The Republican National Committee is suing two cities in Vermont to stop non-citizens from voting in municipal elections.
The RNC is joined in the lawsuit by the Vermont Republican Party against the state capital of Montpelier and the city of Winooski, according to Fox News.
The two Vermont locations have amended their charters to allow non-citizens can now vote in municipal elections under a new state law passed in the spring.
The Republican National Committee news release called the action a “radical scheme passed by Vermont Democrats, to allow foreign citizens to decide American elections.”
The release also called the effort”a blatant attack on election integrity and violates the state constitution which requires Vermont voters to be U.S. citizens.”
The RNC and the VTGOP are today suing the cities of Montpelier and Winooski, Vermont over their new town charters that allow noncitizens to vote in their municipal elections.
This radical scheme passed by state Democrats is a blatant attack on election integrity. pic.twitter.com/YfU2ZLxw3D
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel provided tough words in response to the new Vermont voting changes.
“Democrats are trying to dismantle the integrity of our elections. In addition to attacking widely supported safeguards like voter ID, Democrats also want foreign citizens to vote in American elections,” Ronna McDaniel said in the news release on Tuesday.
“Democrats are trying to dismantle the integrity of our elections. In addition to attacking widely supported safeguards like voter ID, Democrats also want foreign citizens to vote in American elections. Republicans are fighting back” –@GOPChairwomanhttps://t.co/enJeLwe3x5
“Republicans are fighting back on this far-left assault against election integrity — unlike radical Democrats, we believe that our elections should be decided solely by American citizens,” she added.
McDaniel also said the RNC will remain vigilant to address any state that attempts to allow non-citizens voting rights.
“This is a matter of principle and we will fight in all 50 states to ensure this remains the case,” she said.
The bill that would allow non-citizens to vote passed in the spring but was initially vetoed by Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott, Fox News reported.
“Allowing a highly variable town-by-town approach to municipal voting creates inconsistency in election policy, as well as separate and unequal classes of residents potentially eligible to vote on local issues,” Scott wrote in a May letter to legislators.
However, the governor’s veto was overridden by the state House and Senate in June, according to Fox.
When the bill was originally passed, Republican state Sen. Sen. Brian Collamore said, “I believe if someone wishes to be able to vote they should be a citizen.”
Collamore argued that the voting change was based on a person living in the U.S. on a “permanent basis.”
“The Montpelier bill allows what is defined as a legal resident of the United States to be able to vote in city elections. … If someone is here on a permanent basis, why would he or she not want to participate in the process to become a citizen?” Collamore added.
Big Government Socialism has been tried at the state level and it has failed spectacularly.
Stephen Moore, an economist working with the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, offered conclusive proof that Big Government Socialism is a disaster with real consequences for people and the economy in his remarkably useful newsletter “the Unleash Prosperity Hotline” (issue 374).
(UPH)
Moore compared states run by Republicans with states run by Democrats. The above chart from Moore’s newsletter proves the gap between Republican policies of jobs and economic growth and Democratic policies of big government, union domination, corruption, regulation, and an anti-business, anti-jobs attitude.
Note that the only non-red state in the top job creating list is Vermont—which has a Republican governor.
Callista and I recently had lunch with Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts. His state has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. Ricketts’ concern was that businesses in Nebraska were doing so well and growing so rapidly that they had a tremendous number of jobs they could not fill. Remarkably, he thought the real unemployment rate in Nebraska was actually below 2.2 percent.
The red states consistently have lower taxes, less government spending, less bureaucracy, and fewer regulations. Republican-run states also have a pattern of honoring businessmen and women, valuing entrepreneurship and hard work, and expecting people to do their share to create better lives and a better state.
In Omaha, they also have a deep tradition of enforcing the law. When the Black Lives Matter riots broke out, Omaha had an immediate and aggressive response to the violence and looting. By contrast, nearby Lincoln, Nebraska—which has a Big Government Socialist Democratic mayor—failed to enforce the law. While Lincoln is one-fourth the size of Omaha, it had 10 times as much damage from looting. In fact, the difference in law enforcement (and radical woke-think) led the long-time Democratic Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine to switch parties and become a Republican. As he said to me, “there are no moderate Democrats left.”
By contrast many of the highest unemployment blue states also have some of the highest murder rates. Crime, taxes, red tape, overbearing bureaucracy, and corruption all drive jobs out of a state. Those states are almost always run by Big Government Socialist Democrats.
The power of big government ideology, government employee unions (including the teachers), and the corruption and incompetence which metastasizes when governments outgrow the control of their citizens all lead to higher unemployment and slower job growth.
The amazing thing is that Moore’s chart, as definitive as it is, has almost no impact on Big Government Socialist mayors, city councils, state legislators, and governors.
And this kind of evidence seems to have no impact on the reporters and editorial boards in the states and cities which are being cheated by their politicians and bureaucracies.
When you realize that the Nevada, California, and New York unemployment rates are 3.4 times higher than Nebraska’s you would think that delegations would come from those states to try to understand the miracle happening in Missouri. Instead, what we get is scorn for “flyover country” from the supposedly sophisticated elites in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco who are certain they know much more than non-coastal people.
Sadly for Americans, the Speaker of the House and the Vice President come from the state with the second highest unemployment while the Senate Majority Leader comes from the state with the third highest unemployment. They are working desperately to impose on the whole country the kind of Big Government Socialist bills that have given their states massive homelessness, huge unemployment, and frightening levels of violence and crime.
There is an old saying that misery loves company, but this is ridiculous.
Call your representative and senators and urge them to vote “no” on the Bernie Sanders Big Government Socialist bills which would cripple America economically and spiritually.
Two people were killed in Philadelphia on Sept. 25, pushing the city’s total number of homicide victims this year past 400, a milestone that has only been surpassed once since 2007.
Two men, ages 35 and 28, were shot multiple times in South Philadelphia at about 9:30 p.m., according to CBS Philly, citing the Philadelphia Police Department. Both were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where the younger man died of his injuries and the 35-year-old is in critical condition.
Another shooting that took place about an hour later left a 39-year-old man dead and two people injured, police said.
“I am heartbroken and outraged that we’ve lost over 400 Philadelphians to preventable violence already this year,” Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement released to The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I want all residents to know that our administration takes this crisis very seriously and we’re acting with urgency to reduce violence and save lives.”
Neither of the two Saturday shootings has so far led to an arrest. According to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, just 29 percent of homicides and 15 percent of nonfatal shootings in the city result in arrests.
“We should all be outraged that senseless, preventable violence continues to claim and break lives here in Philadelphia and in communities across the country that are also experiencing alarming increases in gun violence,” Krasner said in a Sept. 26 statement. “We have seen cycles of increased homicides before, and we have more research and data than ever on which to formulate solutions.”
Solutions to the homicide surge start with investment in children, according to Krasner. He said that would include providing all children with “safe, structured learning environments” in buildings free of neurotoxins, regular access to nutritious meals, and reliable after-school options.
As for the criminal justice system, Krasner argued that institutions must be “restructured” to make violence prevention their “true priority.” He said that would mean using forensic technologies to solve shootings with no witnesses or not caught on camera, and “shoring up” training and staffing for homicide and nonfatal shooting investigations.
The news comes as the United States saw a nearly 30 percent increase in homicides in 2020 compared to 2019—the largest single-year increase ever recorded by the FBI.
According to the FBI’s latest Uniform Crime Report (UCR), there were 21,570 homicides in the United States in 2020. The overall violent crime rate, including murder, assault, robbery, and rape, was up by 5.6 percent from the 2019 number, while property crimes continued to decline and dropped by 8 percent from 2019.
The actual numbers are likely to be even higher, considering that just 15,897 of the 18,619 federal and local law enforcement agencies eligible to participate in the UCR program voluntarily submitted their crime data to the FBI last year.
The Democrats’ “Build Back Better” agenda is proof that names can be deceptive.
Investigating the $4.5 trillion plan, the Texas Public Policy Foundation gave crucial economic estimates that reveal the damage that could be done by President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress.
The agenda is made up of two key pieces of legislation: a $3.5 trillion spending bill and a $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
Over the course of ten years, the foundation estimates that 5.3 million full-time jobs would be lost, $1.2 trillion in income would be lost, and the long-run GDP would lose $3.7 trillion.
Terrifying news: A dangerous contagion is sweeping across Washington. It’s a virus that specifically targets victims’ hippocampus, particularly impacting the area of the brain responsible for … basic math. See for yourself! pic.twitter.com/wdj5lbUhvk
When broken down even further, the report explains that median family income could drop by $12,000, and there could be a marginal tax rate increase of 13 percent for some.
As the economy is still in recovery mode following the COVID-19 pandemic, the Democrats’ plan would hinder development in the private sector and end up harming average Americans.
For example, the proposed corporate tax rate increase to 26.5 percent would have a harmful trickle-down effect even if it seems harmless on the surface.
If companies are paying more in taxes, that expense falls onto the consumer, who would see prices increase, and their employees, who would risk having their jobs cut.
That corporate tax rate would make the United States less competitive with other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, because we would have the third-highest rate in the group, according to the Tax Foundation. America’s rate would even eclipse communist China’s.
Regardless, the Biden administration is touting public opinion polls that show a majority of Americans support “Build Back Better.”
I would be willing to bet that few Americans know the implications of passing the agenda because the establishment media has kept its negative effects quiet.
“Poll after poll makes it clear: The majority of Americans overwhelmingly support my Build Back Better Agenda,” the president tweeted Monday. “Let’s get it done and deliver for the American people.”
Poll after poll makes it clear: The majority of Americans overwhelmingly support my Build Back Better Agenda.
Democrats are scrambling to unite their caucus to get both bills past before the fiscal year ends on Thursday while trying to avert a looming government shutdown.
Fauci and Daszak continue their CCP collaborator road show.
nthony Fauci recently spoke to a conference sponsored by Wuhan lab collaborators, EcoHealth Alliance, The National Pulse can reveal.
Despite a preponderance of evidence of EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak’s role in the cover-up of COVID-19’s origins, Fauci addressed the event which also featured Daszak as a speaker.
The National Pulse can also reveal that the Fauci-led National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) sponsored the September 2021 event alongside other federal agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
SPONSORS.
A longtime recipient of grants from Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency, Daszak controversially used the federal funds to pursue collaborative research on bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak, who has hosted Fauci as a featured guest at several EcoHealth Alliance events, also spearheaded the fraudulent narrative that COVID-19 developed in a wet market in his roles on the Lancet COVID-19 committee and World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 origins investigation team.
Daszak was later recused from the Lancet task force due to his conflicts of interests exposed by The National Pulse.
Despite EcoHealth’s Chinese Communist Party collaboration and subsequent cover-up, Fauci appeared at a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) forum, “Toward a Post-Pandemic World,” alongside him. The event occurred September 21st through 24th, concluding one day before Daszak’s entire Lancet COVID task force was disbanded due to conflicts of interest.
A conference agenda seen by The National Pulse reveals that Daszak delivered the event’s welcome and closing addresses.
Similarly, on the final day of the event, Fauci delivered a pre-recorded “visionary statement” on “Pandemic Preparedness: The Biomedical Research Approach.”
AGENDA.
Despite Daszak’s repeated lies about COVID-19, the event seeks to mitigate the “impact of dis- and misinformation” in an effort to “maintain public trust and optimize adherence”;
“The impact of dis- and misinformation and how it can be managed to maintain public trust and optimize adherence to health behavioral guidance in a time of crisis.”
The September event was the complement to a forum convened in March 2021 by NASEM’S Forum on Microbial Threats, where Daszak serves as the Chair.
Sources from within the WHO state that they believe time is of the essence if we are to have any chance of proving the origins of the COVID-19 virus.
Sources from within the World Health Organization state that they believe time is of the essence if the world is to have any chance of getting to the bottom of the origins of the COVID-19 virus.
The WHO is putting together a team of 20 experts together with the stated goal of figuring out the origins of the pandemic. There are concerns that time is running out for an investigation like this, or that it could already be too late.
According to Fox News, a WHO spokesperson said that the team will need “data and access in the country where the first reports were identified,” which is China.
“China still holds all the cards, the WHO lacks power and it’s inconceivable to me that a new committee will be able to negotiate access to China…This is building a beautiful committee with nowhere to go,” Lawrence Gostin, the Director of Faculty for Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global and Health Law, said.
“China is highly incentivized and capable of denying us this information,” Kitchen said. “They’re incentivized to deny us this information because no matter what it is – whether it was a wet market or a biological facility as its origin – it’s embarrassing to the Chinese Communist Party.”
The Biden administration has consistently trusted the World Health Organization and their efforts to investigate the origins of the virus. “The President believes there needs to be an independent investigation, one that’s run by the international community. It’s an international pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world,” said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki in May.
“He believes the Chinese need to do more to put forward data, to be more transparent. And in the second phase of this effort, he’s certainly hopeful that will be the case, and he believes that every theory should be explored through that process but that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions before that data and that information is made available.”
President Trump had pulled out of the World Health Organization in the spring of 2020 after the emergence of the virus, and what his administration believed to be excessive deference by the WHO to Chinese interests.
It was in February 2020 that Biden said “…were I president now, I would not be taking China’s word for it,” saying that he “would insist that China allow our scientists in to make a hard determination of how it started, where it’s from, how far along it is.”
Brandon Schadt, Johnson & Johnson Regional Business Lead: “It’s a kid, you just don’t do that, you know? Not something that’s so unknown in terms of repercussions down the road, you know?”
Schadt: “Kids shouldn’t get a f*cking [COVID] vaccine.”
Schadt: “It’s a kid, it’s a f*cking kid, you know? They shouldn’t have to get a f*cking [COVID] vaccine, you know?”
Schadt: “J&J is like stepping in the best smelling pile of sh*t you could step in.”
Justin Durrant, Johnson & Johnson Scientist: “Don’t get the Johnson & Johnson [COVID vaccine], I didn’t tell you though.”
Durrant: “It wouldn’t make that much of a difference” if children are unvaccinated for COVID.
Durrant: “Inconvenience [the unvaccinated] to the point where it’s like, ‘I might as well just f*cking do it [and take the COVID vaccine],’ you know what I’m saying?”
Durrant: “It’s almost like — you’re almost like a second-grade citizen if you’re not vaccinated…you can’t do anything that a normal citizen can do.”
Durrant: “If you can’t work, I feel like that’s punishment enough…Only way people really act and comply is if it affects their pockets, like if you’re working for a big company and you’re going to lose your job, best believe you’ll be the first one in line [to take the COVID vaccine]…That’s what we’re doing.”
[NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Sept. 27, 2021] Project Veritas released the third video of its COVID vaccine investigative series today exposing two Johnson & Johnson [J&J] officials, who argue children do not need to take the COVID vaccine in part because of the potential long-term side effects.
One of the exposed J&J employees, a scientist by the name of Justin Durrant, laughs about inconveniencing unvaccinated adults if they refuse to comply with mandates being imposed upon them:
Justin Durrant, Johnson & Johnson Scientist:“Inconvenience [the unvaccinated] to the point where it’s like, ‘I might as well just f*cking do it [and take the COVID vaccine],’ you know what I’m saying? Like ‘I can’t go out of state,’ I can’t – ‘my grandma’s in Canada and I can’t visit her,’ you know what I’m saying? You can’t go to France unless you’re vaccinated — you know you’ve just got to keep doing things like that where you’re almost like a second-grade citizen if you’re not vaccinated, but I know that’s awful.”
Veritas Journalist:“You’re almost what?”
Durrant:“Like a second-grade citizen, like you can’t do anything that a normal citizen can do.”
Veritas Journalist:“A second graded citizen?”
Durrant: “Yeah like top grade, like the ones that get it, and the ones that just like — then you can’t do sh*t.”
…
Veritas Journalist:“So then how do we punish [the unvaccinated]?”
Durrant:“I mean if you can’t work, I feel like that’s punishment enough.”
Veritas Journalist:“People what?”
Durrant:“Only way people really act and comply is if it affects their pockets, like if you’re working for a big company and you’re going to lose your job, best believe you’ll be the first one in line [to take the COVID vaccine].”
Veritas Journalist:“Right, so if you’re working for a big company and you’re about to lose your job, you’ll be the first one in line?”
Durrant:“Yeah.”
Veritas Journalist:“That’s so true. That’s smart, that’s what we need to do.”
Durrant:“That’s what we’re doing.”
Durrant said he does not recommend taking his own company’s vaccine. He asked the Veritas journalist to keep that information private.
“Don’t get the Johnson & Johnson [COVID vaccine], I didn’t tell you though,” he said.
Both Durrant and Brandon Schadt, J&J’s Regional Business Lead, said that applying the COVID vaccine on children would not move the needle in the battle against the pandemic.
“It wouldn’t make that much of a difference” if children are unvaccinated for COVID, Durrant said.
“It’s a kid, you just don’t do that, you know? Not something that’s so unknown in terms of repercussions down the road, you know?” Schadt said.
“It’s a kid, it’s a f*cking kid, you know? They shouldn’t have to get a f*cking [COVID] vaccine, you know?”
Schadt compared J&J’s COVID vaccine efficacy to the other pharmaceutical companies.
“J&J is like stepping in the best smelling pile of sh*t you could step in,” he said.
More footage exposing Big Pharma will be released by Project Veritas imminently. To receive these upcoming videos directly into your email inbox, click here.
About Project Veritas
James O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2010 as a non-profit journalism enterprise to continue his undercover reporting work. Today, Project Veritas investigates and exposes corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions to achieve a more ethical and transparent society and to engage in litigation to: protect, defend and expand human and civil rights secured by law, specifically First Amendment rights including promoting the free exchange of ideas in a digital world; combat and defeat censorship of any ideology; promote truthful reporting; and defend freedom of speech and association issues including the right to anonymity. O’Keefe serves as the CEO and Chairman of the Board so that he can continue to lead and teach his fellow journalists, as well as protect and nurture the Project Veritas culture.
Project Veritas is a registered 501(c)3 organization. Project Veritas does not advocate specific resolutions to the issues raised through its investigations. Donate now to support our mission.
Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, a 17-year veteran, risked his career and pension when he posted a scathing rebuke of the senior military leaders who failed US servicemen serving in Afghanistan.
Joe Biden’s incompetence and corruption led to the death of 13 US servicemen and 15 more were critically wounded in a blast by a suicide bomber in Kabul on Thursday.
“I want to say this very strongly. I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders: I demand accountability,” said Scheller.
“I’m not saying we’ve got to be in Afghanistan forever. But I am saying, did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, ‘Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone’? Did anyone do that? And when you didn’t think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, ‘We completely messed this up’?” Scheller added.
“I thought through, if I post this video, what might happen to me — especially if the video picks up traction, if I have the courage to post it,” he said. “But I think what you believe in can only be defined by what you’re willing to risk. If I’m willing to risk my current battalion seat, my retirement, my family’s stability to say some of the things I want to say, I think it gives me some moral high ground to demand the same honesty, integrity, and accountability from my senior leaders.”
Scheller is “currently in pre-trial confinement,” a spokesperson for Training and Education Command said of the officer’s status.
“The time, date, and location of the proceedings have not been determined. Lt. Col. Scheller will be afforded all due process,” the statement continued.
But the elder Scheller defended his son, arguing that he was only asking for “accountability” from the military’s top brass.
“He’s asking for the same accountability that is expected of him and his men,” he said.
“I’ve had Vietnam veterans contacting me applauding him for his courage because they too want to know: Was it all worth it?” he continued. “And by demanding accountability and honesty from his senior leaders, that’s all he was asking. And the way the Marine Corps has dealt with it: They have now put him in jail.”
According to a report from the Washington Times, a man who had been convicted of rape and deported from the U.S. was allowed to board an Afghan evacuation flight and reach the state of Idaho.
Ghader Heydari, a convicted rapist who was deported from the US in 2017, was arrested after catching an Ethiopian Airlines evacuation flight out of Kabul.
According to The Washington Times, Heydari came to the US as a refugee and was even granted a green card in 2000.
Heydari pleaded guilty to rape in Ada County, Idaho, in 2010, and he served more than five years in prison.
Roughly 400 Afghan refugees or more will resettle in Idaho in 2021 according to officials with the International Rescue Committee in Boise.
Over 50,000 Afghans are expected to be admitted to the United States this year under a program called “Operation Allies Welcome.”
The news comes as reports surface describing several attacks committed by the newly arrived Afghan refugees.
