and turn over records related to the grant, following a Washington Free Beacon report that found the group works with terrorists.
Issa in a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised concerns about the $41,000 State Department grant, which “was made despite repeated inflammatory remarks on the international stage, and confirmed allegations of repeated, long-standing ties to Hamas.”
The letter comes days after the Free Beaconreported that the State Department provided funding in September to Fares Al-Arab, a Gaza-based charity, to carry out an English-language training program for Palestinian journalists.
Fares Al-Arab worked with the Hamas government as recently as 2021 on a housing project. The charity also gave a media award to a radio network run by the Islamic Jihad Movement, honored a self-described journalist who belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, hosted a press freedom event that featured a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, and co-led a human rights training course with a convicted terrorist, the Free Beacon first reported. The group has also blasted Israel as an “apartheid” regime, supports boycott campaigns against the Jewish state, and signed on to a petition that calls on the United Nations to “uncover the terrorist face” of Israel.
Fares Al-Arab told the Free Beacon that its work with terrorists is in the past and that “the group’s views on Israel will not be a part of the media training program.”
Issa wrote in his letter to Blinken that the group “has previously been noted to maintain historical ties and ‘bilateral relations’ with Hamas,” which is “designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization” under U.S. law.
The congressman said this designation raises questions about whether the group “would have been eligible for the grant.”
“This award must immediately be suspended pending a full and thorough review of these accusations,” he added.
Issa asked the State Department to explain if it “knew the history of the group’s ties to terrorism” and “why the grant was provided if the history was known.”
He also requested that the department turn over all documents and communications related to the grant, the grant application, and all records related to the review and approval process by March 10.
Iran’s parliament provides legal framework for Tehran’s security forces to murder, torture, and imprison dissidents, lawmakers say
A bipartisan coalition in Congress is pressuring the Biden administration to sanction nearly all of Iran’s parliament amid the government’s crackdown on anti-regime protesters.
Out of 290 members of Iran’s parliament, 227 should be sanctioned for providing the legal framework for Tehran’s security forces to murder, torture, and imprison dissidents who have been protesting across Iran for months, according to a group of 26 representatives and senators from both parties.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran lacks democratic legitimacy, and the members of its parliament are not true democratic representatives of the Iranian people,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Claudia Tenney (R., N.Y.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), wrote in a letter sent Wednesday to the State and Treasury Departments. “We urge you to take further actions—and encourage international partners to join us—to impose much clearer costs on the Iranian regime for the execution of protesters.”
The letter is a sign that lawmakers from both parties are frustrated with the Biden administration’s response to the anti-regime protest movement, which began in September of last year and threatens to topple Iran’s clerical ruling regime. While the Biden administration has issued sanctions in response to the protest movement, it also has kept the door open to diplomacy with Tehran over the 2015 nuclear deal.
“We strongly encourage the Departments of State and the Treasury to levy further sanctions against Iranian officials and institutions involved in this brutal campaign of intimidation and extermination,” the lawmakers wrote.
Iran’s parliament, known as the Majles, has been instrumental in the Iranian government’s crackdown on protesters. In November, as the protest movement gained steam, 227 members of parliament “signed an open statement calling for the Iranian government and judiciary to ‘show no leniency’ toward protesters and compared them to ISIS terrorists,” according to the lawmakers’ letter.
Members of the Majles are appointed and strictly controlled by Iran’s ruling regime, led by Ali Khamenei. They are installed in the parliament to forward and support policies that strengthen Khamenei’s grip on power.
Since the protests erupted last year following the murder of a young woman at the hands of Iran’s morality police, the regime has killed at least 519 protesters, according to figures cited by the lawmakers in their letter. More than 19,000 have been arrested and at least 109 of those have been sentenced to death “in grossly unfair trials.” Four Iranians have been executed on “trumped up charges” and reports indicate “that further executions are imminent,” the lawmakers warned.
The lawmakers note that in March 2022 the Biden administration sanctioned members of Russia’s Duma, that country’s parliament, and said the same pressure should be applied to Iran.