A female soldier was recently gang assaulted by several Afghan men brought over during the evacuation. Two other Afghan refugees have been arrested on charges of sexual assaults of minors, and the assault of another woman.
After a short stay at various processing centers, the more than 50,000 refugees will be resettled in states across the country.
According to reports, many of the refugees are being sent to Spokane, WA, Boise ID, Missoula, MT, and parts of Minnesota.
Local officials blame school cancellations on enhanced unemployment benefits
A top House Democrat promised his party’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill would “get kids back in school” just months before a hiring shortage upended two school districts in his community—and local officials say enhanced unemployment benefits are to blame.
At least two school districts within Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney’s (D., N.Y.) 18th Congressional District boundaries have canceled or scaled back in-person classes due to a bus driver shortage, the Times Herald-Record reported in September. The New York School Bus Contractors Association (NYSBCA) attributed the problem in part to President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan,” which Maloney said would “defeat the pandemic” and “get kids back in school.”
“Enhanced federal unemployment benefits and the child tax credit are compounding the problem,” NYSBCA executive director Tammy Mortier told the Times Union in August. “When unemployment runs out in September, we hope to see some of them coming back.”
Maloney, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has acknowledged that such hiring problems could spell trouble for his party in 2022. During a closed-door lunch in late July, Maloney told fellow House Democrats they were on track to lose the midterms thanks in part to “inflation and the hiring shortage affecting low-wage segments of the economy.”
Neither Maloney nor the DCCC returned requests for comment.
Maloney heaped praise on Biden’s stimulus bill before and after Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion piece of legislation. In February, Maloney said the bill would “honor the lives of every single American who has died from this pandemic.” He later called the legislation “a game changer” and said it Would “crush this virus,” “jump-start our economy,” and get America “back to normal.”
Mortier, however, is far from the only local leader to malign the bill’s expanded unemployment benefits and child tax credit payments. Swing-district House Democrats notably broke from Biden on the legislation after U.S. job openings reached a record high in April. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) admitted that the boosted payments were inhibiting business owners from filling vacancies.
“Every single business owner that I know that has reached out to me has talked about this as their number one issue,” Slotkin said in May after a constituent expressed concern over “boosted federal unemployment.” “They want to make money, they want to be open, but they’re having a problem getting people.” Rep. John Garamendi (D., Calif.) echoed her concerns, noting “there’s a lot of discussion among the business community that the unemployment insurance system is keeping people from wanting to go back to work.”
According to the Herald-Record, “many schools” in Maloney’s district are “dealing with bus delays, uncovered routes, a lack of monitors on vehicles for special needs students, [and] adjustments to sports and extra-curricular schedules.” The shortages prompted the Pine Bush Central School District to close for two days. The Newburgh Enlarged City School District, meanwhile, ordered its superintendent to craft a remote-learning option in response to busing issues. Both Pine Bush and Newburgh are located in Maloney’s district.
Neither school district returned requests for comment.
Maloney became DCCC chair in January, pledging to “work every day to … expand our majority.” But his tenure as House Democrats’ campaign chief has been defined by blunders.
In April, Maloney’s staff greenlit $5,000 wire transfers from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) to vulnerable House Democrats, some of whom returned the money over political concerns. Days later, Business Insiderreported Maloney failed to disclose more than $11,000 in stock sales from 2020. And in August, Maloney defied State Department guidelines to travel to France, where he partied maskless at a billionaire’s estate. The DCCC paid $813 for an Air France plane ticket just weeks before the trip.
Ozy Media took donations from Ford Foundation, Laurene Powell Jobs, Charles Koch Institute
The taxpayer-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting and several progressive billionaires have partnered with a digital media company now under FBI investigation for attempting to defraud investors.
Ozy Media is accused of trying to defraud executives from Goldman Sachs earlier this year, the New York Times reported this week. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2018 gave the media company a $500,000 grant to produce a documentary series featuring interviews with liberal celebrities. Ozy has lured in other wealthy investors, including Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Marc Lasry, the hedge fund billionaire whose son is running for Senate in Wisconsin, is Ozy’s board chairman. Lasry organized a $35 million investment round for Ozy in 2019.
Founded in 2013, Ozy bills itself as a “modern media company” with a knack for spotting rising stars in entertainment and politics. According to the Times, Ozy cofounder Samir Rao represented himself as a YouTube executive and touted Ozy’s viewership statistics on the video platform. Rao also hyped the leadership of Ozy’s president Carlos Watson. According to the Times, Ozy has vastly overstated its traffic numbers for years. Google, which owns YouTube, contacted the FBI about Rao’s scheme. Federal agents have contacted Goldman Sachs, the newspaper reported.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting partnered with PBS and the left-leaning Ford Foundation on Ozy’s 12-part documentary series, according to a press release of the partnership. Watson interviewed a number of liberal public figures for the series, including Comedy Central host Trevor Noah, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.), and Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Congressional Republicans have for years called for cutting funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, citing a perceived liberal bias in the organization’s programming.
The Ford Foundation gave Ozy $1.95 million in grants in 2016 and 2017, according to its grants database. The foundation supports a number of left-wing causes, including a journalism center at Howard University that will be led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project. The foundation also awarded a $50,000 grant to Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, a controversial proponent of critical race theory.
The Ford Foundation has received effusive praise from Ozy in the wake of its contributions to the media startup. Earlier this year, Ozy’s Watson hyped Ford Foundation president Darren Walker during an interview for the Carlos Watson Show, which aired on Ozy’s YouTube channel. Watson called Walker “one of the biggest, boldest thinkers in the world.” The Ford Foundation’s earlier funding for Ozy was not disclosed in the 23-minute program.
The Charles Koch Institute, the think tank funded by billionaire libertarian Charles Koch, paid $500,000 to Ozy in 2018 as an independent contractor for media services, according to tax filings.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) accused a leading American pro-Israel lobbying group of acting as a foreign agent.
After Massie voted against funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system last week, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee published an ad attacking him for his stance. “When Israel faced rocket attacks, Thomas Massie voted against Iron Dome,” the ad read.
Massie struck back at AIPAC over the ad; “How is THIS not foreign interference in our elections?” the congressman tweeted on Monday.
AIPAC is a bipartisan American lobbying group headquartered in Washington, D.C., and is not an Israeli government agent. The organization has more than 100,000 members in the United States.
Critics accused Massie of evoking the anti-Semitic “dual loyalty” trope, in which American Jews are cast as holding loyalty to Israel over the United States. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) drew controversy in 2019 for advancing the trope after she bemoaned “the political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country [Israel].”
Massie was the only House Republican to vote against funding the Iron Dome. The congressman said concern over the country’s debt guided his vote.
“My position of ‘no foreign aid’ might sound extreme to some,” Massie said, “but I think it’s extreme to bankrupt our country and put future generations of Americans in hock to our [creditors].”
Massie joined Omar and other Democratic members of the progressive “Squad” in opposing funds for the missile-defense system. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) took to the House floor last week to denounce the measure, calling it a replenishment of “weapons apartheid Israel used in a crisis it manufactured.”
Israel used the Iron Dome system in its May conflict with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to counter thousands of rockets fired by the terrorists in Gaza. The system intercepted 90 percent of rockets fired during the conflict, the Israeli military said, but Hamas rockets still managed to kill 12 civilians in Israel.
Lawmakers say report could be used to target terror group’s funding channels
The Biden administration is withholding from Congress a legally mandated report on Hezbollah’s financial empire, information that lawmakers could use to increase pressure on the Iranian-backed terror group.
Congress ordered the State and Treasury Departments in early 2019 to produce a publicly available report on Hezbollah senior leadership’s funding channels as part of legislation known as the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Amendments Act of 2018. The bill mandated a report be produced 180 days after it was passed, by April 2019. The Trump administration never produced a report and the Biden administration is withholding it too.
Republican lawmakers and congressional sources familiar with the matter say the report has become increasingly critical as the Biden administration considers lifting economic sanctions on Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon as the country grapples with a massive cash crunch. Both the State and Treasury Departments declined to provide the Washington Free Beacon with information about the report or answer questions about why they have failed to comply with the law.
Rep. Pat Fallon (R., Texas), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Free Beacon the report could be used to target Hezbollah’s senior leadership and crack down on their efforts to steal cash and international aid meant for the Lebanese people. This information would also make it harder for the Biden administration to justify rolling back sanctions on Lebanon and providing the country with an economic bailout that could further enrich the terror group.
“I’m not surprised that after botching the retrograde in Afghanistan, the Biden administration is now not complying with reporting requirements stated in the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Amendments Act of 2018,” Fallon said. “Additionally, the possibility that this administration will bailout and lift sanctions on Lebanon is a play straight out of the Neville Chamberlain foreign policy playbook. Hezbollah alone is responsible for Lebanon’s economic ruin.”
As part of that 2018 legislation, Congress mandated a public report on the estimated net worth of Hezbollah’s senior leaders, including Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and his closest associates. The report was also to include information of Hezbollah associates, including those working in Lebanon’s government, which continues to serve the Iranian-backed terror group.
Congressional sources say the Biden administration does not want to disclose the extent of Hezbollah’s financial empire as it considers going along with international plans to provide Lebanon with a cash bailout. The issue has received increased congressional scrutiny amid separate reports the Biden administration is prepared to waive economic sanctions on the Assad regime in Syria to facilitate an energy deal with Lebanon.
Congress decided “the unclassified portion of the report required … shall be made available to the public in precompressed, easily downloadable versions that are made available in all appropriate formats,” according to the legislation.
One senior congressional source who worked on drafting the original legislation told the Free Beacon that the report could help illustrate to the world and the Lebanese people how much money Hezbollah is stealing to fund its terrorism enterprise and stockpiling of weapons.
“Lebanon is collapsing because of Hezbollah’s corruption, that is why this report is so important,” said the source, who was not authorized to speak on record. “It is one of the few reports Congress ever designed on Hezbollah that we required to be publicly available on the internet for the world to see. The world deserves to see how much Hassan Nasrallah and his gang have stolen from their own people. Maybe instead of bailing out Hezbollah and lifting sanctions on the brutal Assad regime, the administration can concentrate more on stopping Hezbollah’s corruption. We shouldn’t reward Hezbollah and their buddy Assad for Hezbollah’s own corruption.”
Congressional Republicans also have been pushing a package of far-reaching new sanctions on Hezbollah that they say would cut off the group’s access to funding. The Hezbollah report’s findings would help lawmakers identify the funding channels that should be shut down.
Woke millionaire Kyrie Irving and other NBA players are stupid conspiracy theorists who literally want all of your family members to die. Rolling Stonereports there is significant opposition among NBA players to the league’s proposal to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine, considered by many to be a “non-starter.”
Irving, whose Instagram feed is filled with homages to Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, has urged Americans to “do your own research”—not as it relates to the COVID-19 vaccine, but rather as to whether the Earth is round or flat. His views on the vaccine, however, can be extrapolated with a high degree of confidence.
For example, Irving has started liking Instagram posts from conspiracy theorists claiming that “secret societies” are using the vaccines to fulfill “a plan of Satan” by implanting black people with microchips connected to a master computer. Similar conspiracies have reportedly spread throughout the NBA.
Irving is a vice president on the executive committee of the NBA players’ union, which held its annual meeting last month to discuss vaccine mandates and other issues ahead of the upcoming season. According to the NBA’s most recent health and safety guidelines, the anti-vaccine players were successful in forcing the league to accept nearly all of their demands.
The league and the players’ union are still negotiating a number of contentious issues, such as “prohibitions on accessing indoor bars, clubs, and lounges.” NBA superstar LeBron James, who has repeatedly refused to discuss his vaccination status, violated the league’s health and safety protocols (but was not punished) earlier this year by attending an indoor tequila party with Drake and other celebs.
Weeks prior to the party, James’s former teammate Dennis Schröder told a German media outlet that “LeBron and I” were the only players for the Los Angeles Lakers yet to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. James has insisted that believing in science (or not) is “a private thing,” despite vowing to use his platform to speak out on “everything that’s going on around this country and around the world,” except for China.
Irving has also refused to comment on his vaccination status, but all evidence suggests he is not. His aunt, Tyki Irving, told Rolling Stone: “There are so many other players outside of him who are opting out, I would like to think they would make a way.”
The NBA may have caved to its anti-vaxx players, but some state and local governments have sought to impose their own vaccine requirements. New York City, where Irving plays for the Brooklyn Nets, will require athletes to show proof of at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose in order to play indoors.
On Monday, the Nets hosted a media day at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Irving, who would have had to present proof of vaccination to attend, wasn’t there. In a virtual interview, he once again refused to discuss his vaccination status. “I like to keep that stuff private,” Irving said. “I’m not able to present there today, but that doesn’t mean that I’m putting any limits on the future of me being able to join the team.”
It remains unknown why Irving, who took a two-week leave of absence to protest the riot at the U.S. Capitol, wants his fellow Americans to die as a result of his reckless behavior. For whatever reason, sanctimonious white liberals were significantly less vocal, if not completely silent, in response to the Rolling Stone report.
MEMPHIS, Tenn.—A Tennessee state senator charged with stealing $600,000 in federal grant money from a health care school she operated has been acquitted on 15 of 20 charges, according to court records.
U.S. District Court Judge Sheryl Lipman filed the order Sunday after lawyers for Sen. Katrina Robinson filed a motion Friday seeking acquittal on all charges, Memphis news outlets reported.
Robinson, 40, a Memphis Democrat elected to the Tennessee General Assembly in 2018, was charged in July 2020 with wire fraud as well as theft and embezzlement involving government programs after the FBI searched the school and her home.
She was accused of stealing federal grant money awarded to The Healthcare Institute, which provides training in the health care field, including nursing assistant jobs in geriatric care.
The school received more than $2.2 million in federal grants from the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The federal grant money was earmarked for student scholarships from 2015 through 2019.
Robinson’s attorneys argued for an acquittal Friday after federal prosecutors rested their case. They argued that prosecutors didn’t prove allegations that Robinson used the federal grant funds on personal expenses.
The trial was expected to continue Tuesday on the five remaining charges, court filings show..
Singer R. Kelly was found guilty by a New York jury on Sept. 27 on all charges in his federal racketeering trial after he was accused by multiple witnesses of grooming and exploiting young women for years.
The 54-year-old, whose real name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, potentially could be sentenced to decades in prison. He was first indicted in July 2019 and pleaded not guilty to the charges in 2020. His trial started on Aug. 18 with testimony from more than 45 witnesses over the span of several weeks.
Kelly was charged with a total of nine counts, including racketeering, with 14 underlying acts that included sexual exploitation of a child, bribery, kidnapping, and sex trafficking charges. He also faced several additional counts of violations under the Mann Act, a sex trafficking law.
The “I Believe I Can Fly” singer also faces federal charges in Chicago, as well as local charges in Illinois and California.
The charges were based on an argument that the entourage of managers and aides who helped the singer meet girls—and keep them quiet—amounted to a criminal enterprise. Several accusers testified during the trial, alleging that Kelly subjected them to abuse when they were underage.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Maria Cruz Melendez said Kelly was a serial abuser who “maintained control over these victims using every trick in the predator handbook,” although the singer’s defense lawyers said the accusers were “stalkers” who were trying to exploit him and peddled “lie after lie” to defame him.
“You made a choice,” Deveraux Cannick, one of Kelly’s lawyers, told one unnamed woman who testified. “You participated of your own will.”
“They’re all working on those paydays,” Cannick said of the accusers, referring to lawsuits against Kelly. “These folks are capitalizing.”
“You can’t blame folks for trying to make a living but that’s totally separate from trying to take away someone’s liberty.”
But in closing arguments, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Geddes stated that Kelly “used lies, manipulation, threats, and physical abuse to dominate his victims” and weaponized his “money and public persona” to hide the crimes.
“Of course we’re disappointed with the verdict. We’re even more disappointed with the prosecution for bringing this case given all the inconsistencies,” Cannick said in a statement after the verdict, the New York Daily News reported. “I don’t think anyone is prepared for an outcome like this when you know the truth.”
Kelly, who never took the stand, is known for numerous hits that earned him 26 Grammy Award nominations over the years while selling millions of albums.
But in 2002, the singer was indicted on 21 counts of child pornography before he was cleared on all counts. Throughout his career, Kelly has been dogged by allegations of abuse and trafficking.
In a 2019 CBS News interview with Gayle King, Kelly emotionally denied all the allegations against him and portrayed it as part of a conspiracy. Some of the accusers, he suggested in the interview, were trying to gain fame.
“Believe me, man! This is not me! They lying on me! They’re lying on me! I’m cool, bro,” he yelled. “I’m cool. I’m good. I’m not afraid because I’m telling the truth. I’m not afraid because I’m telling the truth!”
Shortly before the U.S. presidential election that Joe Biden won, the New York Post published a bombshell story based on emails from Biden’s son, Hunter, that indicated corruption by his father. The October 2020 story, neatly encapsulated by the quote, “ten percent for the big guy,” which the Bidens never denied, was castigated and largely ignored by the left mainstream media, and censored by Twitter. That left censorship might well have led to the election of Biden instead of Donald Trump. Apparently, getting Biden elected was more important to them than his alleged China-linked corruption. Now almost a year later, a Politico writer has finally confirmed the story.
This adds an additional confirmation to the Wall Street Journal’s corroboration and expansion of the Post story, through emails obtained from Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski. “They showed that Hunter was seeking to cash in on his name via a business deal with a Shanghai-based company with ties to the Chinese government and military. One email noted that the deal envisioned ‘10 held by H for the big guy,’ whom Mr. Bobulinski identified as Joe Biden,” according to the Journal editors.
What might Beijing have gotten for its money? In May 2019, Biden was busy denying that China was a threat, against sentiment in both parties.
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man … they can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west.” Biden continued, “They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not, they’re not competition for us.”
Not bad folks? The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) runs the country with an iron fist, to the point of a triple genocide against Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Falun Gong. The CCP has been capturing territory from neighboring governments since the 1930s, including all of China in 1949 and a claim to the entire South China Sea in 2009. Since 2016, the Xi Jinping regime has threatened war against the United States, Australia, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
Some of the 220 Chinese vessels are seen moored at Whitsun Reef, South China Sea, on March 7, 2021. (Philippine Coast Guard/National Task Force-West Philippine Sea via AP)
Even the leftist Washington Post news team, which edited out Biden’s east-west gaff, confessed that it was perplexed about which mountains the presidential hopeful referred to.
Then in February, Biden tried to divert concerns about China’s military competition with the United States, into a fear over infrastructure competition. He apparently did not want to significantly increase military spending to defend against China, so he tried to reframe the competition as one over infrastructure.
While the United States is busy building, say, $2 trillion worth of solar-lighted roads across the nation, with imported Chinese concrete, steel, and silicon, China would be using the money it made from us to build amphibious assault vehicles for an attack on Taiwan, and hundreds of silos for nuclear missiles that could reach the American mainland.
“If we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch,” Biden said of China. “They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”
The money that China was investing in the environment, at the time, was in coal-fired power plants. Was Biden trying to get America to compensate for China’s pollution by building costly solar farms at the expense of the American taxpayer?
Workers install solar panels at the construction site in Huai’an, China, on June 11, 2018. (VCG via Getty Images)
Biden had proposed, during the campaign, a $2 trillion infrastructure package to be spent over four years, including on jobs and clean energy. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which could be biased given their profession, estimated the existence of an “infrastructure gap” in the United States of $2 trillion. They claimed that the economy would lose twice that amount if these funds were not invested.
Be that as it may, the Wall Street Journal was the only mainstream news source that took Hunter’s emails seriously at the time of the election. They wrote of the New York Post’s vindication this month: “A press that was interested in telling the truth about both candidates would have pressed to confirm the Post’s story and examined the emails for themselves. Instead they rose nearly as one to denounce the Post and claim without evidence that the emails might have been Russian disinformation. That was a sorry repeat of the Russia collusion narrative from 2016, which the press flogged for more than two years but we now know was concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign.”
In the same opinion, the Journal’s editors allege that the FBI colluded with Clinton’s campaign in 2016, which is “cause for even more Americans to assume that the U.S. intelligence community is a partisan interest group that can’t be trusted. This is damaging to those institutions and the country.”
The Hill’s John Solomon also argued that the FBI colluded with Democrats during the 2016 election. If true, this should be taken seriously. The FBI must maintain its neutrality between the parties in order to maintain its integrity and legitimacy in the eyes of the American citizen.
However, tendentious arguments to “abolish the FBI” go so far as to be ludicrous. The FBI serves critical counter-intelligence and law enforcement functions that maintain the stability of the world’s most powerful democracy. Such arguments may be taking an extreme position in order to get the attention of political leadership, but they are the height of irresponsibility, and play into the hands of the world’s most powerful dictators, including Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
But neither are Democrats blameless. They fuel such arguments by ignoring the FBI’s lapses, and claiming that evidence of Biden’s China corruption doesn’t matter. They deflect blame by pointing to President Trump’s own alleged transgressions, for example, payments by foreign governments to Trump-branded hospitality businesses.
The truth is that both parties compete so strenuously as to have a legalized corruption problem. To win elections, politicians need money and support, which they can seek from big corporations, government insiders, and powerful dictators, like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
To fix the problem, we need bipartisan electoral reform, which removes the influence of foreign money and powerful interests from election campaigns of either party, including through American intermediaries. We need laws that forbid high government officials from using their office, and the revolving door between government and industry, to enrich themselves and their families.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to explain why prosecutors have dropped a series of cases connected with the Justice Department’s (DOJ) clampdown on Chinese espionage.
In July, federal prosecutors filed motions to dismiss charges against six Chinese researchers who had been accused of hiding their ties to Chinese institutions or the Chinese military. The DOJ said at the time that “recent developments” in those cases had prompted the department to “re-evaluate these prosecutions,” stating that the dismissals were made “in the interest of justice.”
However, other reports have suggested that the decision to drop the charges was due to other reasons, such as the FBI’s failure to properly inform the accused of their rights against self-incrimination, Jordan wrote to Garland in a joint letter (pdf) with Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) dated Sept. 27.
“It is not clear whether the Department dismissed these [charges] due to reported misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or because the Department under your leadership is more invested in pursuing the far-left political goals of the Biden-Harris Administration than in protecting American national security interests,” the letter reads.
“These actions by the Department raise serious concerns about its commitment to confronting the national security threats posed by the People’s Republic of China.”
The letter comes days after the DOJ struck a deal with Huawei Chief Financial officer Meng Wanzhou allowing her to return to China, nearly three years after the executive was arrested in Canada at the request of U.S. prosecutors who had accused Meng of lying to HSBC, causing the bank to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran. The deal, which paved the way for the release of two Canadians held in China, has similarly prompted Republican lawmakers to question the Biden administration’s approach to confronting threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In recent years, the DOJ has, under a project called the “China Initiative,” aggressively pursued cases targeting the CCP’s expansive campaign of economic espionage against the United States. Academics, in particular, for the first time found themselves in the crosshairs over allegedly hiding their funding ties to the Chinese regime.
In 2020, there were at least six prosecutions against alleged undercover Chinese military officers posing as researchers at U.S. universities. But the department moved to drop five of those cases in July.
One of the cases was against Tang Juan, a researcher at the University of California–Davis, who allegedly hid her affiliations with the Chinese military in her visa application. She was arrested in July 2020 after being harbored by the Chinese Consulate in San Franciso for one month, according to prosecutors.
In another dropped case, the researcher, according to prosecutors, admitted under questioning by federal agents that he was instructed by his supervisor, the director of an unnamed military university lab in China, to “observe the layout of the UCSF [University of California–San Franciso] lab and bring back information on how to replicate it in China.”
In the letter, Jordan and Biggs requested the attorney general to provide details by Oct. 11 on why the department decided to drop the cases. The lawmakers also asked for information on the China Initiative, including the project’s staffing and resources and whether the department has any plans to “reform, prioritize, or reinforce its duties and responsibilities.”
“Especially at a time when President Biden’s disastrous foreign policy in Afghanistan has alienated allies and alarmed Americans, our country cannot afford the threat to the United States posed by Chinese espionage,” the letter reads.
DOJ officials didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
An illegal immigrant teenager from Mexico was arrested for allegedly setting wildfires in California, said Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials.
Agents with the CBP’s El Centro Sector apprehended the illegal alien, who was not identified, and accused him of setting fires in the Jacumba Wilderness last week.
When Border Patrol agents responded, “they located an unknown individual in the vicinity of the reported fire, attempting to start another fire,” according to CBP in a news release. “Agents attempted to extinguish the second fire but had little success.”
Then, the Bureau of Land Management provided dispatched an aircraft with firefighting capabilities to stop the wildfire, and the “combined resources and firefighting efforts were able to control the fires” the next day, the agency said.
The accused arsonist was identified as an 18-year-old male Mexican national who was arrested for illegally entering the United States and was transported to the El Centro processing location. The teen was “caught in the act” of trying to start a wildfire, the agency said.
The Bureau of Land Management will now be investigating the wildfires as arson, according to the news release.
“Our environment and natural places are national interests that all Americans hold dear,” Chief Patrol Agent Gregory K. Bovino said in a statement. “I would like to thank our partners at Bureau of Land Management as they work tirelessly to conserve and protect the fragile Jacumba Mountains Wilderness area; the location where this undocumented migrant purposefully set fire to endangered Big Horn Sheep habitat.”
The Jacumba Wilderness, which spans about 31,000 acres and is managed by the bureau, is located in California’s Imperial County, which is located along a remote stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border.
In a release issued earlier this month, Border Patrol said that about 9,728 illegal immigrants with prior criminal convictions have been apprehended in the United States during the fiscal year 2021 to date. That represents a sharp increase over the past three years, while during the fiscal year 2020, only 2,438 illegals with criminal convictions were arrested.
The arrest of the alleged Mexican arsonist comes as the Biden administration faces criticism of how it struggled to contain a surge of Haitians who amassed underneath a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, prompting concerns of the spread of transmissible diseases.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday said that some 12,000 of 17,000 Haitian illegal immigrants were effectively released into the interior U.S. in recent days with court dates.
“Approximately, I think it’s about 10,000 or so, 12,000,” Mayorkas told “Fox News Sunday” when asked how many have already been released.
Former President Donald Trump released a statement on Monday attacking the Biden administration for releasing “17,000 illegal immigrants” from Del Rio, Texas, into America as part of a twin debacle alongside failure in Afghanistan, arguing, “Our Country is being destroyed!”
“All 17,000 illegal immigrants who entered our Country from Haiti and other places unknown have now been released into our Country with no vetting, checking, or even minimal understanding of who they are,” Trump began in his statement posted to Twitter by spokeswoman Liz Harrington.
NEW!
President Donald J. Trump:
“All 17,000 illegal immigrants who entered our Country from Haiti and other places unknown have now been released into our Country with no vetting, checking, or even minimal understanding of who they are. pic.twitter.com/BiqEkdthNa
Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a briefing on Friday that approximately 30,000 mostly Haitian migrants had been encountered in Del Rio since Sept. 9, with only about 2,000 deported to Haiti.
Many were given a notice to appear for an asylum hearing and were released after being removed from a camp under the Del Rio International Bridge that included about 15,000 people at its height.
Trump also criticized the Biden administration for releasing the Haitian migrants without COVID-19 testing or other health checks.
“Some are very sick with extremely contagious diseases, even worse than the China Virus. They are not masked or mandated, but just let free to roam all over our Country and affect what was just a year ago, a great Nation,” he said in the statement.
“Some are very sick with extremely contagious diseases, even worse than the China Virus. They are not masked or mandated, but just let free to roam all over our Country and affect what was just a year ago, a great Nation.
The former president argued that the Biden administration’s open border policies have resulted in America being “humiliated like never before.”
In addition to the border crisis, he also noted President Joe Biden’s “embarrassing” withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“Now we are a Nation humiliated like never before, both with the historically embarrassing ‘withdrawal’ from Afghanistan, and our Border where millions of people are pouring in. Our Country is being destroyed!” Trump said.
“Now we are a Nation humiliated like never before, both with the historically embarrassing “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, and our Border where millions of people are pouring in. Our Country is being destroyed!”
The Biden administration withdrew all U.S. military personnel on Aug. 31, leaving hundreds of Americans behind under the rule of the Taliban.
In addition, the military departure included leaving behind vast amounts of military equipment, providing tremendous resources to arm the Islamic extremist group.
Further, 13 U.S. military personnel were killed during a suicide bombing in August outside the Kabul airport.Should Trump run for president in 2024?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
In response, the Biden administration authorized a drone strike, originally reported to have taken out an Islamic State group leader.
A later report revealed the drone strike accidentally hit an innocent target, killing 10 people, including seven children.
An unknown number of Americans and allies remain in Afghanistan nearly a month after the Biden administration’s military departure.
Surviving in President Joe Biden’s America is getting harder and harder for workers who find themselves falling behind as costs gobble more and more of their paychecks.
As noted by Trading Economics, inflation was at 1.4 percent when former President Donald Trump left office, then spiked rapidly during the first months of the Biden administration.
Although the Biden administration for months rejected claims that its spending was triggering inflation and tried to spin the rise in costs as a transitory blip, even the Federal Reserve now admits the inflation picture will not improve soon, according to KATV-TV.
On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the causes of inflation were “greater and longer-lasting than anticipated.”
The Fed, which in June said inflation for the year might hit 3 percent, adjusted its prediction to 3.7 percent, with a possible mark of 4.2 percent for the year when including rising energy and food costs. The translation for workers is that making more might not mean making enough.
“Some of the gains we had seen for workers in certain categories, the increases looked good, but not if you have 5 percent inflation,” said Jim Butkiewicz, an economist at the University of Delaware.
Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showed that within the 5.3 percent overall increase in costs from a year ago, gasoline prices were up 42 percent, beef prices were up 14 percent, lumber prices were up 10 percent and egg prices were up 10 percent.
One of the factors driving price increases is that wages have increased as employers try to attract help, leading to a spiral in which wages and prices keep rising.
As the spiral continues, the National Association for Business Economists has reduced its forecast for Gross Domestic Product growth, according to CNN.
In May, the group’s economists projected 6.7 percent growth, but that is now down to 5.6 percent.
Growth in the third quarter of the year is now projected at an annualized pace of 4 percent, down from May’s estimate of 6.6 percent.
The group also upped its estimate of the toll inflation would take on workers, projecting consumer prices in the coming fourth quarter of the year will be 5.1 percent above last year’s levels, far above the prediction of 2.8 percent the group made in May.
In a statement, Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said it’s no secret that the White House is to blame for inflation.
“Reckless government spending causes inflation. We’ve seen the disastrous consequences of the Democrats’ radical spending plans in consistently rising inflation month after month. We know Democrats won’t stand up and fight for American families. They only care about getting their liberal wish list, no matter the cost,” he said on Friday.
“There will be a day of reckoning for this, and unfortunately, American families will pay the price if Democrats have their way. It’s time to say enough. Republicans won’t raise the debt ceiling. We won’t cut Democrats another blank check and allow them to keep hurting families with insane spending and raging inflation. We won’t let the total lack of accountability in Congress continue.”
Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana said the $3.5 trillion spending bill Democrats want to pass would only make inflation worse, according to Fox Business.
“President Biden’s agenda has dramatically increased inflation, and they’re trying to pour gasoline on that fire,” Scalise said.
“[Democrats are] seeing how families have tied the increase in spending in Washington to higher inflation, and if you add trillions in new spending as well as trillions in new taxes, you’re only going to make inflation worse.”
If our federal authorities are going to construct a prison-worthy surveillance state, can they at least buy American while they do it?
According to a report from Axios, federal law enforcement agencies — including the FBI and the Secret Service — have purchased drones from a Chinese company that was flagged by the Department of Defense as a national security threat.
The drones were purchased from Da Jiang Innovations, a company based in Shenzhen, China, that’s the biggest consumer drone manufacturer in the world.
“DJI makes an array of consumer products that are tremendously popular, including the Phantom and Mavic drone series, as well as the Osmo image-stabilization handle,” Axios reported.
“While the products are used for personal and commercial purposes, they also require the user to download proprietary DJI software, and to fly using mapping databases that have the potential to be monitored remotely.”
The FBI bought 19 of the drones for nearly $60,000 on July 20 and on July 26, the Secret Service purchased eight of the drones for over $12,000, according to records included in the Axios account. And yet, on July 23, the Pentagon warned in a news release that DJI’s drones “pose potential threats to national security.”
“Existing DOD policy and practices associated with the use of these systems by U.S. government entities and forces working with U.S. military services remain unchanged contrary to any written reports not approved for release by the DOD,” a release read.
“A recent report indicated that certain models of DJI systems had been found to be approved for procurement and operations for US government departments and agencies. This report was inaccurate and uncoordinated, and its unauthorized release is currently under review by the department.”
It was unclear what specific report the release was citing.Should the federal government be using Chinese drones?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Just over four years ago, in an August 2017 report, as Axios noted, the Department of Homeland Security said it had “moderate confidence” that DJI drones were “providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.”
In 2019, according to a Wall Street Journal report Axios cited, the Interior Department grounded its entire drone fleet over national security concerns related to Chinese manufacturing.
However, Axios reported that efforts to rid government agencies of the drones have stalled due to red tape, partially due to what the outlet called the “cost and complexity of replacing the systems.”
The Secret Service said the drones will “supplement the agency’s existing fleet of small unmanned aircraft and improved [sic] mission support through the use of the most up-to-date equipment nd [sic] software,” according to purchasing records cited by Axios.
The FBI, in its purchasing records, said DJI’s Phantom 4 Pro was “the only commercially available consumer [drone] to combine all [its required] capabilities at an acceptable cost.”
A DJI representative told Axios there’s nothing to be concerned about and the company’s data won’t be transmitted to Chinese authorities.
“Claims that somehow DJI products are transmitting customer data back to China, or to DJI, or anywhere they’re not supposed to be … are just false,” DJI spokesman Adam Lisberg told the outlet. “No one has ever found a deliberate attempt to steal data, or any of the other fantasies promoted by some of our critics. It simply isn’t true.”
There’s also another potential explanation: That the FBI is securing the drones to study Chinese data mining and devise methods to counteract hacking attempts.
“If the federal government is purchasing DJI drones for counter-drone or other security research — fine,” American Enterprise Institute defense and cybersecurity expert Klon Kitchen told Axios via email.
“But otherwise, in a world where you have plenty of alternatives — including some U.S. alternatives that are very good — why would federal agencies assume the inherent risks of Chinese-made systems?”
Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio was similarly unimpressed, according to Axios.
“DJI’s cyber security vulnerabilities are well documented,” Rubio wrote in an email to the outlet.
“Given everything we know about the Chinese Communist Party and its companies, there is absolutely no excuse for any government agency to use DJI drones, or any other drones manufactured in countries identified as national security threats.”
And that’s the critical problem here — if these agencies aren’t using these drones as vehicles to study China’s data-collection efforts and hacking, this is handing Beijing the keys to our national security apparatus.
The fact that these off-the-shelf drones are in the fleets of our federal government is worrying enough as it is.
The Interior Department has already stopped using DJI drones, after all. If the FBI and Secret Service are using these drones, it’d be impossible to ensure complete sequestration between our systems and Chinese software.
We’d also be hard-pressed to stop them from seeing and hearing exactly what our federal law enforcement sees and hears — which is, by its very nature, sensitive data. No matter what role the unmanned vehicles are playing in either agency’s mission, I’m guessing it won’t just involve a dad playing with his son in the backyard, teaching him how to use the drone.
Say what you will about the necessity of our surveillance state and how invasive (or not) it is. If it’s going to exist and it’s going to be peeking into our backyards and up our streets with panopticon-like omniprescence, it would help if China isn’t seeing what the federal government sees, too.
Former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan blasted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a “Fox & Friends First” interview on Monday, arguing that Mahorkas is misleading Americans regarding the border crisis.
On Sunday, Mayorkas faced questions from “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace about the mass of Haitian migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border at Del Rio, Texas, that have dominated the latest headlines about the Biden administration’s illegal immigration debacle.
And one particular aspect of Mayorkas’ answers stood out to him: That many of the migrants are in “immigration court proceedings.”
“When you say 12,000 are in immigration proceedings, they are not,” Homan said.
“That’s what the secretary leads you to believe, but many of them were released on notice to report. On the notice to report, it clearly says at the bottom of the form, ‘You are not in immigration proceedings. You will not be detained. ICE will not detain you for humanitarian reasons. You are released.’
So, they’re only going to be in immigration proceedings if they chose to voluntarily show up and turn themselves in, which most won’t. So the secretary is misleading on what he told Chris Wallace,” he added.
Homan also disputed claims that many Haitian migrants had returned to Mexico.
According to The Washington Times, Mayorkas’ DHS estimated on Friday that 8,000 Haitans had gone voluntarily back to Mexico.
“[Mayorkas] realizes they went one or two miles down the line and came into the United States because they surged so many resources to Del Rio that they left 224 miles of border unguarded,” Homan said.
“So those 8,000 didn’t just go to Mexico and they’re going to live there. They went down to cross illegally. Those a8,000 are now in the United States, you know, living here illegally,” he added.
The Biden administration has reported about 2,000 Haitians have been deported.
Approximately 30,000 Haitian migrants crossed at Del Rio in September, according to NPR.
Earlier in September, Sen. Ted Cruz visited Del Rio when more than 10,000 migrants were awaiting processingm and called the situation a “manmade disaster” due to President Joe Biden’s political decisions.
“Joe Biden’s policies are encouraging this staggering rush of illegal aliens,” the senator said on Twitter.
Joe Biden’s policies are encouraging this staggering rush of illegal aliens:
208,887 encountered in August including 103,129 single adults (up 134% from 2020), 18,847 unaccompanied children (up 507% from 2020), & 86,487 individuals in a family unit (up 3,086% from 2020).
“208,887 encountered in August including 103,129 single adults (up 134% from 2020), 18,847 unaccompanied children (up 507% from 2020), & 86,487 individuals in a family unit (up 3,086% from 2020),” Cruz added.
Kimberly Jenkins, a critical care nurse at Banner Health Center in Phoenix, Arizona, knows she could be out of a job soon—unless she complies with her employer’s COVID-19 vaccine program by Nov 1.
That’s just not going to happen, said Jenkins, who is pinning her hopes on a religious exemption to the shot.
“If it’s denied, I won’t be working for Banner any more,” she told The Epoch Times.
Dressed in hospital scrubs, Jenkins and several other nurses in hospital garb stood outside Arizona’s Senate Building on Sept. 24 to protest against the mandatory vaccines.
“I don’t care how I get a paycheck [but] I have to take a step back for my own mental health,” said Jenkins, holding a sign with a drawing of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.
“It Appears To Be Mutating Into A Dictatorship,” the sign’s caption read.
Across the street from the Arizona Capitol, more than 1,000 people had gathered at a medical freedom rally sponsored by more than a dozen anti-COVID-19 vaccine organizations.
Among the sponsors were the Arizona Coalition for Medical Freedom, America’s Frontline Doctors, America’s Healthcare Workers for Medical Freedom, the Patriot Party of Arizona, and Arizona for Medical Freedom.
Jenkins, 41, shrugged when asked what she will do for work if and when she gets fired from her job. “Other organizations are hiring in Arizona. The biggest problem is staff, and having to deal with the fact that we will lose a lot of nurses” over the vaccine mandates, Jenkins said.
“So, you now have new graduates working in high-security areas [in place of seasoned nurses]. We don’t have the staff to train new nurses.”
Since the Biden Administration announced vaccine mandates for federal employees and companies with 100 employees or more, health-care facilities across the country have suffered losses.
Earlier this month, Novant Health Inc. announced 375 staffers had been suspended for their noncompliance with the company’s COVID-19 program.
Meanwhile, Lewis County General Hospital in Lowville, New York, this month shut down its maternity ward when dozens of employees chose to quit their jobs rather than take the injection.
And at Indiana University Health, 125 staffers resigned this month after they refused to get vaccinated.
While Jenkins said she isn’t sure how many nursing jobs are on the chopping block at her facility, “it’s enough to make a huge dent to do proper care.”
She said the standard of care in ICUs is three skilled nurses per patient. Now, it’s common to see two nurses for every critical care patient, she said.
“I don’t like it when science is ignored,” said another unvaccinated nurse at the Sep. 24 rally, who works at Common Spirit Health in Phoenix. “I’ve seen adverse [side effects] happen to co-workers of mine,” after they received the vaccine.