Sanctions should also extend to Majles members’ families “who may seek to study, work, or acquire property in the United States,” according to the letter. These types of sanctions could be easily approved by the Biden administration under existing authorities granted by the Global Magnitsky Act, 2016 legislation that targets human rights abusers worldwide.
Congress also stands ready to grant additional authorizations that may be needed to sanction Iranian regime officials and their family members. The lawmakers ask the Biden administration to “immediately consult with Congress on any legislative remedy to ensure that the Executive Branch has all necessary legal tools to sanction these members of the Iranian regime and impose costs on their family.”
Semafor, a popular media startup, has interesting new partners in its quest to fix “the crisis of trust in news”: a consortium of Chinese Communist Party front groups, soft-on-China business leaders, and one organization that calls itself a “chamber of commerce led by the Communist Party of China.”
The online news outlet is partnering with the Center for China & Globalization for a “China and Global Business” initiative that will launch in Beijing later this year. The center is part of China’s united front system, which the Communist Party uses to influence “universities, think tanks, scholars, [and] journalists.” Semafor’s initiative will bring together a number of CCP allies and Americans known for dovish views towards Beijing, among them John Thornton, a prominent Brookings Institution donor with longstanding ties to Chinese government officials.
Semafor’s “ambitious” new initiative calls into question its claim to be a global news platform whose goal is “addressing the crisis of trust in news.” Media watchdogs have long been concerned about corporate and foreign influence on American news organizations, particularly with China’s aggressive attempts to influence American news outlets. The New York Times and Washington Post have ended advertisement deals with Chinese state-run media outlets over the optics of those relationships and the potential that foreign influence might shape editorial coverage.
Ben Smith, the cofounder of Semafor and a former Buzzfeed editor, says the China initiative is aimed at counterbalancing “hawkish” views in Washington toward China, with an advisory board that represents a “diversity of opinion” on the topic of U.S.-China relations. But a glance at the advisory board’s members calls that claim into question as well.
Advisory board member Wang Huiyao, the founder of the Center for China & Globalization, is a Chinese government adviser and official at organizations that helped develop China’s controversial “Thousand Talents” program, which the FBI says Beijing uses to steal trade secrets from American companies and create national security risks for the U.S. government.
Chen Deming, a former Chinese minister of commerce and advisory board member, has been a Chinese Communist Party member since 1974. Another adviser is former Chinese ambassador Cui Tiankai, who in that diplomatic role has defended Beijing’s human rights record. In 2018, he dismissed concerns about China’s oppression of Muslim Uyghurs, saying that China was merely “trying to reeducate most of them, trying to turn them into normal persons [who] can go back to normal life.”
Other Chinese advisory board members include the chairmen of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce and the China Public Diplomacy Association, both of which are linked to the CCP’s United Front Work Department. The Guardianreported that the the China Public Diplomacy Association organized training sessions where “foreign reporters are schooled not just on China, but also on its view of journalism.” The All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce describes itself as “a mass organization and chamber of commerce led by the Communist Party of China.”
On the American side are business leaders, academicians, and former diplomats known for supporting closer ties to China.
Jessica Chen Weiss, a former Biden State Department official, has criticized the United States’ “obsession” with China. She recently asserted that the national security threat of China’s spy balloon last month was “blown wildly out of proportion.” Susan Thornton, a former State Department official and Semafor adviser, came under fire during the Trump administration for what Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) said was her “troubling record of undermining America’s allies like Taiwan, failing to stand up to China’s efforts to impose its authoritarian will beyond its borders,” and “downplaying human rights abuses in China.”
John Thornton, the namesake for the Brookings Institution’s China Center, chairs the Silk Road Finance Corporation, a CCP-backed investment fund that develops projects for Beijing’s controversial Belt & Road Initiative, the Free Beaconreported. He has also been a consultant for China’s Confucius Institutes, which Beijing uses to wield influence at American high schools and colleges.