“The vaccine was completely rushed through. It was being rushed through even when we were in a pandemic state,” she told The Epoch Times.
The irony, she said, is that during the pandemic in 2020 “we were heroes. Now, we’re zeroes.” Regardless, she said, “I’m not quitting. I’m not worried about their timeline.”
Another registered nurse at the rally who also works at Common Spirit Health told The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, “I wouldn’t say I’m fearful [about losing my job]. I would say it’s wrong what they’re doing.”
President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday unveiled a new rule aimed at protecting an Obama-era program that has shielded over 600,000 illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children.
The proposed rule (pdf) would “preserve and fortify” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, by trying to respond to a court ruling that the program was illegally created.
Then-President Barack Obama ordered the deferred action policy through an executive order but Congress never provided the Executive Branch authorization to allow illegal immigrants to stay in the country, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, a George W. Bush nominee, ruled in July.
Hanen halted the acceptance of any new applications made under the program and remanded to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the memorandum that actually established the program for further consideration. That memo, filed in 2012 by Obama’s attorney general, Janet Napolitano, did not under proper notice and comment rulemaking, which violated federal law, according to the judge.
The new DHS proposal, which will formally be published on Tuesday, is a response to the ruling. It includes many of the same provisions as Napolitano’s memo, including eligibility requirements like living continuously in the United States since June 15, 200.
It would also make additions to the program—among them, letting applicants apply for deferred action from deportation without submitting forms for employment authorization.
People will have 60 days from Tuesday to comment on the proposed rule.
“The Biden-Harris administration continues to take action to protect dreamers and recognize their contributions to this country,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. “This notice of proposed rulemaking is an important step to achieve that goal. However, only Congress can provide permanent protection. I support the inclusion of immigration reform in the reconciliation bill and urge Congress to act swiftly to provide dreamers the legal status they need and deserve.”
Immigration activists refer to the illegal immigrants brought to the United States when they were children as dreamers.
In response to the rule, NumbersUSA, a group that seeks to educate policymakers and other Americans on immigration legislation and policies and pushes for lower immigration levels, said on Twitter, “DACA is illegal and unconstitutional.”
Congress has considered but failed to pass legislation for years that would address the approximately 616,030 DACA recipients in the country. Democrats wanted to include a pathway to citizenship in their budget, which they’re seeking to ram through using a reconciliation process, but the Senate’s top rules expert said last week it could not be part of the process.
Let Muslim terrorists at Gitmo pray, but not American residents. “Democracy” [US Patriot]
A Colorado web site designer is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to accept her appeal of a lower court decision depriving her of the right to conduct her business according to her religious beliefs.
Attorneys for Lorie Smith, the owner and sole employee of 303 Creative, submitted a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court on Sept. 24, asking the justices to overturn a decision of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver that held Colorado officials can “force [Lorie] to create custom websites that [she] otherwise would not.”
The ADF has won 13 Supreme Court victories in recent years, including Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in 2018, which upheld the right of another Colorado artist, Jack Phillips, to practice his faith in his business of making wedding cakes.
The writ described Smith as “a website designer who creates original, online content consistent with her faith. She plans to (1) design wedding websites promoting her understanding of marriage, and (2) post a statement explaining that she can only speak messages consistent with her faith.
“But the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) requires her to create custom websites celebrating same-sex marriage and prohibits her statement—even though Colorado stipulates that she ‘work[s] with all people regardless of … sexual orientation.’ App.53a, 184a,” the writ continued.
“The Tenth Circuit applied strict scrutiny and astonishingly concluded that the government may, based on content and viewpoint, force Lorie to convey messages that violate her religious beliefs and restrict her from explaining her faith.”
The writ said two key questions are raised by the case, including “whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent, contrary to the artist’s sincerely held religious beliefs, violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment,” and “whether a public-accommodation law that authorizes secular but not religious exemptions is generally applicable under Smith, and if so, whether this Court should overrule Smith.”
Smith refers to the 1990 Supreme Court decision of Employment Division v. Smith that, according to the writ, Colorado officials cited as supporting the CADA, even though that state law “creates a ‘gerrymander’ where secular artists can decline to speak but religious artists cannot, meaning the government can compel its approved messages.”
Lorie Smith’s case challenges Aubrey Elenis, Director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division (CCRD), as well as each of the individual members, including Sergio Raudel Cordova, Charles Garcia, Richard Lee Lewis Jr., Ajay Menon, Cherylin Peniston, and Meremy Ross. Also challenged is Colorado’s Attorney General, Phil Weiser.
If the high court accepts the case, it would hear oral arguments next spring and could issue a decision as early as July 2022.
Given the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, the Lorie Smith case could be viewed as a straight-forward opportunity for the Justices to remind lower courts and state officials that the First Amendment guarantees every individual American the right to practice and express their religion, or lack thereof, according to ADF General Counsel Kristen Waggoner.
“The government shouldn’t weaponize the law to force a web designer to speak messages that violate her beliefs. This case involves quintessential free speech and artistic freedom, which the 10th Circuit dangerously cast aside,” said Waggoner, who argued before the 10th Circuit on behalf of Smith.
“Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips has been harassed for years, and now Lorie Smith is being told that she must speak views she opposes and can’t post about her beliefs on her own business website. The 10th Circuit’s reasoning turns free-speech protections on their head by saying that the more ‘unique’ speech is, the more the government can compel it. That kind of dangerous, unconstitutional reasoning is why we have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take Lorie’s case.”
Waggoner was referring to actions taken by the CCRD against Phillips in the aftermath of the Masterpiece decision, including new charges of CADA violations that effectively forced him to retrace the same costly litigation path that resulted in the landmark 2018 decision.
The High Court could also be inclined to accept the Smith case because, according to the writ, the 10th Circuit’s decision “cements a three-way split over conflicts between free speech and laws like CADA, pitting the Tenth Circuit and several state courts of last resort against the Eighth and Eleventh Circuits and the Arizona Supreme Court.
“At the same time, the opinion contradicts this Court’s free-speech precedents, which have repeatedly declared as anathemas to the First Amendment all government attempts to compel speech, to regulate speech based on content, and to stamp out disfavored speech.”
Director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division Elenis has been emailed asking for comment.
A U.S. military veteran who was charged in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol breach has died.
John Anderson, 61, died at a hospital on Sept. 21 in Jacksonville, Florida, according to family members and his lawyer. His cause of death has not been disclosed.
“My sweet, handsome husband went home to be with the Lord,” Anderson’s wife said, according to his lawyer, Marina Medvin.
Anderson’s wife is asking for prayers and privacy as she mourns the loss.
Anderson, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, was charged with seven counts, including civil disorder, interfering with law enforcement, and stealing government property.
Anderson was arrested in late February in St. Augustine and released pending trial about a week later.
Authorities said he was part of the crowd that tried entering the Capitol through a tunnel, clashing with officers in the process. But his lawyers said he did nothing wrong and was trapped by people pressing behind him.
Screenshots from surveillance video in the tunnel show Anderson was struck with a chemical substance let loose by a male in the crowd. Police officers later sprayed pepper spray, which also hit Anderson. He was assisted by officers through the tunnel after several minutes. Anderson said the officers saved his life.
John Anderson is seen outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (FBI)John Anderson is seen being pulled by police officers after being pepper sprayed near the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Courtesy of Marina Medvin)
But he also protested against the charges, which his lawyer says were not backed by evidence.
“John Anderson never hurt or touched a single police officer. The video evidence proves this,” Medvin said in an emailed statement. “John Anderson died an innocent man wrongfully accused.”
Before Anderson’s death, he and Medvin were preparing to reject a plea offer.
The government is preparing to dismiss the case against Anderson, according to his lawyer. That’s common practice, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said in a separate case this month.
Lamberth cited United States v. Pogue as he granted a motion for abatement from the government and dismissed the indictment against Joseph Barnes, a Texas resident, who died after getting into a vehicular accident. Barnes had also been charged in the Jan. 6 breach.
The government prosecutor leading prosecution against Anderson did not respond to a request for comment.
The court was informed Friday of Anderson’s death. Parties were ordered to file a joint status report by Nov. 8.
Texas Attorney General Paxton announced on Sept. 20 that he is leading a coalition of 10 states in filing an amicus brief with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Florida’s law that attempts to regulate censorship on Big Tech social media platforms.
Paxton signed on behalf of Texas, joining the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina who have also filled an amicus brief in support of Florida’s law.
“The regulation of big tech censorship will inevitably suppress the ideas and beliefs of millions of Americans,” Paxton said in a statement. “I will defend the First Amendment and ensure that conservative voices have the right to be heard. Big Tech does not have the authority to police the expressions of people whose political viewpoint they simply disagree with.”
Florida’s SB 7072 law allows Floridians to take legal action against Big Tech platforms if they censor a user’s content without consistent standards.
The new bill also prevents Big Tech from banning Floridian political candidates. Social media companies that deplatform candidates for statewide office will be fined $250,000 a day. The fine is $25,000 per day when deplatforming candidates for other offices.
Big Tech companies that violate the law can be brought to trial for monetary damage, and the state’s attorney general can litigate companies that don’t comply with the law under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law in May but District Judge Robert Hinkle in June granted a temporary injunction preventing the governor from implementing the law after two Internet trade groups—NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association— filed a lawsuit.
The trade groups argued the law may violate the First Amendment by compelling social media platforms to host offensive speech they otherwise would not and by interfering with their editorial policies.
The coalition in its amicus brief said the district court’s First Amendment analysis is “riddled with errors.”
“It veered off course from the outset by concluding that S.B. 7072 regulates speech, when that law instead regulates conduct that is unprotected by the First Amendment: social media platforms’ arbitrary application of their content moderation policies,” the coalition wrote.
Earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas’s House Bill 20—similar to Florida’s law—which protects Texans from wrongful censorship on social media platforms.
House Bill 20 prevents social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, from banning users based on their political beliefs. The attorney general would also be able to take legal action on behalf of Texas residents that were banned or blocked by a platform due to such discrimination.
“We will always defend the freedom of speech in Texas,” Abbott said. “Social media websites have become our modern-day public square. They are a place for healthy public debate where information should be able to flow freely—but there is a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas. That is wrong, and we will not allow it in Texas. I thank Senator Bryan Hughes, Representative Briscoe Cain, and the Texas Legislature for ensuring that House Bill 20 reached my desk during the second special session.”
The Epoch Times sits down with Elbridge A. Colby, author of the new book “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” to discuss America’s strategy for defeating China in a war over Taiwan.
China aims to replace the United States as the dominant power in Asia, and it is rapidly acquiring the means to achieve this goal. As a result, Beijing will soon be able to make a bid for regional military dominance, starting with an invasion of Taiwan. Absent an effective American response, Beijing could certainly achieve its aims.
This is the premise of a watershed new book, “The Strategy of Denial: America’s Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” by Elbridge A. Colby, the top Pentagon official who authored America’s 2018 National Security Strategy (NSS).
The 2018 NSS explicitly moved America away from terrorism and towards China and great power competition, a complex shift in mindset for many in the U.S. defence establishment.
“I absolutely experienced a lot of institutional pushbacks on it,” Colby told The Epoch Times in an interview. “And we’re still not there, there has been an enormous amount of foot-dragging, but there’s been a lot of progress too.”
Colby noted that it was not widely appreciated that China posed the greatest threat to U.S. security interests.
“That is one of the reasons I wrote this book, not just as a statement, but to lay out in a pretty clear and rigorous way why China is the primary threat and how do we deal with it in a military context,” he said.
The stakes could not be higher. Asia comprises 40 percent of global GDP and around two-thirds of global growth. Chinese dominance over Asia would, Colby observes in his book, give Beijing the power “to exclude the United States from reasonably free trade and access to these wealthy regions.”
Not only would China be a true peer competitor of the United States, but its advantageous position would also gravely weaken America. Eventually, China could consolidate to “project violent force elsewhere, including into North America.”
Colby clearly has no time in his book to discuss America’s destiny as the most powerful nation. While others continue to speak of the U.S. strategic objectives, Colby cuts to the chase stating clearly: “Denying China hegemony over Asia is the cardinal objective of U.S. grand strategy.”
Colby is also candid in his writing that America’s unipolar moment has passed.
The United States does not have the power to do everything everywhere and must make hard choices about aligning means to the ends. The sacrifices America must make in other parts of the world are real, and Colby does not shy away from these, calling them out by name.
Colby notes that the United States has made far-reaching pledges in Europe and the Middle East without appreciating China’s rise as a potential great power. Many fear that failing to follow through on these commitments will fatally weaken Washington’s credibility with allies in Asia.
Yet Colby presents a compelling counter-argument—that means and actions speak far louder than stated intentions. If the United States doubles down on rhetoric without responding to changing realities, then this undermines rather than supports America’s credibility.
This “differentiated credibility,” as Colby persuasively puts it, means jettisoning pledges that are of lesser importance, so that America may focus on its core interest in Asia. He argues it is this willingness to focus effort that will really determine whether Asian partners have confidence in their American ally.
Colby analysis of America’s comparative strengths and weaknesses, the optimal pathways available to each actor, combined with his ruthless honesty, is what makes this book a must-read for anyone with an interest in strategy or the post-pandemic world.
It’s also what gives his framework for U.S. success its own “credibility”—that to prevent Beijing’s dominance in Asia, an anti-hegemonic coalition must be able and willing to defeat China in a war over Taiwan. By carefully walking the reader through all the alternatives, the consequences for failure, and the means required for success, Colby demonstrates the inescapable truth through rationalised reason.
Colby observes that ordinary Americans seem to have a far greater appreciation for the true threat China poses than the political and foreign policy elite in Washington.
Asked by The Epoch Times why he thinks that is, he explains that the speed of China’s rise has escaped an enormous number of people, especially outside the economic sphere.
“In the military sphere, there hasn’t obviously been a major war so it hasn’t been put to the test, so lagging like this is not uncommon,” he said. “It doesn’t make it excusable or good, but it isn’t uncommon.”
Colby notes that those in the Midwest understand the China challenge in a more visceral and real way than others.
“I think we still are failing to appreciate the magnitude the China challenge,” he said
The framework Colby lays down for defeating China is one he knows, from first-hand experience in the Pentagon, will help policy-makers make sensible resource decisions.
“If you are to make intelligent decisions, you have to have a framework, and that framework should allow your military, your defence establishment, to understand what’s most important, how you deal with it and in what way,” he said. “My aspiration is to make it clear on what basis we need to focus our effort and what kind of military strategy we need…How many F35s do we have, how many ships we have in the navy, what kinds of things we do with different allies etcetera.”
Defeating China in a war over Taiwan requires robust preparation, and not only by the United States.
“Japan and Taiwan both need to dramatically increase defence spending,” says Colby, pointing to the fact Japan only spends 1 percent of GDP on defence.
“Japan needs to at least double its defence spending at a minimum. Taiwan needs to invest in the right kind of stuff to resist an invasion and be resilient to a blockade.”
Many American foreign policy experts speak in overtly ideological or universalist language, and the contrast with Colby’s realist tone is striking, yet he considers this a matter of approach.
“I am motivated by American values and my motivation is to preserve and promote them,” Colby tells The Epoch Times. “I think the way to do that is in a realistic fashion.”
Recently the world commemorated 20 years since 9/11. Reading through the book one cannot escape the sense that this level of analysis–rigorous, methodical, and serious-minded–has been sorely missing from American strategic policy during these past two decades.
Asked to rate American performance since 2001 Colby is scornful: “Quite poorly, honestly. Very poorly, especially until about 5 years ago.”
“We allowed China to more than steal a march. I mean, we allowed China to grow without being challenged, and not just grow but get closer to a position where it could bid for regional dominance, so we really need to do better,” Colby said.
While America experienced political paralysis over the so-called Russian influence at home, those in Asia have witnessed China’s expansionist ambition with increasing unease. Beijing is exerting dominance over the South China Sea, cracking down in Hong Kong, and deploying ever more numerous and advanced capabilities for seizing Taiwan.
Missing has been any plan from America to thwart Beijing’s goal of dominance.
Colby’s book arrests this danger in a direct way, laying down a believable framework for victory that will galvanise support, concentrate action and help decision-makers make correct choices in a hegemonic rivalry that will play out for decades to come.
Elbridge A. Colby’s “The Strategy for Denial: America’s Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict” is a must-read for every person who is concerned about China’s growing threat and how the world—and more importantly, America—should counter it.
Despite a federal judge’s ruling that the Deferred Action in Childhood Arrivals program was outside the law, the Biden administration is moving forward with its plan to make it permanent.
According to a report Monday in The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Homeland Security will publish a proposed regulation that will allow the illegal immigrants protected by DACA — known as “Dreamers” — to continue to be part of the program.
The proposal is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday.
DACA allows illegal immigrants who entered the country as children to remain, as long as they meet certain conditions. The program was started through an executive order of then-President Barack Obama.
In July, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the program could not accept new applications but could continue for those already enrolled until the case eventually makes its way through the court system, according to CNN.
The description of the rule says, “On January 20, 2021, President Biden signed a Presidential Memorandum, Preserving and Fortifying Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), requiring DHS, in consultation with the Attorney General, to take all appropriate action to preserve and fortify DACA, consistent with applicable law. Consistent with the Presidential Memorandum, DHS intends to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking to preserve and fortify DACA.”
The regulation was crafted, in part, to address concerns of the judge who put the brakes on DACA that there was no sound administrative rationale for the program Obama created with the stroke of a pen in 2012.Do you think DACA should continue?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Legislative efforts to make DACA part of federal law have failed. Last week, an attempt by Senate Democrats to create a path to citizenship for DACA recipients through the $3.5 trillion spending bill they hope to pass was dashed when the Senate’s parliamentarian said the proposal could not be part of the massive package.
After the DACA regulation is published, there will be a 60-day comment period for the public to weigh in.
As noted in the document, mail comments are not being accepted.
“You may submit comments on the entirety of this proposed rulemaking package, identified by DHS Docket No. 2021-0006, through the Federal eRulemaking Portal at https://www.regulations.gov. Follow the website instructions for submitting comments,” the document says.
As envisaged by the new rule, illegal immigrants covered by DACA would pay $495 for a two-year work permit and could come and go from the country as they pleased.
DACA recipients not interested in working could stay if they pay an $85 fee, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The DHS analysis of its DACA proposal says costs to local communities from the illegal immigrants it protects are “unlikely to be significant, and it may well have a positive net effect,” according to the report.
The rule says that “it is not generally the best use of those limited resources to remove productive young people to countries where they may not have lived since early childhood and whose languages they may not even speak.
“It recognizes that, as a general matter, DACA recipients, who came to this country many years ago as children, lacked the intent to violate the law, have not been convicted of any serious crimes, and remain valued members of our communities.
“It reflects the conclusion that, while they are in the United States, they should have access to a process that, operating on a case-by-case basis, may allow them to work to support themselves and their families, and to contribute to our economy in multiple ways.
“This proposed rule also accounts for the momentous decisions DACA recipients have made in ordering their lives in reliance on and as a result of this policy, and it seeks to continue the benefits that have accrued to DACA recipients, their families, their communities, and to the Department itself that have been made possible by the policy.”
The rule estimates that through this regulation, the DACA population will grow, reaching 956,863 by 2031.
A game that was purportedly being promoted by the Google Play Store featured a scene in players could undress a sleeping stepsister, according to video posted to the social media site TikTok.
The New York Post reported last week that the game, “LUV,” has been deleted from the store. However, before that, a parent from a now-deleted TikTok account documented the ad for the creepy game.
Ads for the deleted app would apparently appear to users playing other games. So-called “free” games typically display advertisements in between levels as a source of revenue.
Florida filmmaker Michael McWhorter saw the original video and made his own TikTok video complaining about “LUV.”
“Hey google, why is this in your play store?” the caption on McWhorter’s video reads.
The video advertisement features an illustration of a pink-haired woman in scanty clothing sleeping on a bed. A young man with a sexually suggestive T-shirt is shown saying, “My stepsister passed out after the party.”
The player, who’s supposed to be controlling the stepbrother, is given a choice: “Don’t disturb her” or “Help her undress.”
In the advertisement, if the player takes her top off and wakes her up, at first she’s scandalized — but then she bites her lower lip and smiles.
“The goal is to get her naked without waking her, but the message is, ‘if you do wake her, don’t worry, she’s into it,’” McWhorter said in his video. “Google, how the f*** is this game available in your app store?”Are Google’s values out of sync with America?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“And then being advertised on other games — a game that my son could easily be playing,” he continued. “What do you think this teaches young preteen boys about how women should be valued and treated?”
According to U.K. Metro, the app held a 17+ “Mature” rating on the Google Play Store. However, the article also noted it was being advertised in other “free-to-play” games, which are popular among children since they don’t cost money to install and play.
WARNING: The following video contains language that some viewers will find offensive.
Here’s McWhorter’s video, which features footage from “LUV”:
The game has since been removed, although it’s unclear how it made it onto the store in the first place.
Consider Google’s Inappropriate Content policy, which bars “apps that contain or promote sexual content or profanity, including pornography, or any content or services intended to be sexually gratifying.”
“We don’t allow apps or app content that appear to promote a sexual act in exchange for compensation,” it continues. “Content that contains nudity may be allowed if the primary purpose is educational, documentary, scientific or artistic, and is not gratuitous.”
I’m operating under the assumption that “LUV” did not get a pass for artistic merit. The game, which boasted “addictive gameplay” and an “interactive story” according to Metro, in what the newspaper described as “a badly written blurb inviting players to get involved,” has since been deleted.
The app’s developer, Afivad Limited, didn’t have any other listed titles in the store. However, it’s worth noting that the Metro article contained a screenshot of a host of other soft-porn titles featuring similar themes in the Google Play Store. Whether any of those featured incest or sexual assault was unclear, as was whether they were being advertised on free-to-play titles.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Google reportedly blocked the pro-life organization Live Action from running advertisements on its platform — while allowing pro-abortion organizations to run their ads without similar restrictions:
.@Google has also banned the promotion of our Baby Olivia video, a medically accurate (& accredited by OBGYNs), lifelike animation of human development in the womb, citing “unreliable claims.”
Google has also censored Project Veritas on their YouTube platform — in a video where the controversial group was exposing Google’s censorship of conservative sources.
But a game that advertised itself on free-to-play apps that children tend to use with a clip featuring incestuous sexual abuse? That, somehow, just happened to have slipped through the cracks.
Parents need to monitor what their kids do online, granted, and not just because of apps like “LUV.”
However, is it too much to hope for that one of big tech’s biggest companies couldn’t monitor games that advertise through its store for odious content like this?
For a guy with the support of billionaires, millionaires, China, Mainstream Media, and Social Media, his numbers are WAY worse than Trump ever [US Patriot]
President Joe Biden’s approval rating has hit a new record low at just 40 percent, according to a poll released on Monday by Rasmussen Reports.
The poll of likely U.S. voters also revealed 58 percent of likely voters disapprove of the president’s job performance.
Among those, 50 percent selected “Strongly Disapproved.”
In contrast, only 21 percent selected “Strongly Approve.”
The current approval rating places him below former President Donald Trump, who was at 43 percent approval at this point in his presidency, according to Rasmussen.
The daily poll has followed Biden’s approval rating since his first day in office.
He ranked as high as 55 percent approval on May 26. Since then, his approval has dropped by 15 percent.
According to a Rasmussen Reports Twitter post Monday, the majority of Americans oppose Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill, his plan to raise the debt ceiling and his pandemic restrictions.
Coming Up Today:@JoeBiden daily presidential job approval % is – now at a new record low.
– Majority Oppose $3.5 Trillion Spending Bill – Majority Against Raising Debt Ceiling – Majority Now Believe Pandemic A Trojan Horse For Permanent Socialism pic.twitter.com/XB2r7zFGQF
The Democratic spending bill will be a central focus this week as Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeks a House vote on Thursday. The California Democrat has claimed to have the votes to pass the bill, but some House members remain uncertain.
Biden’s recently announced vaccine mandates for federal workers and companies with 100 employees or more has also led to widespread frustration with many Americans. Several states have opposed the measure through letters and across social media.
Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem have both vowed to sue the Biden administration over the issue.
Daily tracking results for the daily poll are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis, according to Rasmussen Reports.
The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.
A poll from Fox News last week showed Biden’s approval rating with independent voters had experienced a strong drop. Since January, his approval rating plummeted 24 points.
WATCH: Joe Biden’s approval rating collapses 24 points among independent voters. pic.twitter.com/a8YxNMmyQJ
The Taliban could gain control of nuclear weapons as a result of their lightning conquest of Afghanistan and the Biden administration’s hurried abandonment of the county, according to former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
“The Taliban in control of Afghanistan threatens the possibility of terrorists taking control in Pakistan too. … If the whole country gets taken over by terrorists, that means maybe 150 nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists,” Bolton told host John Catsimatidis a WABC-AM interview on Thursday.
Bolton elaborated upon the threat in an Op-Ed in The Washington Post last month in which he said that Pakistan could become an extremist country in the aftermath of the fall of Afghanistan.
“For decades, Islamabad has recklessly pursued nuclear weapons and aided Islamist terrorism — threats that U.S. policymakers have consistently underestimated or mishandled. With Kabul’s fall, the time for neglect or equivocation is over,” he wrote.
The Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan elevates the risk that Pakistani extremists will increase influence, or threaten to seize control. Pakistan could have well over 100 nuclear weapons, which in the hands of an extremist regime is an unthinkable threat. https://t.co/kueRiCB6zH
“The Taliban’s takeover next door immediately poses the sharply higher risk that Pakistani extremists will increase their already sizable influence in Islamabad, threatening at some point to seize full control,” he wrote.
Bolton said the nuclear threat could be even worse than that from Iran.
“While Iran still aspires only to nuclear weapons, Pakistan already has dozens, perhaps more than 150, according to public sources,” the former national security advisor wrote.Has Joe Biden set back hopes for world peace?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“Such weapons in the hands of an extremist Pakistan would dramatically imperil India, raising tensions in the region to unprecedented levels, especially given China’s central role in Islamabad’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs,” he said. “Moreover, the prospect that Pakistan could slip individual warheads to terrorist groups to detonate anywhere in the world would make a new 9/11 incomparably more deadly.”
Bolton said the United States must ensure Pakistan does not become either an ally or a client of the Taliban.
“Acknowledging the enormous uncertainty, given Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities, the United States must now come down hard on Islamabad if it continues supporting the Taliban and other terrorists,” he wrote.
America must also avert a potential disaster, Bolton said.
“Most important, we must devote maximum attention to Pakistan’s nuclear stockpiles and weapons-production facilities. If a future terrorist regime in Islamabad (or even today’s government or like-minded successors) appears ready to transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, we should take preventive action,” he wrote.
Bolton, who was national security advisor to former President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019, said during his Sunday interview that President Joe Biden embarrassed himself and the nation with his bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Allies are “wondering if he has a grip on his own administration’s foreign policy,” Bolton said in the Aug. 23 Op-Ed.
He said China is more of a threat than the Biden administration seems to understand.
“China, which already has a lot of influence in Pakistan, is going to increase its influence and put more pressure on India. This is a big development in that part of the world,” Bolton wrote.
“I think the United States must look at China and the threat it poses across the board. They’ve been stealing our intellectual property for decades … They discriminate against foreign companies and investors. They manipulate the World Trade Organization. They are building up their military… And they are very aggressive politically,” he said.
“The United States needs to come to grips with this threat … and needs to be prepared for a long struggle across the full spectrum of potential power — economic, political and military. …
Should companies that alienate customers and hamstring themselves in the name of wokeness be held to account by investors in court? Sen. Marco Rubio thinks so — and he introduced a bill that would do just that.
The Mind Your Own Business Act, unveiled by the Florida Republican on Thursday, would force corporate directors to testify in court that they were acting in their company’s best interest when taking political actions if sued by shareholders.
“Patriotic Americans who love their country and the opportunity it provides should be able to fight back against the growing tyranny of the woke elites running corporate America,” Rubio said in a statement.
“These are often nationless corporations that amass fortunes divorced from the fate of our great country while pushing socially destructive, far left policies like boycotts and cancel crusades at home,” the sentator said.
“My Mind Your Own Business Act would put the burden of proof on corporations to show that their far left actions were in shareholders’ best interests, and make corporate directors and officers personally liable if they can’t prove it.”
The bill would require a company listed on public stock exchanges to provide large shareholders “certain privileges with respect to claims for breach of fiduciary duty” if that corporation “takes an action on a primarily non-pecuniary basis in response to State law, boycotts a class of persons or industry on a primarily non-pecuniary basis, or uses primarily non-pecuniary public reasoning for an action.”
It’s not difficult to identify examples of all three.
In the first class — actions taken in response to state law — you have the anaphylactic reaction of corporate America to a relatively moderate voter integrity law in Georgia, a reaction that included moving the MLB All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver.
In the second class, you have banks that won’t deal with gun manufacturers.Do you support Rubio’s bill?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
In the third class, pretty much any self-sabotaging corporate posturing that surfs on the crest of a wokeness wave would qualify.
As Rubio pointed out in an Op-Ed for Fox Business published Thursday, shareholders theoretically should be able to sue these companies for damages already — but the cards are stacked against them.
“One solution is to empower shareholders to push back,” the senator wrote. “If you own a stock, invest in a mutual fund, have a company-sponsored 401k, then you are a shareholder and are owed legal duties by the corporations you invest in. The truth is that corporate executives keep you in the dark about your right to hold them accountable for how they spend your money.
“Under current law, a shareholder has the right to sue corporate officers when they take actions like these that are motivated by their politics rather than your financial interests. But corporations have stacked the deck to make these lawsuits hopeless. They tweak provisions in their bylaws to protect themselves as they leave America behind.”
Thus, Rubio said, his legislation would “provide a clear path forward for shareholders when they sue in response to these actions” by putting the burden of proof on companies.
“No more legal tricks that shield these corporate executives from accountability. If they really believe that being woke is good for business, they should have to say so — and prove it — under oath in court.”
The tactic would be an interesting one. For instance, imagine the corporate officers of Nike going to court to justify their 2019 decision to nix a shoe with the Betsy Ross flag on the side — reportedly at the behest of Colin Kaepernick, a Nike endorser who reached out to the company to complain that the flag had offensive historical connections.
Nike’s fealty to Kaepernick has mostly been forgotten by the former NFL quarterback and his allies, who’ve moved onward and upward. For conservatives, however, the affair still sticks in their craw. Was it a good pecuniary choice for Nike? More importantly, did executives believe it was?
The senator’s proposal was applauded by the Free Enterprise Project, a conservative shareholder activist group.
“We heartily endorse Senator Rubio’s efforts,” said FEP director Scott Shepherd, according to a news release. “This is an important first step toward reining in the most aggressively politicized American corporations.”
“Increasing numbers of corporate executives have indulged their own personal policy preferences at company – shareholder – expense, taking controversial, inflammatory and oft-times discriminatory and illegal positions on behalf of their companies,” Shepherd added.
“All of this has to stop. The left and the right should be able to agree that no one wins if corporate executives are permitted to abandon their obligations to shareholders in order to act as unelected, unappointed policy czars. Senator Rubio’s legislation should sound as a fire bell in the night to those executives.”
This has no chance of passing in this Congress, given that Democrats are in control of both chambers and corporate wokeness is a virtue in their books.
However, if and when the GOP is back in control of things, the Mind Your Own Business Act could force companies to make a tough choice: position themselves to mollify the left or create value for shareholders.
Washington, D.C. — Last night the U.S. House of Representatives voted 316-113, including 135 Republicans, to approve H.R. 4350, the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), that requires young women to register with the Selective Service for a potential military draft. Democrats blocked House floor consideration of proposals to strike the provision from the bill. Action moves to the Senate where a similar provision reportedly was adopted by the Democrat-led committee in July.
“The House has capitulated to the Democrat’s radical social agenda for our military and forced our daughters to sign up for the draft. Shame on them. There is no justification for reversing established military policy that protects young women from gambling their lives on a Biden-declared national emergency.
“Concerned Women for America rejects the destructive lie that women’s equality means being the same as men and the left’s bankrupt ideology that erases the dignity and status of women entirely.
“We will not accept the ‘go along to get along’ attitude of elected leaders willing to sacrifice common sense and tie the hands of our military with costly mandates for social experiments in our armed forces.
“We will continue to reject cheap calls for ‘equality’ at the expense of young women’s lives and critical national security priorities.
“We call on the Senate to reject this reckless crusade to draft our daughters.”
While you were distracted with the Arizona Audit, Congress (including 135 Republicans) the House of Representatives just passed a new Red Flag Gun Confiscation law.
How did they do it?
With the help of 135 Republicans joining with the Democrats to pass something so clearly unconstitutional.
A provision in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act would allow military courts to issue protective orders that include “Red Flag” gun confiscation, according to the more than 1,300-page bill.
In the legislation, those beholden to the United States Code of Military Justice could be issued a “military court protective order” by a military judge or magistrate, which would make “possessing, receiving, or otherwise accessing a firearm” illegal.
“A military court protective order issued on an ex parte basis shall restrain a person from possessing, receiving, or otherwise accessing a firearm; and a military court protective order issued after the person to be subject to the order has received notice and opportunity to be heard on the order, shall restrain such person from possessing, receiving, or otherwise accessing a firearm in accordance with section 922 of title 18,” SEC. 529 of H.R. 4350 states.
Additionally, military court protective orders issued on an emergency basis are exempted from providing the recipient with the standard “right to due process.” Instead, “notice and opportunity to be heard” must only be provided after an order was already issued.
“EMERGENCY ORDERS.—A protective order on an emergency basis may be issued on an ex parte basis under such rules and limitations as the President shall prescribe,” the section continues. “In the case of ex parte orders, notice and opportunity to be heard and to present evidence must be provided within a reasonable time not to exceed 30 calendar days after the date on which the order is issued, sufficient to protect the respondent’s due process rights.”
Gun Owners of America (GOA), a pro-Second Amendment gun rights advocacy group, warned the military gun confiscation orders could provide lawmakers with a precedent to extend the rule to the general population.
“Like the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent, allowing this provision to remain in a bill pertaining to the military will eventually work its way into legislation applying to the rest of the population,” GOA wrote. “That’s why we need to raise our voices in unison against these gun confiscation orders.”
Dan Crenshaw, Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz and 132 other House Republicans voted with the Democrats to pass federal red flag gun laws. Why even bother having a Republican Party when they just vote with the Democrats anyway?
Madison Cawthorn appeared to panic when word got out he was one of the traitors….
He recorded this video in his car to do damage control:
Cawthorn hits the panic button tonight, firing off a video from his car. He has been getting called a traitor all day after voting for the “red flag” gun bill. “I have not betrayed anybody in the 2nd Amendment community. I will always have your back. I’m armed every single day.” pic.twitter.com/91yUw5GFGW
What do I know, but perhaps instead of relying on the Senate to do your job, maybe you and your 134 RINO buddies should have just fucking voted NO and sent it back to be deleted before it would get your vote.
I mean, I’m no “Congressman” or anything, but that’s what I’d do.
You piece of shit RINOS.
Even the ones we thought were good are selling us out.
Are people aware of what happens when someone triggers a red flag law?
They send armed police to your house. Armed police who have been told you are armed with a firearm and present a risk to yourself and others. And they attempt to retrieve your guns.
One hundred and thirty-five House Republicans have voted in favor of legislation that includes red flag gun confiscation provisions. “A provision in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act would allow military courts to issue protective orders that include “Red Flag” gun confiscation.”
In the legislation, those beholden to the United States Code of Military Justice could be issued a “military court protective order” by a military judge or magistrate, which would make “possessing, receiving, or otherwise accessing a firearm” illegal.
You might say, well, that’s just people in the military. You mean people who swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all threats, foreign and domestic. Why would a Government want to disarm them, I wonder?
Having trained them to be efficient at war and most if not all forms of combat before any real leap toward a lasting despotism of the elite, it might not be a bad idea to deprive these potential irritants of their firearms. But not just them.
Gun Owners of America (GOA), a pro-Second Amendment gun rights advocacy group, warned the military gun confiscation orders could provide lawmakers with a precedent to extend the rule to the general population.
“Like the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent, allowing this provision to remain in a bill pertaining to the military will eventually work its way into legislation applying to the rest of the population,” GOA wrote. “That’s why we need to raise our voices in unison against these gun confiscation orders.”
Yes, it would set a precedent, and yes, the gun-grabbers would try to expand it at the earliest opportunity. They are not even shy about that. Their candidates for president run on it these days. So, you might also wonder, why would 135 Republicans vote for this? Folks like Dan Crenshaw, Matt Gaetz,
They either didn’t know it was in there, or they did, neither of which is acceptable.
This is a nationwide grant to confiscate firearms without concern for due process or property rights and an incremental assault on second, fourth, and fifth amendment rights.
From the moment of passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, Democrats from high tax states began to whine that the capping of the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) at $10,000 was unfair and unwarranted. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have been insistent that wealthy taxpayers are entitled to an unlimited federal tax deduction for high taxes these wealthy individuals pay in their home states.
The conversation regarding the appropriateness of an unlimited SALT deduction has continued unabated and is an item of controversy as Congress is discussing both the $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion “budget” proposal.
Apparently missing from this conversation are legislative actions that have already taken place in high tax states that will allow individuals with non-corporate business income to achieve unlimited SALT deductions beginning in their 2021 federal income tax returns. These already completed legislative actions will not cost the individual states passing such legislation a penny.
Legislation passed in 2021 in high tax states allowing unlimited SALT deduction on business income will likely cost the federal government as much as (a reasonable guess) $35 billion to $45 billion in 2021 and $175 billion to $220 billion over the next five years. The legislation would leave only employees and those with interest and dividend income limited to a $10,000 SALT deduction.
The often-published estimate of the cost of eliminating the $10,000 SALT cap for 2021 is $88.7 billion. This often-repeated estimate was made by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in December 2019 before any states passed legislation to allow individuals with business interests to deduct their SALT without limitation. All of this legislative action took place in 2021, more than a year after the CBO published its estimate of the cost of restoration of the SALT deduction as $88.7 billion. This $88.7 billion estimate for the cost of a restoration of an unlimited SALT is obsolete.
As the Trump administration wound down, in November 2020, the Treasury issued a notice stating that if a state taxed a business with more than one owner directly rather than through the owner’s individual tax return, the state taxes applicable to the business would be deductible against the income of the business without limitation. Over the next 10 months, legislatures (mostly Democratic legislatures in high tax states) trying to help their wealthiest residents avoid the $10,000 limitation for SALT gave them the opportunity to pay their state taxes applicable from their businesses through their businesses. This results in full deductibility on their individual federal tax returns. While costing the Treasury billions, these legislative actions did not cost these individual states one penny. In California, the legislation passed unanimously.
Like tax shelter salesmen of yesteryear, the state legislatures have referred to these new opportunities for more than single owner entities as “work-arounds.” The mere change in where an individual’s tax payment is mailed will reduce the federal tax on the individual. The combined impact of these states passing such legislation for their wealthy residents could be considered as the largest tax shelter program in the history of the United States.
There has been little, if any, mention of these state legislative actions that could cost the Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars over the next five years.
It appears unlikely that this loss of funds to the Treasury, which is already in place, is being considered in concert with the infrastructure and budget proposals. It’s sad, but possible, that a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of federal tax revenues is of no interest in Congress.
The president and Congress each have choices with respect to both the unlimited SALT deduction and the recent legislative actions in high tax states. The president could direct the Treasury to withdraw Revenue Notice 2020-75, which resulted in the high tax states’ legislation and direct the IRS to challenge any individual taxpayer who deducts SALT beyond $10,000 regardless of whether the state taxes were paid through their businesses to state taxing authorities. Congress could include in either the infrastructure bill or the budget language to codify that the state taxes paid by individual businesses is limited to the $10,000 cap. Either of these actions would restore the $10,000 cap on SALT deductions.
With state legislative changes and what will probably be very aggressive use of the individual state legislation, the remaining number of individuals impacted by the SALT limitation will be composed almost solely of exceptionally highly paid employees. And this has the taint of being grossly unfair.
Congress could restore the unlimited SALT deduction. With existing state law, it would appear to be terribly unfair that individuals owning businesses can avoid the SALT limitation while employees would not be entitled to this opportunity. Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors will earn $46 million in 2022. He will be limited to a $10,000 SALT deduction for his roughly $5.5 million of SALT. A hedge fund partner also making $46 million would be entitled to a $5.5 million SALT deduction, reducing his federal taxes by about $2.2 million relative to Curry. How can this be the goal of federal law?