It is unclear whether the Center for China & Globalization and the other Chinese advisers are funding the Semafor initiative. Smith, the Semafor cofounder, referred questions to Semafor’s spokeswoman, who did not respond to a request for comment.
The controversial partnership is also not the first for Semafor in its short existence. The company recently announced plans to repurchase Sam Bankman-Fried’s investment in the website after his indictment for defrauding investors in his cryptocurrency exchange. Bankman-Fried reportedly invested $10 million in Semafor.
Ticketmaster makes money off event where Farrakhan assailed ‘stranglehold that Jews have on this government’
The ticketing giant hated by Taylor Swift fans and everyone else who has ever tried to buy concert tickets is now under fire from Jewish activists for selling tickets to a Louis Farrakhan event in which the minister defended Adolf Hitler and predicted another Holocaust against Jews. But many of Ticketmaster’s biggest critics on Capitol Hill don’t seem to care.
Ticketmaster, which charges service fees on each ticket it sells, raked in money selling tickets to Farrakhan’s annual Saviours’ Day conference in Chicago last weekend. During his speech at the event, Farrakhan assailed the “stranglehold that Jews have on this government” and claimed “Jewish power is what has all of our people of knowledge and wisdom and talent afraid.”
The event was met with crickets on Capitol Hill, with almost no one in Congress speaking out against Ticketmaster for making money off of the Farrakhan event. The reaction is a stark contrast to lawmakers’ response when Ticketmaster bungled sales last year for Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated concert tour. That fiasco was in the news cycle for weeks and led to a Department of Justice investigation as well as a Senate hearing. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say Ticketmaster and its parent company, LiveNation, have a monopoly over the ticket industry, leading to price-gouging and a failure to crack down on automated scalping.
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in [sic],” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) in a Twitter post in November. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) called on the Department of Justice to investigate. None of their offices responded to a request for comment on Ticketmaster’s Farrakhan sales.
Only Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.)—who also spoke out about the Taylor Swift debacle—weighed in on the Farrakhan controversy when contacted by the Washington Free Beacon.
“It is extremely concerning that Ticketmaster is choosing to use its platform to elevate and promote a well-known anti-Semite. The targeting of the Jewish people has gone on far too long and must stop,” she said.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.), a Ticketmaster critic who serves as the chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also sent a comment after this story was published.
“Anti-Semitism has no place in America,” said McMorris Rodgers. “Ticketmaster should be completely transparent on why it chose to profit off of Farrakhan’s abhorrent history of hatred and violent threats of genocide against the Jewish people.”
Entertainment industry leaders and Jewish groups had urged Ticketmaster to drop the Farrakhan event from its sales platform, but Ticketmaster did not waver. The Anti-Defamation League also sent a letter to Ticketmaster on Friday to “note that the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviors’ Day event regularly serves as a platform to amplify this hate and bigotry.” The group said it was not calling on the company to halt ticket sales.
The event came as anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States. Hate crimes against Jews have surged in majorcities, while celebrities like Kanye West and Kyrie Irving have promoted anti-Jewish conspiracy theories on social media. Farrakhan during his speech praised West as a “very great brother” and “genius.”
“Ye broke into the fashion industry, that’s controlled by Jews,” said Farrakhan. “Don’t be mad with them. They’re in every avenue that leads to power.”
“Somebody has to take on the synagogue of Satan, and here we are,” he said. “We cannot let them take the country.”
Farrakhan criticized Jews who use the phrase “Never Again” when discussing the Holocaust.
“You can say that to men, but you can’t say that to God. Because the Bible says, behold, the day cometh that shall burn—as a what?—as an oven. And those who do wickedly, He will slay them.”
“God is not unjust; when he kills you, you know you deserved it,” he added.
Farrakhan also defended the Nazis by citing an argument he supposedly heard from a Jewish rabbi on TV.