Congress could restore the unlimited SALT deduction and increase tax rates to reflect this increase in SALT deductions for wealthy taxpayers. Note again, state legislatures have already passed legislation that will cost the Treasury in the neighborhood of $175 billion to $220 billion. If this is ignored, the deficit will increase by this amount.
Or Congress could ignore the issue and allow business owners a tax break while punishing high income employees, many of whom are high-profile athletes.
Evidence seized by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents in a warrantless vehicle search near the international border with Canada cannot be used in state prosecutions, a divided Vermont Supreme Court ruled on Sept. 24.
Vermont’s high court rebuked the CBP.
Article 11 of the Vermont Constitution, which “protects individuals from unreasonable searches or seizures ‘by any officer or messenger,’” guarantees “individuals the right to privacy in their vehicles and to containers within those vehicles,” Justice William D. Cohen wrote for the court in the 3–2 decision.
Justice Karen Carroll authored the dissenting opinion, which Justice Harold Eaton Jr. joined. They held that the court’s majority opinion conflicted with case law from Vermont and other jurisdictions.
Defendants Phillip Walker-Brazie and Brandi-Lena Butterfield were in a car on Aug. 12, 2018, driving to their home in Richford, Vermont, when a border patrol officer pulled the vehicle over in a remote area about 2 miles from the U.S.–Canada border, which is used to smuggle people and drugs. Such officers conducting roving patrols near the border are authorized by federal law to carry out warrantless searches, Cohen wrote in the court opinion.
The officer smelled a strong odor of marijuana coming from the car and thought the occupants seemed nervous. The defendants denied the officer permission to search the vehicle, but other border patrol agents subsequently searched the car. They discovered and seized marijuana and a bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The feds gave the evidence to the Vermont State Police, and the defendants were charged with drug possession in Orleans County in Vermont state court.
The defendants argued that this federal search authority isn’t consistent with Article 11 of the Vermont Constitution. That provision would have required a Vermont police officer to secure a warrant before searching the car without their consent.
“The search of defendants’ car was an unreasonable intrusion into this privacy interest, and we have previously determined that the appropriate remedy for such violation is exclusion of the evidence that was gathered. … The intrusion into defendants’ privacy was not somehow lessened because the search was conducted by a federal agent,” the court opinion states.
Excluding such evidence from state proceedings is essential, the opinion states, because “allowing the State to use evidence gathered in violation of the Vermont Constitution simply because it was gathered by federal law enforcement officers might implicitly encourage federal officers to engage in searches that Vermont officers cannot, so that Vermont officers will reciprocate by passing along information regarding immigration violations.”
Jay Diaz, general counsel of the ACLU Foundation of Vermont, which represented the defendants, hailed the court decision in a statement.
“This critically important ruling means that local police and prosecutors cannot use [the] Border Patrol to do an end run around Vermont’s Constitution. … The strong privacy and dignity protections embedded in our state constitution are a source of state pride and the Court’s decision reaffirms and expands those rights,” Diaz said.
Attorney General T. J. Donovan, a Democrat who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the defendants, said in a statement: “I applaud the Court’s decision.
“The Vermont Constitution protects Vermonters regardless of federal government involvement.”
At the end of his magisterial book “How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower,” Adrian Goldsworthy compares the fate of imperial Rome with contemporary America.
The dominance of a civilization, he notes, depends not only on resources and military prowess but also on “culture,” that hard-to-define yet palpable mixture of confidence, savoir-faire, and commitment to foundational principles beyond the calculus of individual profit or aggrandizement.
Beginning in the third century, Goldsworthy writes, Rome began to turn away from that cultural compact and decline wove itself into the sinews of Roman society.
“The rot,” Goldsworth observes, “began at the top, and in time a similar attitude pervaded the entire government and army high command.”
I predict that future historians, seeking to understand the decline of the United States, will settle on the annus horribilis of 2021 as the terminus a quo.
Immersed in the moment, it is often hard to disentangle the main story from the cacophony and chatter of mere events.
But can anyone who is not Jen Psaki contemplate America’s leadership and not discern the rot at the top?
Goldsworthy mentions the army high command. Take a look at the American high command, beginning with SecDef Lloyd “stand down” Austin and Mark “White Rage” Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A lot of ink has been spilled trying to assess them both, their surrender to identity politics and to the corrosive sentimentality of political correctness.
General Milley’s treacherous effort to circumvent the chain of command and pretend that America’s military answered first of all to him, not the President, has attracted some measure of the obloquy it deserves, but he continues on in his position instead of being courtmartialed.
I doubt that he will be able to remain for long in the army—public sentiment against him is strong and growing—but I also doubt that he will be disciplined.
The rot that he himself embodies is too widespread to require it.
Indeed, “rot at the top” describes our situation to a T.
At the pinnacle we have an erratic practitioner of glossolalia whom everyone, friend and foe alike, understands is well on the road to senility.
Then cast your eye down the line of succession: Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, President pro tempore of the Senate Patrick Leahy, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellin, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
A depressing cavalcade, isn’t it?
But the rot is not confined to political figures.
What Robert Frost called “the slow smokeless burning of decay” has installed itself in the heart of many of our most cherished institutions.
I already mentioned the military. What about our intelligence and crime fighting institutions?
It must be dismantled, and not just the leadership “but the whole organization and everyone in it.”
With every passing week, its role in concocting and disseminating the whole “Russia Collusion” narrative against Donald Trump becomes more obvious and more disgusting.
And note well that its activities on that front are not done and over with.
Christopher Wray, the Director of the Bureau, is assiduously pursuing the successor to the Russia Collusion Narrative: the Jan. 6 insurrection hoax, according to which American citizens exercising their Constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech are branded as “domestic extremists” and hunted down.
The closer you look at that institution, the worse it looks.
Even the mild mannered Holman Jenkins, writing in The Wall Street Journal, argues that the Bureau “should be scrapped and something new built to replace it.”
And what about other institutions, higher education, for example? It speaks volumes, I think, that Harvard’s new chaplain, Greg Epstein, is a self-professed atheist.
Reflecting on the experience of Rome, Adrian Goldsworthy notes that when “governments or agencies forget what they are really for, then decline will occur.”
Moreover, he writes, “bureaucracies are stubborn” and “tend to expand on their own and develop their own agendas.”
The rot that was likely yesterday becomes inexorable tomorrow.
Can the trend be reversed? Maybe. But Goldsworthy is right. “If the trend is to be reversed, then this process needs to start at the very top.”
What do you suppose the prospects of that are?
Perhaps it is an illustration of Franz Kafka’s mordant observation that “there is hope, but not for us.”
BOISE, Idaho—The U.S. Department of Defense is taking input on its plan to build an advanced mobile nuclear microreactor prototype at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho.
The department began a 45-day comment period on Friday with the release of a draft environmental impact study evaluating alternatives for building and operating the microreactor that could produce 1 to 5 megawatts of power. The department’s energy needs are expected to increase, it said.
“A safe, small, transportable nuclear reactor would address this growing demand with a resilient, carbon-free energy source that would not add to the DoD’s fuel needs, while supporting mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments,” the Defense Department said.
The draft environmental impact statement cites President Joe Biden’s Jan. 27 executive order prioritizing climate change considerations in national security as another reason for pursuing microreactors. The draft document said alternative energy sources such as wind and solar were problematic because they are limited by location, weather, and available land area, and would require redundant power supplies.
The department said it uses 30 terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons of fuel per day. Powering bases using diesel generators strains operations and planning, the department said, and need is expected to grow during a transition to an electrical, non-tactical vehicle fleet. Thirty terawatt-hours is more energy than many small countries use in a year.
The department in the 314-page draft environmental impact statement said it wants to reduce reliance on local electric grids, which are highly vulnerable to prolonged outages from natural disasters, cyberattacks, domestic terrorism, and failure from lack of maintenance.
The department also said new technologies such as drones and radar systems increase energy demands.
But critics say such microreactors could become targets themselves, including during transportation. Edwin Lyman, director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit, said he questioned using microreactors at military bases either at home or abroad.
“In my view, these reactors could cause more logistical problems and risks to troops and property than they would solve problems,” he said. “And unless the Army is willing to spend what it would take to make them safe for use, especially in potential combat situations or foreign operating bases, then I think it’s probably unwise to deploy nuclear reactors in theaters of war without providing the protection they would need.”
He said the reactors would likely be vulnerable during transport.
“There is always going to be a way that an adversary can damage a nuclear reactor and cause dispersal of its nuclear content,” he said.
The Idaho National Laboratory is on the U.S. Department of Energy’s 890-square-mile site in high desert sagebrush steppe, about 50 miles west of Idaho Falls. All prototype reactor testing would take place on the Energy Department site.
The lab is considered the nation’s leading nuclear research lab, and has multiple facilities to aid in building and testing the microreactor.
The Defense Department said a final environmental impact statement and decision about how or whether to move forward is expected in early 2022.
If approved, preparing testing sites at the Idaho National Lab and then building and testing of the microreactor would take about three years.
Two mobile microreactor designs are being considered, but the department said detailed descriptions are unavailable as both are in early stages of development. The department said both designs are high-temperature gas-cooled reactors using enriched uranium for fuel.
The type of enriched uranium to be used can withstand high temperatures, “allowing for a reactor design that relies primarily on simple passive features and inherent physics to ensure safety,” the draft environmental impact statement states.
Building the mobile reactor and fuel fabrication would be done outside Idaho, and then shipped to the Idaho National Laboratory where the final assembly, fuel loading and a demonstration of the reactor’s ability to operate would occur.
That demonstration would include startup testing, moving the reactor to a new site, and testing at the second location. The second location would mimic a real-world situation by testing the reactor’s ability to respond to energy demands.
The department said the microreactor would be able to produce power within three days of delivery and can be safely removed in as few as seven days.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he would hire any Border Patrol agent fired by the Biden administration after several top White House officials said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would investigate images of agents on horseback blocking Haitian illegal immigrants from entering the United States.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said his agency would probe claims that the agents whipped Haitian aliens with the horse’s reins, despite Border Patrol union officials and the Getty photographer who captured the images saying they didn’t whip anyone.
Those agents, Abbott said, “wouldn’t have been in that situation had the Biden administration enforced the immigration laws.”
If President Joe Biden “takes any action against them whatsoever—I have worked side by side with those Border Patrol agents—I want them to know something,” Abbott said. “If they are [at] risk of losing their job by a president who is abandoning his duty to secure the border, you have a job in the state of Texas. I will hire you to help Texas secure our border.”
During a news conference on Sept. 24, Mayorkas dedicated a significant amount of time answering questions about the images of agents on horseback, while White House press secretary Jen Psaki previously said that horseback patrols would be suspended. The agents were responded to a surge of illegal immigrants from Haiti who had amassed in Del Rio, Texas, and camped underneath a bridge before DHS moved them elsewhere.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection mounted officers attempt to contain migrants as they cross the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, into Del Rio, Texas, Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021. (Felix Marquez/AP Photo)
“I promise you, those people will pay,” Biden told reporters at the White House hours before Mayorkas held his press conference. “There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous. It’s wrong.”
In describing the scene near a river crossing area in Del Rio, Getty photographer Paul Ratje said that Haitian men were running and “trying to go around the horses.”
“I’ve never seen them whip anyone,” he told KTSM, referring to the agents. “He was swinging it, but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
Brandon Judd, an official with a Border Patrol agent union, told The Epoch Times in an interview last week that the agents “did not use those reins in any way, shape, or form to try to strike anybody.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has received significant criticism from progressive and pro-immigration activists, who claim that DHS’s plan to deport some illegal immigrants back to Haiti violates U.S. protocols on refugees. However, Republicans and local elected officials who represent municipalities along the Texas border have said the Biden administration’s messaging and policies are confusing and are triggering the surge in illegal immigration.
Mayorkas, during an interview with Fox News on Sunday, confirmed that more than 12,000 Haitian illegal immigrants who have been moved from the bridge area were relocated to other parts of the United States for processing.
Dozens of Massachusetts state troopers have submitted their resignations ahead of a deadline to comply with the state’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccination mandate.
“Many of these troopers are going to be returning to their previous municipal police departments within the state that allow for regular testing and masks,” State Police Association of Massachusetts President Michael Cherven said in a statement. “To date, dozens of troopers have already submitted their resignation paperwork.
“Throughout COVID, we have been on the front lines protecting the citizens of Massachusetts and beyond,” he said. “Simply put, all we are asking for are the same basic accommodations that countless other departments have provided to their first responders, and to treat a COVID-related illness as a line of duty injury.”
The action comes as a Massachusetts Superior Court judge rejected the union’s request to delay the vaccine mandate, which goes into effect on Oct. 17. Exemptions are granted, under an order issued by the governor’s office, to those seeking religious or medical exemptions to the vaccine.
“We are disappointed in the judge’s ruling; however, we respect her decision,” Cherven said. “It is unfortunate that [Gov. Charlie Baker] and his team have chosen to mandate one of the most stringent vaccine mandates in the country with no reasonable alternatives.”
The State Police Association of Massachusetts recently filed a lawsuit saying the Oct. 17 deadline would cause troopers “irreparable harm” and sought more time to “negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment.” They also had sought to have troopers who are not vaccinated instead submit to regular COVID-19 testing and wearing a mask on the job.
But the judge, Suffolk County Superior Court Associate Justice Jackie Cowin, said that delaying the vaccine mandate wouldn’t serve the public’s interest.
“The public interest is, unquestionably, best served by stopping the spread of the virus, in order to protect people from becoming ill, ensure adequate supply of medical services, and curtail the emergence of new, deadlier variants of the virus,” according to her ruling.
At the federal level, the Biden administration earlier this month issued an order mandating that all federal workers and contractors, including law enforcement personnel, get a COVID-19 vaccine. Earlier, the federal government stipulated that federal employees and contractors who didn’t get the shot would have to instead wear masks, socially distance, and undergo routine testing.
A few dozen federal employees, including U.S. Secret Service members, have filed lawsuits against the Biden administration over the mandate. Some argued that a prior COVID-19 infection should preclude them from receiving the vaccine, while others said that mandatory vaccines would violate their religious freedom.
Gov. Baker’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii said President Joe Biden was “absolutely wrong” to condemn Border Patrol agents without waiting for the facts.
Gabbard was interviewed Saturday by Fox News host Jesse Watters on the show “Watters’ World.”
Last week, a photo of a Border Patrol agent on horseback showed the agent using what appeared to be a whip as Haitian illegal immigrants accumulated near the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas.
However photographer Paul Ratje said that what many eyes thought was a whip was in fact the rein of the horse the agent was riding.
“I’ve never seen them whip anyone,” Ratje said, according to Fox News. “He was swinging it, but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
“[I]t was horrible what — to see, as you saw — to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay. They will be — an investigation is underway now, and there will be consequences. There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous; it’s wrong,” he said. https://www.youtube.com/embed/nA8N7oXU5DU?feature=oembed
For comments that were based on anything but the facts, Gabbard said, “He’s absolutely wrong and he needs to apologize to the American people for saying what he said.”
“What he essentially did was act as judge, jury and executioner for these Customs and Border [Protection] agents on horseback,” she said.
“How can they expect to have any kind of fair outcome to an investigation when the president of the United States has already declared their guilt and that they will be punished?” she said.
Gabbard said the incident is troubling because it is part of a larger problem of issuing judgment before the facts.
“If we are no longer a country of laws, if we are no longer a country where we know we will be presumed innocent unless proven guilty, then we don’t have a democracy,” she said.
“That’s the increasing feeling that a lot of us have, is that we are losing our democracy and moving closer and closer to what essentially is an autocracy,” she said.
I was hoping that Biden would keep his promise to try to unite our country, but instead this admin has used race and identity politics to divide us, our freedom of speech and civil liberties are under assault, inflation is going through the roof, and we’ve got open borders. pic.twitter.com/uFOxutndho
Gabbard said snap judgments that become media dogma are dangerous, noting that those who condemn police officers and others when it fits a political narrative “are getting away with it.”
“They are unwilling to sacrifice their interests for the interests of the country,” she said.
“They have no business being in positions of leadership at any level in our society because who suffers as a result of this? It’s the American people. It’s our democracy. And they don’t care about the cost and the toll that that takes,” Gabbard continued.
“And this is why leadership that puts service above self, that puts the interest of the American people in our country first, is so critical and essential — especially now.”
A collection of Democrats, including Rep. Maxine Waters of California, want to ground America’s Space Force.
Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California said he is introducing a bill to abolish the military branch created by former President Donald Trump because its very existence disturbs the peaceful realm of space in which all earthlings are pals.
“The long-standing neutrality of space has fostered a competitive, non-militarized age of exploration every nation and generation has valued since the first days of space travel. But since its creation under the former Trump administration, the Space Force has threatened longstanding peace and flagrantly wasted billions of taxpayer dollars,” Huffman said in a statement on his website.
“Dems Plan To Scuttle Space Force” Of course they are. They’re against defense spending in general, but anything Trump did specifically.https://t.co/bvMnN2p3SL
“It’s time we turn our attention back to where it belongs: addressing urgent domestic and international priorities like battling COVID-19, climate change, and growing economic inequality. Our mission must be to support the American people, not spend billions on the militarization of space,” he said.
In addition to Waters, Huffman’s call to ground the Space Force is supported by Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, Jesús García of Illinois and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
Although President Joe Biden has trashed many of Trump’s initiatives since assuming office, the Space Force is not among them, according to Fox News.
Biden’s fiscal 2022 budget calls for $17.4 billion for the Space Force, up $2 billion from the current level.
But Huffman’s proposal is supported by liberal groups such as the anti-war organization Peace Action.
“Outer space must be de-militarized and kept as a realm strictly for peaceful exploration,” Kevin Martin, the president of Peace Action, said, according to Huffman’s website.
“Militarizing space is an unconscionable waste of billions of tax dollars, and it risks extending the worst mistakes of history to the final frontier by inviting conflict and escalation. Americans don’t want more wasteful military spending, which means Congress should pass the No Militarization of Space Act before the Space Force budget inevitably skyrockets,”said Sean Vitka, the senior policy counsel for Demand Progress.
“We are being more effectively challenged militarily than at any other time in our history.”@USAirForce Secretary Frank Kendall warned about #China’s increasing military threats, including those from space. https://t.co/UWIZvnNNel
In an Op-Ed published by the Washington Examiner, contributor Tom Rogan said the logic of the Democratic critics of the Space Force is deeply flawed.
“The Space Force exists for a simple reason: The security of the United States and its allies is increasingly dependent on space,” he wrote.
“The issue is Chinese and Russian efforts to deploy weapons and sensor systems (such as satellites) into Earth’s orbit so as to hold the U.S. at risk. The reality of space in 2021 is very different from the ‘neutrality of space’ fiction offered by Huffman,” he said.
Rogan said that to ignore the efforts of China and other nations to dominate space “would be to invite calamity. If adversaries are seizing the initiative to turn space to their own military advantages, the U.S. must do the same.”
“The establishment of the Space Force has allowed for a specific professional service dedicated to space,” he wrote. “This enables the more effective use of relevant capabilities and a more efficient means by which to serve government policy.”
California is a mess. But it doesn’t use the word “alien” in official state codes anymore.
The state is in the midst of a homelessness crisis. It has the highest gas prices in America. Its COVID lockdowns and mask restrictions have decimated small businesses. Its leaders don’t feel bound by it — least of all Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose infamous dinner at the French Laundry has become emblematic of how our ruling class doesn’t play by their own rules.
But at least it doesn’t use the word “alien” in state code anymore.
Last week, U.S. Labor Department data revealed unemployment claims in California had skyrocketed, reaching their highest level since April. The state is dealing with an epidemic of shoplifting thanks to a 2014 law that turned theft into a misdemeanor provided under $950 of items were stolen. The state is currently in the midst of a spate of wildfires which are threatening its sequoias.
But, thank heavens, they’re not using the word “alien” in state code anymore. I was getting worried there.
Proving that neither he nor the rest of California’s Democrats learned anything from the recall election other than he won by a sizable margin, Newsom signed legislation Friday which, yes, struck the word “alien” from the state’s code.
The bill, AB 1096, “removes the derogatory term ‘alien’ used to describe foreign-born individuals,” according to a media release from Newsom’s office.
“As the nation’s most diverse state, we are stronger and more vibrant because of our immigrant communities,” Newsom said in the statement.