“Usury is what has made [the Jews] strong. I heard a Jewish rabbi, maybe about six weeks ago, he came on television talking about Adolf Hitler,” said Farrakhan. “And he said Hitler was right. He said Hitler went against usury and Hitler attacked pornography that the Jews had put on the Germans.”
Farrakhan and his group, the Nation of Islam, promote numerous conspiracy theories about Jews, including that Jews control the government, the media, and global financial institutions.
Last week, a group of entertainment industry leaders sent a letter to Ticketmaster CEO Michael Rapino calling on the company to drop the sales of the Farrakhan event and citing the preacher’s long history of anti-Semitism.
“Providing support of any kind to this sort of hatred is not just unacceptable, but dangerous,” said the letter.
Update 2:50 p.m.: This post has been updated with comment from Rep. McMorris Rodgers
Michael Delaney nomination in peril as parents of sexual assault victim speak out
One of Joe Biden’s judicial nominees appears to be in peril as a sexual assault victim and her family are speaking out against his confirmation.
Michael Delaney, who represented the elite St. Paul’s School in a civil lawsuit against a teenage sexual assault victim, wasn’t scheduled for a Senate vote on Thursday, and the First Circuit nominee faced rare—and extensive—written questions from Democratic senators about his role defending institutions embroiled in sexual misconduct scandals.
The news comes after Delaney faced tough questions from Republican senators in February over his attempt to strip the anonymity of then-minor Chessy Prout, who was sexually assaulted at St. Paul’s, the prestigious New Hampshire school, in 2014.Prout’s parents called on Biden to pull Delaney’s nomination in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon Monday, arguing that Delaney has chosen “to make money off of survivors of sexual assault and defend these institutions.”
Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), who called Delaney’s February hearing “pretty rough,” has yet to schedule a vote on his nomination.
The Judiciary Committee’s weekly schedule, which Durbin released Monday, lists two other nominees up for a vote, Jeffrey Cummings and LaShonda Hunt, who had their hearings the same day as Delaney last month.
Another indication of Delaney’s troubles is the extensive set of written questions sent to him by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.). It is rare for senators to submit written questions to nominees of their own party, and Feinstein’s lengthy list—Delaney’s responses ran 42 pages—homed in on his representation of institutions under fire for the sexual misconduct of employees.
Delaney’s responses make clear that this has been a core practice area for him: He has, he said, represented 25 “primary or secondary educational institutions … in responding to instances of misconduct experienced by students” as well as five youth organizations under fire for the sexual abuse of a child.
But it is clear Delaney’s nomination will hinge on where Democratic senators fall on his conduct during the Prout case: Their name appears 81 times in the Feinstein questionnaire alone, and he concedes that, while representing the St. Paul’s School, he “did request permission to use Ms. Prout’s real name in private settings during pretrial discovery stages of the case, and with jurors at any trial.”
Prout’s parents said Democrats who previously supported their daughter’s crusade against rape culture on college campuses have been silent, in what Prout’s mother, Susan Prout, called an “egregious backing away from [their] values.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) blasted Sens. Maggie Hassan (D., N.H.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.) on the Senate floor Wednesday for their continued support of Delaney’s nomination. The pair released a letter in January introducing Delaney to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The letter highlighted Delaney’s “commitment to justice” and urged the Senate to confirm him. They made no reference to St. Paul, which is located in New Hampshire and where Delaney previously served as attorney general.
“By the way, this brave young lady is outraged that President Biden is trying to reward her legal tormentor with a lifetime appointment, and that our two Democratic colleagues from New Hampshire are backing him,” McConnell said.
Both Hassan and Shaheen voted against Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in 2018 after he was accused of sexual misconduct by several women. Shaheen described Prout in 2016 as “a remarkable, brave young woman.”
BUT WHO WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE CACOPHONY OF LIES?
Natural immunity is just as effective – if not more so – at protecting against COVID-19 Big Pharma vaccines, admits a new study in the Lancet medical journal. The about-face from the 200-year-old publication comes at the same time as the sudden change of heart amongst authorities regarding the origins of the virus.