“This important legislation removes the word ‘alien,’ which is not only an offensive term for a human being, but for far too long has fueled a divisive and hurtful narrative. By changing this term, we are ensuring California’s laws reflect our state’s values.”
Wait, how is widely accepted legal terminology “an offensive term for a human being”? Let Newsom’s office explain.
“The term ‘alien’ has been used to identify individuals who were not born in the United States by the federal government since 1798 and in California since 1937,” the statement read.
“In the 1990s, the word ‘alien’ began to be used as a political dog whistle to express bigotry and hatred without using traditionally racist language. By 2015, the term was officially replaced with ‘noncitizen,’ however ‘alien’ is still widely used in many aspects of California law.”
Ah, yes, the old “dog-whistle” feint. In case you haven’t encountered this liberal tactic, if the left wants to declare certain language off-limits, one easy way to do it is to call it a dog-whistle.
For instance, “undocumented migrant” sounds a lot nicer than “illegal alien.” The latter gets to the heart of the matter: It’s a foreign-born individual who’s not legally in this country. The former sounds almost like someone who lost a few immigration papers.Related:
Ergo, “alien” is a dog-whistle. No evidence needs to be presented. Just stop using it.
Even the media release demonstrated Newsom’s misplaced priorities. In addition to AB 1096, his office announced, he’d “signed a series of bills to protect the health and safety of immigrants, including legislation to clarify safety standards at detention facilities, ensure rights and protections for unaccompanied undocumented minors, and cement protection for immigrants under hate crime legislation.”
Each one of those is more substantive than removing the word “alien” from California’s state code. Whether or not you agree with those things is beside the point — they have a tangible effect.
What did Newsom’s office tout right at the top of the release? Extirpating a “dog-whistle” word from the books because it’s “fueled a divisive and hurtful narrative.”
Newsom may have won the recall election by a reasonable margin, but he still fails to understand why there was a recall in the first place — and why the polls were reasonably close until his campaign started raising and spending huge amounts of cash on the race.
California’s COVID policies paralyzed the state’s economy. The state remains as unaffordable as ever. Homelessness is rampant. Its leaders are hypocrites. The state is going to pot.
What needed fixing? That word, apparently.
California had its chance to stop this madness in 2021. It has another chance in 2022. If its citizens don’t avail themselves of the opportunity, they have only themselves to blame for their problems.
A former Alaska Airlines flight attendant is fighting back after being fired for wanted to have a dialogue over the company’s support the pro-LGBT Equality Act.
Lacey Smith responded to a notice on an internal company message board in which the company expressed its support for the bill, according to First Liberty Institute, which is representing Smith.
“As a company, do you think it’s possible to regulate morality?” she wrote, according to First Liberty’s website.
“I was shocked that the airline I loved working for fired me for asking a question about something the airline asked us to support,” Smith said, according to Newsweek.
“I thought my question would receive the same level of respect that I give to others. It’s frightening to think that Americans can lose their jobs for simply asking questions about important issues,” she said.
According to Newsweek, the bill, also known as H.R. 5, “prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity in areas including public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment housing, credit and the jury system. It more specifically defines and includes sex, sexual orientation and gender identity among prohibited categories of discrimination and segregation.”
It passed in the Democratic-controlled House in February by a vote of 224-206. Its fate in the Senate has yet to be determined.
In August, First Liberty filed a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Smith and another fired flight attendant, whose name was not released, according to Fox Business.
It announced the lawsuit in a Sept. 10 news release headlined “First Liberty Defends Christian Flight Attendant Fired for Questioning the Equality Act.”
In her EEO complaint, Smith said she was asking out of concern for how religious beliefs are treated in the workplace.
The airline, however, said her question was offensive and discriminatory by suggesting that gender orientation was a moral issue.
First Liberty noted that the issue is bigger than one employer.
“Lacey’s termination demonstrates the heavy hand woke corporate America wields over religious employees, as well as the devastating repercussions that can follow. The consequences for those who dare to violate the ‘acceptable’ speech codes set up by the corporate elite are extreme,” it wrote.Have too many companies gone full-blown woke?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“This brave patriot has resolved to be the one to stand by her God-given rights to believe as her conscious and faith dictate, not the official ‘woke’ narrative from a corporation,” First Liberty wrote.
The second flight attendant, a woman who was otherwise unidentified in the complaint, went even further in her criticisms than Smith’s question. She said that the proposed law would end up endangering girls and women in places designed to ensure their safety.
“Does Alaska support: endangering the Church, encouraging suppression of religious freedom, obliterating women rights and parental rights? This act will force every American to agree with controversial government-imposed ideology or be treated as an outlaw,” the flight attendant wrote, according to the EOE complaint.
“The Equality act [Act] would affect everything from girls’ and women’s showers and locker rooms to women’s shelters and women’s prisons, endangering safety and diminishing privacy. Giving people blanket permission to enter private spaces for the opposite sex enables sexual predators to exploit the rules and gain easy access to victims. This is the Equality Act.”
She was immediately banned from the workplace and eventually fired, the complaint said.
“The corporate ‘canceling’ of our clients by Alaska Airlines makes a mockery of laws that protect religious Americans from employment discrimination,” David Hacker, director of litigation for First Liberty Institute, said Sept. 8, according to Fox Business.
“It is a blatant violation of state and federal civil rights laws to discriminate against someone in the workplace because of their religious beliefs and expression. Every American should be frightened if an employer can fire them for simply asking questions based on their religious beliefs about culturally important issues,” he said.
China has been credited with practicing “successful hostage diplomacy” in a deal that saw two Canadian citizens freed.
To make that happen, the Biden administration’s Justice Department cut a deal with Meng Wanzhou, 49, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, according to The Associated Press.
The fraud charges against Wanzhou will be officially dropped next year, and she was allowed to return to China. Meng had been held in Canada at the request of the U.S.
In the deal, Meng agreed to accept responsibility for misrepresenting Huawei’s business dealings in Iran.
As Meng returned home, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were being released to come back home as well.
The men were arrested in China in December 2018 on allegations of espionage, shortly after Canada arrested Meng. They landed Saturday in Calgary.
The Trump administration’s Justice Department had accused Huawei of stealing trade secrets and doing business with Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions by using a Hong Kong-based shell company. Meng was charged with fraud in connection with allegedly misleading the HSBC bank about Huawei’s dealings in Iran.
Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, said China conducted “successful hostage diplomacy.”
By letting Ms. Meng return to China, Biden has vindicated China’s holding of two innocent Canadians hostage since 2018. Canada had contended that its judicial system was insulated from any political influence. China’s successful hostage diplomacy is a real shot in the arm for Xi.
Some commentators said the incident was a cold, calculating action by China, which may have believed that if it took hostages, it could get its way, according to The New York Times.
“They’re not even making a pretense of a pretense that this was anything but a straight hostage situation,” said Donald C. Clarke, a law professor at George Washington University’s Law School specializing in China.
“In a sense, China has strengthened its bargaining position in future negotiations like this,” he said. “They’re saying, if you give them what they want, they will deliver as agreed.”
“When you look at this, it’s Beijing admitting that this was hostage diplomacy,” said Guy Saint-Jacques, Canada’s ambassador to China from 2012 to 2016, according to The Washington Post.
“They make no qualms about it. … I think the message to the world is, ‘Be careful, because we can go after your citizens if you cross us.’”
Lynette Ong, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, said China has left a stain on its relationships with other countries.
“Going forward, I don’t think Canada-China relations will be the same as they were 1,000 days ago,” she said. “It’s fundamentally at a different point. … I think China has underestimated the cost of playing this game of hostage diplomacy. Its reputation has been tarnished tremendously.”
Belligerent rhetoric flowed from China.
“This was the political persecution of a Chinese citizen with the goal of crushing a Chinese high-tech enterprise,” said Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, according to the Times. “The actions by the United States and Canada were classic arbitrary detention.”
The United States officially praised the resolution to the long-running issue.
“The U.S. Government stands with the international community in welcoming the decision by People’s Republic of China authorities to release Canadian citizens Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig after more than two-and-a-half years of arbitrary detention,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement, according to the AP.
“We are pleased that they are returning home to Canada.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said on Sept. 26 that a significant number of Haitian illegal immigrants who had amassed along the U.S.—Mexico border last week are being released into the United States.
About 12,400 of 17,000 Haitians are having their cases heard by immigration courts, Mayorkas said, adding that some 5,000 are being processed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Only about 3,000 are in detention, he said.
“Approximately, I think it’s about 10,000 or so, 12,000,” Mayorkas told “Fox News Sunday” when he was asked about the number of Haitian illegal aliens who have been released into the interior of the United States. The number could rise as 5,000 more cases are processed, he said.
Mayorkas said the number of those being released “could be even higher” and that the “number that are returned could be even higher.”
“What we do is we follow the law as Congress has passed it,” Mayorkas said, adding that the U.S. “immigration system is broken.”
“Legislative reform is needed.”
The Department of Justice estimated in 2017 that about 43 percent of illegal aliens released into the United States miss their immigration court hearings. When asked about what will happen to those of the 12,000 who were released in the past week and miss their hearings, Mayorkas said that “it is our intention to remove” those aliens.
“We have enforcement guidelines in place that provide that individuals who are recent border crossers who do not show up for their hearings are enforcement priorities, and will be removed,” he said.
Last week, more than 15,000 Haitians congregated underneath a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, and essentially constructed a shantytown before numerous local officials sounded the alarm that a humanitarian crisis was brewing.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas updates reporters in Washington on the effort to resettle vulnerable Afghans in the United States on Sept. 3, 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)
DHS officials, including Mayorkas, said on Sept. 24 that the encampment under the bridge had been cleared out. A day later, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said that the Texas border crossing will be partially reopened.
The agency also said it’s planning to continue flights to Haiti throughout the weekend, ignoring criticism from Democratic lawmakers and some progressive groups.
The number of people at the Del Rio encampment peaked last weekend, as migrants driven by confusion over the Biden administration’s policies and misinformation on social media converged at the border crossing. While Mayorkas and other White House officials have asserted that the border is closed, Republicans have said that the administration’s decision to rescind a number of Trump-era immigrant orders has triggered a surge of illegal immigration.
Mayorkas and other senior officials have also dedicated a significant amount of time in news conferences condemning some Border Patrol agents who were seen on horseback near Haitians who had crossed the border illegally. The photographer who shot those pictures last week said that the agents weren’t whipping the migrants, as some officials and Democratic lawmakers had claimed.
“Some of the Haitian men started running, trying to go around the horses,” photographer Paul Ratje told local station KTSM, explaining the situation on the ground.
“I’ve never seen them whip anyone. He was swinging it [the reins], but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
If you think the establishment media doesn’t like the Democrats enough already, wait until the federal government is subsidizing it.
There’s plenty of objectionable waste in the $3.5 trillion spending bill the Democratic Party is pushing on Capitol Hill, but few giveaways hidden in the 881-page document are so blatant as a tax credit for “local news” outlets.
According to the Washington Times, the credit would allow the outlets to receive a quarterly tax credit “equal to 50%” of a journalist’s salary up to $12,500 a quarter.
Add that up and it’s a gift of $50,000 per year per journalist, courtesy of the Democrats and the federal government.
After the first year, the credit would decrease to 30 percent of a journalist’s salary. In five years, the program would sunset. Joint Committee on Taxation estimates say the program will cost over $1.3 billion between now and 2031.
“Think of it as a way to turn every news outlet in America into a version of NPR,” said Adam Guillette, president of conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media, in a commentary piece for The Daily Signal.
“Let’s be clear: ‘Saving’ the media would destroy the media. How could we ever trust journalists to accurately cover the elected officials who voted against their funding?” he wrote in the Wednesday piece. “How can you ‘speak truth to power’ when you’re also pleading with that power for cash? Which news outlets would get the funding, and which would be snubbed?
“Any pretense of objectivity would be destroyed once the media is on the federal payroll,” he continued. “And if you think the media is already hostile to conservatives, libertarians, Christians, business leaders, southerners, and basically anyone who didn’t love Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y., dress from the Met Gala, just imagine the disdain they’ll show us once they’re funded by tax dollars. Also imagine the press coverage of any politician that dares to oppose renewing — or increasing — their funding.”
In other words, don’t expect the tax credit to expire after the five-year sunset period — unless you want to see media outlets attacking the politicians who let it expire as enemies of democracy.
Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson has called the “local news” bailout “media collusion.”
“Not only is this proposal a grotesque waste of taxpayer money,” Johnson said, “it would be a dangerous precedent of government collusion with the media. Biden’s collusion with the press has already caused enough damage to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”
“Freedom of the press does not contemplate government funding of it,” Johnson added.
Let’s keep in mind, too, that the definition of a local news outlet in the bill’s language is promiscuous enough to cover some of the biggest names in media.
As the text crafted by the House Ways and Means Committee stands, it would benefit a “local newspaper publisher” that serves “the needs of a regional or local community and who employs no more than 750 employees.”
“The criteria are broad enough to cover major newspapers with a national reach,” the Times’ Haris Alric wrote in a Sept. 16 piece.
The language was introduced by Democrat Arizona Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who’s introduced a similar local-news subsidization bill in previous Congresses.
“Local journalism is a bedrock pillar of communities across the United States,” Kirkpatrick said. “Unfortunately, journalistic endeavors throughout the country face major economic struggles that put the future of many publications in serious jeopardy.”
Yes, but the reason these papers “face major economic struggles” is because they’ve lost out to the competition, in no small part due to the built-in liberal bias in establishment media.
“In 2021, most Americans are getting their news from independent podcasts, blogs, social media sites, and more. They compensate these journalists using new payment services like Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and GoFundMe. Last year Patreon alone paid out roughly $1 billion to creators,” Accuracy in Media’s Guillette wrote.
“Rather than using politicians to shake down taxpayers, why don’t these desperate journalists try to collect money voluntarily on Patreon?”
The question answers itself: We wouldn’t give it to them, because we have choices. The journalists, in turn, think we shouldn’t have those choices because they’re bad for us.
Local establishment media in general — and newspapers in particular — still want to operate on a model that hasn’t existed for decades. Inside every dying newsroom in America, there’s a feeling readers and viewers would all be better served if we went back to the paternalistic model of half-a-century ago, where most cities had three TV stations and two newspapers, at best.
These outlets curated the news you could consume and shaped how you thought about it. One flavor of local news might be slightly different than another — this one a bit further to the left, this one skewing to the right — but if media outlets were restaurants, you’d still be eating at a burger joint every night.
We now live in a world where you can have Thai, poké bowls, Texas-style barbecue, quinoa wraps, cronuts and paleo. However, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are incensed that you just won’t just eat at the freaking burger joint like you used to. They love burger joints so much, in fact, they want to take your money to keep them running so that you’ll have a good place to chow down when you finally come to your senses.
Except the government already has its own burger joints. They’re called PBS and NPR, and if one wants to see how government-funded media institutions cover government — particularly when one party supports that government funding and the other doesn’t — all one needs to do is turn on “All Things Considered.”
The only positive development that can come out of this tax credit, if the spending bill ends up passing in its current form, is that it further delegitimizes ossified local media outlets. Everything else about this proposed $1.3 billion giveaway is rotten to the core.
With the recent flood of Haitian illegal immigrants a constant reminder of the precarious nature of border safety in Joe Biden’s America, Texas is calling for volunteers to help secure its border.
Officials of the Texas Military Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety have issued a call for National Guard members to volunteer to protect Texas through Operation Lone Star, a state-funded effort launched this spring by Gov. Greg Abbott to pick up the slack when federal officials allowed the border to become a sieve.
“We are still looking for Texas Guardsmen to support Operation Lone Star. Please help us stop human trafficking, smuggling, and illegal border crossings while we are #securingtexas Lodging and per diem included,” the department wrote in a Twitter post last week.
We are still looking for Texas Guardsmen to support Operation Lone Star. Please help us stop human trafficking, smuggling, and illegal border crossings while we are #securingtexas Lodging and per diem included.
“Texas continues to work diligently to secure our southern border under the leadership of Governor Abbott,” DPS Director Steven McCraw said, according to a news release posted on the department’s website.
He said that there is “tangible evidence of how combined local and state operations being conducted are protecting communities across the nation.”
McCraw said, “Operation Lone Star is preventing crime despite the federal government’s failure to provide the brave men and women of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection [with] the infrastructure, technology and personnel needed to secure the border.”
Through Operation Lone Star, Texas forces are “confronting the crisis and cracking down on the cartels and human traffickers daily. Texas Guard soldiers provide boots on the ground, and other valuable assets, to help identify illegal activity and apprehend illegal immigrants,” he said.
“The Texas Military Department is made up of Texans who come from communities across our great state; we are always ready and always there to support our partner agencies in protecting our home and preventing criminal elements from entering Texas,” Maj. Gen. Tracy Norris, the adjutant general of Texas, said in the news release.
“We have a long history of enduring relationships with local, state and federal agencies in conducting Homeland Security missions that dates back more than 100 years and we are proud to continue this legacy as Texans serving Texas.”
Through early September, Operation Lone Star referred 64,900 illegal immigrants to federal officials, according to Breitbart.
Texas law enforcement has also made more than 5,000 criminal arrests and seized more than four tons of illegal drugs, Breitbart reported.
DPS Lt. Christopher Olivarez said the work is not easy, according to KVEO-TV in Brownsville, Texas.Rela
“Troopers that work along the border, they deal with this day in and day out,” Olivarez said.
“But the numbers that we are seeing this year have been historic, just the surge of migrants that have been coming across, the criminal activity, the increase in vehicle pursuits, we have never seen that before in prior years.”
Texas DPS Regional Director Victor Escalon told KVEO that children are often used by smugglers.
“The adults were getting away with driving the narcotic but more so driving the human smuggling, the migrants,” Escalon said.
“And we’re seeing juveniles, we’re still seeing juveniles being more aggressive and wanting to fight with our personnel.”
“The federal government needs to help Border Patrol and provide them with more resources because right now they are being stretched thin,” Olivarez told KVEO.
“We’re the ones filling those gaps along the border because they are being taken away from the field and processing all the migrants that are coming across.”
Escalon said constant vigilance is essential.
“We’ve got to be out there every day, we have to be visible, they’ve got to see us in those areas of interest,” Escalon told KVEO.
“The airplanes, your helicopters, your boats that are in the water, that is a great deterrence, and having fencing, that is a great deterrence.”
Apparently, federal charges against a lawyer linked to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign for allegedly lying to the FBI have convinced one of the entertainment industry’s most politically active leftists to conclude Trump-Russia collusion narrative was engineered by the Democrats.
In a video posted to YouTube on Thursday, outspoken English comedian Russell Brand said he was “flabbergasted” by a federal grand jury’s indictment of Michael Sussman. The indictment was part of special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia “collusion” inquiry, according to The Hill.
According to the indictment, Sussman met with an FBI official in September 2016 to tip him off about a connection between then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. The bureau could never substantiate the connection.
In the indictment, prosecutors say Sussman didn’t disclose that his law firm, the Democrat-linked Perkins Coie, was working for Hillary Clinton’s campaign when he talked with FBI General Counsel James Baker roughly a month and a half before the election.
“Sussman’s false statement misled the FBI General Counsel and other FBI personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the FBI of information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussman’s clients,” the indictment stated.
In a news release, the special counsel’s office said Sussman’s “false representation led the General Counsel to understand that Sussmann was providing information as a good citizen rather than a paid advocate or political operative. In fact, Sussmann assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two clients, including a U.S. technology executive and the Clinton Presidential Campaign.”
The news release also stated that Sussman had provided information about the Alfa Bank theory to the media.
This was all enough to alarm Brand. During his Thursday video — titled “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!” — the comedian and actor said he thought the indictment was “serious evidence that it was the Clinton campaign and Hillary Clinton acolytes” behind the narrative.
“It seems like years ago that we were hearing that Trump was colluding with Russia, that he wouldn’t have won the election without Russia, that his whole presidency was kind of a Putin plot,” said Brand, star of “Get Him to the Greek.”
“Well, now there’s serious evidence that it was the Clinton campaign and Hillary Clinton acolytes that were directly involved in the generation of what has proven to be conspiracy — untrue!
“Think about how much media you watched. Me, a person who I think, broadly speaking, is from the left — a liberal, certainly not a Trump-supporting Republican, with respect to those of you who are — I find myself in awe, gobsmacked, flabbergasted and startled by these revelations.”