“Although protection from re-infection from all variants wanes over time, our analysis of the available data suggests that the level of protection afforded by previous infection is at least as high, if not higher than that provided by two-dose vaccination using high-quality mRNA vaccines,” the report states.
READ THE BOOK BY ARTICLE AUTHOR, ‘RAW EGG NATIONALIST’.
The authors of the study believe the findings should be used by policymakers to inform future policy-making about COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. According to chief author Dr Charles Murray, the report “supports the idea that those with a documented infection should be treated similarly to those who have been fully vaccinated with high-quality vaccines.” Policymakers should “take both natural immunity and vaccination status into consideration to obtain a full picture of an individual’s immunity profile”.
Previous studies in the Lancet equivocated over the effectiveness of natural immunity, deciding that vaccination clearly represented the best course as a matter of public health policy. Although this new report appears to be the end for such equivocation, it’s worth noting the study’s authors still recommend vaccination as the “safest option” for acquiring immunity.
Gates Hedges.
Ironically, the new research appears to be at least partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates has been one of the chief public advocates for mass vaccination; although he has recently contradicted earlier claims about the vaccines.
Speaking at the Lowy Institute in Australia, the Microsoft founder recently noted that there are three main problems with the current vaccines:
“The three current vaccines are not infection-blocking,” he said. “They’re not broad, so when a new variant comes up you lose protection; and they have very short duration, particularly in the people who matter, which are old people.”
Bill Gates:
We also need to fix the 3 problems of covid-19 vaccines
The current vaccines:
1. Are not infection blocking.
2. They are not broad, so new variants come up & you lose protection.
The new Lancet publication comes as vindication, but perhaps cold comfort, for the many people who insisted that the vaccines would not provide uniquely powerful protection against the disease. These people have been subject to relentless derision as “antivaxxers” and “conspiracy theorists” for the last three years for expressing what had previously been common knowledge about the effectiveness of natural immunity conferred by infection. Some will have been forced to take a vaccine against their will to comply with the various mandates that were issued by governments and employers around the world – mandates that were enforced on the basis that only vaccination could offer the necessary level of protection needed – while others will have suffered professional and personal consequences as a result of their beliefs and decision not to be vaccinated.
“If the Covid lab leak theory being a ‘conspiracy theory’ was a lie and ’15 days to stop the spread’ was a lie,” wrote one commentator on Twitter, “and ‘masks work’ to stop the spread was a lie and ‘vaccine mandates will stop the spread’ was a lie and ‘natural immunity is a myth’ was a lie and ‘there are no side effects’ was a lie and ‘safe and 100% effective’ was a lie then you can pretty much bet that whatever the U.S. government is telling us about anything right now is a lie.”
Others wondered what would come next after this latest stunning reversal.
“Those of us with natural immunity were blamed for ‘killing grandma’. So what’s going to happen now? Are people going to call The Lancet conspiracy theorists too?” asked another Twitter user.
The Study.
The new study is a meta-review of 65 individual studies from 19 countries worldwide. These studies included participants who had previous infections but were not vaccinated; participants who were not vaccinated and not infected; and control groups of people who were vaccinated against COVID-19. Any studies that included participants with hybrid immunity –people who had been both vaccinated and infected – were excluded.
The results of the meta-analysis showed that natural immunity remained “highly protective” against hospitalisation and death from several variants at 40 weeks. Previous infection was 90.2 percent protective for the original, alpha, and delta variants, and 88.0 percent protective against omicron BA.1.
Protection against reinfection declined over time, but remained high for the pre-omicron variants at 78.6 percent at 40 weeks. Protection against reinfection by omicron BA.1. was much lower, at 36.1 percent at 40 weeks.
The authors of the study still cling to their legacy views, recommending vaccination since “there are still considerable risks from infection, particularly among those who are unvaccinated.”
“The problem of saying ‘I’m gonna get infected to get immunity’ is you might be one of those people that end up in the hospital or die,” said Christopher Murray. “Why would you take the risk when you can get immunity through vaccination quite safely?”
The authors failed to make the same considerations for vaccine injury.
Conspiracy Theory Fact.
In an important respect, this new meta-study is not news at all. We already knew natural immunity was an effective protection against COVID-19, regardless of what the scientific and political authorities had to say. We knew the virus came from a lab. We already knew that masks scarcely worked, and that the Big Pharma “vaccines” didn’t prevent transmission. We already knew that two – then three, then four – jabs wouldn’t be enough. The reversal is wholesale.
But what is actually going to be done about it? Who is going to be held to account for the damage done to our lives – not just to our health and wealth, but also our reputations and relationships with our friends, family, colleagues and neighbours? That damage cannot be undone. We will be reckoning with the negative consequences of the decisions taken on our behalf, whether we agreed with them or not, for a long time to come, probably many decades.
In November, I reported on the fact that Gen-Zers are suffering from massive pandemic-induced depression. The young, even babies, have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic social-distancing and masking restrictions, and their adult lives will be blighted by everything they’ve lost – time, interaction with their peers, confidence and joy – and gained – weight, mental-health issues – as a result of their isolation over the past three years. The unhappy lives of our younger generations are just one tragic example of how the future will bear the unmistakable mark of the pandemic, before we even consider the unheralded economic damage done to the middle classes or the vaccine side effects or the massive extension of illiberal surveillance and tracking of citizens by their governments.
The clamour for a reckoning will grow. The very real danger is that none will come. Nobody will be held to account. The corrupt institutions and corrupt actors who presided over this disaster, who lied to the public, detained them in their own homes and coerced them into taking experimental medical treatments, who profited politically and economically from this entire disaster, will not be purged or even suffer negative consequence. They will cling on to power and influence and continue to enrich themselves at our expense.
And even if a reckoning does come, what form will it take? We have no precedent for the kind of wide-ranging global tribune that would need to be held, with real powers of investigation and punishment, to allow anything approaching full justice to take its course. People talk of a “Nuremberg 2.0”, but the circumstances could not be more different from those obtaining in 1945. We – the people – are not the victors here, able to set terms. At most, there is only local political desire for investigation, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s call for “accountability”.
The sad fact is, it’s going to be far easier for us all to forget, especially since so many of us have proven such willing executioners as well as victims.
There was a bit of an online sensation when a story broke that Puffin Books, part of the Random House publishing group, had a group of sensitivity screeners read and edit the children’s books from the late author Roald Dahl.
The changes were sweeping and, as one can imagine, idiotic:
Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which originally was published in 1964, is no longer “enormously fat,” just “enormous.” In the new edition of “Witches,” a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be working as a “top scientist or running a business” instead of as a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.”
The word “black” was removed from the description of the terrible tractors in the 1970s The Fabulous Mr. Fox.” The machines are now simply “murderous, brutal-looking monsters.”
And so on. Quite rightly, contemporary authors like Salman Rushdie slammed the changes as “absurd censorship.” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said “selective editing to make works of literature conform to particular sensibilities could represent a dangerous new weapon” in the ongoing war over banned books.
Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.
Which is exactly right. Censors, whether they are on the left or the right, all have one thing in common: a fear that someone, somewhere, will learn something new and perhaps see the world in a different way.
Perhaps understanding they went too far, Puffin Books has done some quick damage control:
Puffin announces…the release of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, to keep the author’s classic texts in print. These seventeen titles will be published under the Penguin logo, as individual titles in paperback, and will be available later this year. The books will include archive material relevant to each of the stories.
The Roald Dahl Classic Collection will sit alongside the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time.
Readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.
It’s not a complete climb down. But it’s an acknowledgment that unleashing the PC censors on a beloved children’s author was bad for business.
And on the upside, we now have a real-life test underway to see which set of Dahl books the market prefers to buy: “classic” Dahl or “new” Dahl. If it turns out like the Classic Coke v. New Coke experiment of long ago, “new” Dahl is destined for the remainder shelf.