Brand also noted that “we have to recollect just how prevalent this story was. Every late-night talk-show, all over the news, it was just — you were bombarded with it.”
Brand he wanted to be believe that the Democratic Party is the party of “inclusivity, and diversity and truth and social justice and all great, positive ideas.” But now he’s not so sure.
“What my concern is becoming is that these are totemic issues pushed to the forefront to mask ordinary, regular corruption like the Russiagate thing, the Hunter Biden laptop, all of that stuff.”
Brand admitted he wasn’t paying much attention to the Russia “collusion” narrative as it unfolded in 2016, but noted that it was “seen as a defining issue,” and “still, in 2020, it was something that was being talked about.”
“And it was like, being sort of in a way discussed as if it was just an absolute fact. To discover that this was propaganda, a construct, a confection by the Democratic Party — who, of course, are now in government — is kind of beyond disappointing, because you begin to question and query what other things may not be true,” he said.
“Once you recognize that people create certain truths in order to meet certain ends and aims, the idea that you might be able to trust their integrity obviously dissolves.”
None of what Brand was talking about — or what was disclosed in Sussman’s indictment — was necessarily news for conservatives. It’s long been known the FBI’s investigation of Trump-Russia “collusion” was predicated on a dossier that was nothing more than a piece of opposition research by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The allegation that the Alfa Bank tip was provided to the FBI by someone connected to the Clinton campaign, who supposedly lied to the bureau about his connection to said campaign, might be new — but it’s similarly unsurprising.
The only surprise here is that Russell Brand, vocal liberal though he may be, was willing to acknowledge how rotten this all seems.
That said, we welcome Brand to the reality party, late to it though he may be.
While we don’t expect to welcome many more celebrities here, it’s a sign that that one of the most cherished fictions the left holds about the Trump presidency — that he was little more than the Muscovite Candidate, propped up by Vladimir Putin and his election-meddling — is crumbling for good.
The national divide has gotten so deep that even the brilliant Roger Simon has broached the subject of succession: “I never thought I’d be writing about secession or anything close. Not in a million years,” he wrote.
After reciting his love of country, Simon continues,
“But the times being what they are and the man occupying the presidency being who he is, not to mention those surrounding him being who they are, plus the issues that divide us … I feel compelled to discuss secession or division as if they were a real possibility worth considering.”
Simon has picked up on the secession talk I’ve heard bubbling through the grassroots:
“… I know I’m not alone in thinking about what was once unthinkable. Indeed, from what I’ve heard, even in the halls of Congress there are those so concerned with the inability of the red and blue to speak or reason together, who see a gulf between both sides so wide it will never be bridged, that some of our politicians are beginning to whisper about secession or the like as well.”
Secession movements are responses to national policies imposed over strong objections from particular regions of the country. The first major secession movement arose in the New England states during the War of 1812. The federal government, then dominated by officials from other states, had declared war on Great Britain. The war destroyed the New England fishing and commercial economy.
The second major secession movement was, of course, the exodus of Southern states in 1860 and 1861. The South resented federal tariffs and feared the central government would act against slavery. The immediate trigger was the election of a president whose party had pledged to end slavery in the federal territories. If that happened, the slave states would be hemmed in and their “peculiar institution” potentially doomed to extinction.
Like previous secession movements, modern secession sentiment derives from regional dissatisfaction with national policy. However, the current sentiment differs from previous movements in at least four ways:
First: In previous movements, the national policies causing dissatisfaction were few in number. Today there is much more to complain about: The central government has been forcing all states and citizens (except those with political pull) to bend the neck to arbitrary and stupid diktats governing health care, immigration, education, marriage, social policy, land use, and many other subjects.
Second: During the War of 1812, New England contained only five of the 18 states. (Maine was still part of Massachusetts.) In 1860–61, only 11 of 34 states—containing just 27 percent of the population—seceded.
Modern dissatisfaction is more geographically widespread. In recent years, a majority of states have sued to upend Obamacare, vaccination mandates, and other federal policies. In 2020, half the states voted for Donald Trump. Sixty percent of the states have Republican legislatures and a majority have Republican governors.
Third: It was awkward to make a moral case for New England commerce and particularly difficult to do so for slavery—although some people tried. By contrast, many of the policies now issuing from Washington are deeply offensive to traditional morality.
Fourth: The centralized policies of 1814 and 1861, wise or not, were constitutionally legitimate: The Constitution grants Congress power to declare war and (despite the absurd ruling in the Dred Scott case) power to govern the federal territories. By contrast, many current national policies are, under any honest reading of the Constitution, far outside federal authority. Some of them, such as the Biden administration’s failure to enforce immigration statutes, actually defy federal law.
One might argue that these four differences make secession more practical than in 1814 or 1861. But a better way of looking at it is that those differences give the dissenting states certain advantages, and more viable options, than merely submitting or seceding. The best option—and the key to saving the country—is decentralization.
The Founders understood the advantages of decentralization. That’s why they created a federal, rather than a unitary, government. History had shown that free republics endured only if they govern small territories. Republics occupying large areas degenerated into despotism, because holding together regions with disparate interests and cultures required a strong man or military oligarchy. An obvious example was the Roman Republic, which could not adapt to territorial expansion, and therefore degenerated into autocracy. Another example is Russia today.
John Dickinson in his “Fabius” essays and Alexander Hamilton in “Federalist” No. 9, pointed out that the Constitution met the challenge by creating a decentralized system. The overwhelming majority of policy issues would be resolved at the state or local level; divisive national controversies would be limited to tariffs, foreign affairs, the post office, and a few other subjects.
We have ignored this wisdom and the Constitution that enshrined it. Federal functionaries and their media/special interest allies have nationalized every issue. That is the leading cause of our bitter divisions: We fight over everything because the feds try to control everything.
How do we restore decentralization? The Constitution gives us a tool for the purpose. Article V of the Constitution permits two-thirds (34) of the state legislatures to force Congress to call a convention for proposing amendments. At a convention for proposing amendments, each state has an equal voice: It is one species in a larger class of assemblies called “conventions of states.” State lawmakers can direct this assembly to propose amendments limiting federal power, after which the states then decide whether to ratify them.
This is the procedure the Founders recommended for correcting central overreach. George Mason, Constitutional Convention delegate from Virginia, insisted on it as a remedy in case the central government became “oppressive.” Samuel Rose, a leading New York ratifier, noted that the procedure “prescribed for the states a mode of restraining the powers of government, if upon trial it should be found that they had given too much.” Tench Coxe, the author of some of the most-widely read essays in support of the Constitution, explained:
“The sovereign power of altering and amending the constitution … is vested in the several legislatures and [ratifying] conventions of the states, chosen by the people respectively within them. The foederal government cannot alter the constitution, the people at large by their own agency cannot alter the constitution, but the representative bodies of the states, that is their legislatures and conventions, only can execute these acts of sovereign power.
“… [A]s the foederal legislature cannot effect dangerous alterations which they might desire, so they cannot prevent such wholesome alterations and amendments as are now desired, or which experience may hereafter suggest. … If two thirds of those legislatures require it, Congress must call a general convention, even though they dislike the proposed amendments, and if three fourths of the state legislatures or conventions approve such proposed amendments, they become an actual and binding part of the constitution, without any possible interference of Congress.”
The number of states with Republican legislatures (governors have no role in the process) already approaches the necessary two thirds. Because the Biden administration’s power lust is matched only by its incompetence, after the 2022 election, the tally of GOP legislatures may soon be higher. Surely a convention dominated by conservative state legislatures can draft amendments popular enough to be ratified by 38 states. There are, after all, sensible liberals appalled by federal excess and the danger of national breakup.
We have everything to gain from a convention of states and nothing to lose. (Claims that an amendments convention is uncontrollable or could be controlled by Congress are myths without historical or legal basis.) We have, accordingly, a moral and legal obligation to employ that constitutional tool before splitting up the country.
Many conservative Americans are seething over President Joe Biden’s decision to remove singer Lee Greenwood from the National Council on the Arts.
The singer, whose signature song “God Bless the U.S.A.” has been played at patriotic events ever since Greenwood penned the anthem in 1984, said he was surprised that he was ousted from the panel, having been first appointed by former President George W. Bush
“So, hearing now under the Biden administration and he’s cleaned house and finally he’s fired a patriot. I was quite shocked to tell you the truth. I didn’t get a phone call or letter. It was just an email,” Greenwood said in a “Fox & Friends” interview Thursday.
Greenwood will be the subject of a tribute on Oct. 12 in Huntsville, Alabama.
Greenwood’s ouster irked Perry O. Hooper Jr., chairman of the Lee Greenwood VIP Dinner that will be held in conjunction with the tribute.
“I went from shock to anger,” Hooper said in a statement released Thursday. “I guess there is no room for a true American Patriot in Joe Biden’s world. From Woke Generals running the Military to the National Endowment of the Arts he wants to tear down the America we love.
“This is disgusting. Lee’s masterpiece ‘God Bless the USA’ has become a patriotic hymn behind only the National Anthem and God Bless America in importance to the soul of our great country,” the statement said.
Hooper said he believes the concert now takes on a new significance.
“Once the word of this firing gets out, this sold-out event will become standing room only as Alabamians show their support for an adopted favorite son, Lee Greenwood,” Hooper stated.
In an interview with Newsmax in May, Greenwood said the United States America is a very special place — and he wrote the song to reflect that.
”Everywhere I go, I see people who want to be just an American. They just want to have a great life and live every single day helping their neighbors and helping veterans,” he said.
“God Bless the U.S.A.,” Greenwood said, “reflects for me the freedom that I had to do, what I wanted to do to make my life fun and it is. I thank every single soldier, sailor, Marine, Coast Guard, Space X people that are doing their very best to make this country free.”
Biden’s nominations to the Council on the Arts were announced on June 23. Those severed from the council were not announced at the time.
According to the National Endowment for the Arts website, the National Council on the Arts includes 18 citizens members and six members of Congress, who serve in a non-voting capacity. Its citizen members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for six-year terms.
Greenwood was most recently appointed in 2014.
Biden’s nominees to the National Council on the Arts were: Huascar Medina, the poet laureate of Kansas; Fiona Prine president of Oh Boy Records; Kamilah Forbes, executive producer at the Apollo Theater and director of Broadway’s “Soul Train”; Jake Shimabukuro, international ukelele player;
Ismael Ahmed, co-founder of the Arab American National Museum of Dearborn, Michigan; Kinan Azmeh, clarinetist and director of the Damascus Festival Chamber Players; Christopher Morgan, Washington dance choreographer; Constance Williams, businesswoman, politician and chair of the board of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
MIAMI—Police have arrested one man for his alleged role in the mass shooting that killed three people and wounded 20 others outside a Northwest Miami-Dade banquet hall in May.
Davonta Barnes, 22, of Miami Gardens, was booked into a Miami-Dade jail Thursday night on three counts of first-degree murder and 20 counts of attempted murder, records show. He is being held without bond.
His was the first arrest made so far for the May 30 shooting at the El Mula banquet hall that shocked South Florida.
That early morning, a crowd had gathered for a rap show at El Mula, 7630 NW 186th St., when gunmen opened fire. Surveillance video showed the crowd scattering in panic as people crumpled to the ground wounded, with puffs of dust exploding in the air from bullets hitting the walls outside the venue.
Killed in the shooting were Desmond Owens and Clayton Dillard III, both 26, and Shankquia Lechelle Peterson, 32.
Miami-Dade police later said at least three gunmen in ski masks and hoodies had gotten out of a stolen white Nissan Pathfinder and opened fire on the crowd. They rushed back to the SUV and drove off as others in the parking lot returned fire.
The stolen SUV was later found in a canal in the area of Northwest 154th Street and Second Avenue.
Investigators said during a news conference that the targeted attack was connected to an ongoing rivalry between two groups.
Police believe Barnes acted as a suspected lookout for the men who opened fire on the crowd.
According to a police arrest report, Barnes was picked up for questioning Thursday and confessed he was with the attackers before the shooting. “He saw at least one of the subjects was armed with a firearm,” according to an arrest report.
Police said Barnes confessed he was part of a group that was looking to kill a specific man who was going to be at the show. Barnes admitted “he drove to the location of the shooting, in his mother’s Nissan Altima, acted as a lookout just before the shooting, and reported back to the other subjects whether [the intended target] was present at the location,” the report said.
Barnes was not accused of firing any weapons.
The mass shooting at El Mula was among a slew of high-profile shootings in public spaces in May and June.
Among them were a wild car chase-and-shooting near a Miami casino, a mass shooting in Wynwood that left one dead and six wounded, the murder of the son of a former state senator, and a shooting outside a swank South Beach restaurant that ended in one man paralyzed and a rapper behind bars.
The spate of violence spurred Miami-Dade and other police departments to launch “Operation Summer Heat,” which was described as a crackdown on violent criminals and guns.
Several prominent professors at American colleges have participated in China’s talent acquisition program, according to leaked documents from a Chinese regional authority. The professors worked with the Thousand Talents Program (TTP), a controversial state-backed recruitment plan criticized by U.S. officials for its role in transferring Western research and technology to China.
Two of the professors work at Carnegie Melon University, and another at University of California, Berkeley. All three are experts in biomedical research and development. Their names will not be included in this report.
The leaked documents, obtained from multiple municipal government agencies in Xi’an city of central China’s Shaanxi province, further listed names of other recruited experts from abroad, funding details, and objectives for the local TTP.
Chinese talent programs, including the TTP, have recruited thousands of experts from around the world since 2008, when the program was introduced by Beijing. The plans offer up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives for overseas professionals to research and work in China for a period of time each year. Xi’an’s program specifically targets biomedical engineering experts, while others programs have focused on other technological fields including advanced manufacturing, aerospace engineering, and new materials.
These state-run programs have drawn intensifying scrutiny in recent years amid growing alarm among U.S. officials that the plans could facilitate the flow of American intellectual property and know-how to China. A raft of American and Chinese researchers have also been prosecuted in the United States for allegedly hiding their links to such programs while receiving federal grant money.
Accomplished Professors
One of the three TTP participants is a professor and associate department chair at Berkeley. This professor is the recipient of numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Since 2007, he has received at least $5.9 million in research funding, according to online records.
According to the leaked document, this professor is also the technical director of a biotech firm in Xi’an and an editor at Molecular Plant, a journal run by Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Chinese Society of Plant Biology.
A Chinese-media report dated Feb. 13, 2015, mentions a research article co-authored by this professor published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in January 2015. In this journal article, this academic’s affiliation was listed as both Berkeley and Nanjing University in China.
The Chinese also report provides some background information on this professor, in which the keywords related to his connection to the TTP were redacted.
Screenshot of a Chinese language report on the internet dated Feb. 13, 2015, with background information related to the Thousand Talents Plan redacted. (The Epoch Times)
This professor’s bio on Berkeley’s website does not list his affiliations with TTP nor with Nanjing University. The Nanjing University website also does not include records relating to this academic.
The leaked documents classified the other two accomplished CMU professors as “category A” talents, the top-tier of the city’s internal ranking system.
One is a distinguished professor of chemical engineering at CMU, who also holds the top position at a research institution at the university.
The other professor holds a top position in a macromolecular research center, which is funded in part by the NSF. He is one of the most cited chemists in the world.
A Chinese report dated Sept. 7, 2017, by Xi’an News said that the two professors were awarded honorary professors at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, and that they would lead the efforts to establish the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME).
The report also said that according to the “Policies for ‘One Belt One Road’ Talents Development,” a policy developed by Xi’an authorities, biomedical engineering is the second most desired field of development for the region. However, local expertise and R&D capabilities are both lacking. Therefore, overseas top-tier researchers are crucial in transforming Xi’an into a world-class biomedical center in a short time, the report said. The regional government would provide exceptional support for the professors, and provide them with sufficient research funding and facilities.
The same report quoted one of the CMU professors saying that it would take 5 to 10 years for IBME to become the world’s leading institution in chemistry, biology, and material research. Both professors said that they were very impressed with Xi’an municipal government’s recruiting commitments and believed that “it is possible to create a future” in Xi’an.
Carnegie Melon declined to comment. The three professors and UC Berkeley did not respond by press time.
TTP Incentives
Each year, Chinese regime agencies solicit applications domestically and internationally. For overseas talents, they are not required to quit their jobs overseas, but asked to spend some amount of time in China to perform similar types of work, which brings them financial gains and recognition.
One leaked document (Chinese pdf) titled “Xi’an talent recruiting status” said that by 2020, the city of Xi’an alone has attracted 243 national level, 1,325 provincial level, and 961 municipal level TTP talents. In addition, it has recruited 515 top-tier professionals in key technological areas, and converted 303 scientific research projects into industrial products.
In the set of leaked documents, there are several documents about recruiting policy and incentives. One document titled “Policies for ‘One Belt One Road’ Talents Development” (Chinese pdf) said that expertise in high-tech industry, advanced manufacturing, biomedical engineering, aerospace engineering, green energy, and new materials are highly desired.
Screenshot of leaked Chinese regime document titled “2018 Background Information on ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ Experts Business Park in Gaoxin District of Xi’an City” (The Epoch Times)
Another document, excerpt above, described the budgets allocated for the talents who will work in the Gaoxin district in Xi’an city. The budget is for sign-on bonuses, which are given to recruits’ personal bank accounts, and ranges from $155,000 to $700,000, as well as project bonus, which ranges from $466,000 to $776,000.
In addition, top-tier talents enjoy a variety of extra perks, including free housing, priority school admissions for their children, employment assistance for their spouses, exclusive access to healthcare services, and expense-paid annual vacations.
Moreover, local businesses or institutions are rewarded $155,000 for hosting top-tier talent, and $77,600 or $31,000 for lower-tier talent.
One document titled “2017 Incentives for Entrepreneurs and Awards for Research to Industry Conversion” said that if a talent starts up a business in Xi’an, the start-up will receive a one-time bonus from $155,000 to $776,000. If a scientific research project is converted to a profitable business, the bonus ranges from $77,600 to $1.24 million.
US Response
In recent years, the United States has moved to stem the flow of American research and technology to China, and push back against Beijing’s efforts to target academia through recruitment plants.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, in a 2020 speech, described the operation of talent programs, saying “China pays scientists at American universities to secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China—including valuable, federally funded research.
“To put it bluntly, this means American taxpayers are effectively footing the bill for China’s own technological development.”
Meanwhile, a growing number of U.S. academics have been prosecuted for allegedly concealing their ties to Chinese institutions and talent plans while receiving federal funding. In a high-profile case, the former chair of Harvard’s chemistry department Charles Lieber was indicted in June 2020 on charges of making false statements relating to funding from China. Prosecutors alleged that Chinese authorities had paid $50,000 per month, in addition to over $150,000 in living expenses, and more than $1.5 million to establish a laboratory in China.
In March 2020, a TTP member and tenured professor at West Virginia University pled guilty to fraud. In May 2020, DOJ announced a former Emory University Professor and TTP participant was convicted and sentenced for filing a false tax return.
In June, the U.S. Senate passed the Endless Frontier Act, which includes a provision barring any U.S. scientist who participates in a Chinese-sponsored talent recruitment program from receiving or making use of federal funding.
In response to these crackdowns in the United States, the Chinese regime has been deleting information related to TTP and names of TTP participants from the internet. But the recruitment continues.
New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for teachers and other Department of Education staffers is on pause after a federal judge late Friday granted a request to temporarily block it.
Plaintiffs, a group of teachers, asked for a temporary injunction pending review by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
U.S. Appeals Court Judge Joseph Bianco, a George W. Bush nominee, in a one-page order granted the request.
The panel will now decide whether to impose an injunction pending appeal or allow the mandate to take effect.
Rachel Maniscalco and three other New York City Department of Education workers sued over the mandate, which was supposed to start on Sept. 27.
They said the order, which requires all workers to show proof they’ve received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, is government overreach, violating the U.S. Constitution’s Due Process Clause. That clause states in part that no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The right to pursue a profession is a liberty interest and the mandate, which threatens to cost workers who don’t comply with their jobs, interferes with it, the suit said.
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan, another George W. Bush nominee, earlier this week declined to block the mandate, ruling plaintiffs failed to show they would likely succeed in their suit.
That prompted an appeal and led to Bianco’s ruling.
It’s not clear when the three-judge panel will make their decision.
In a statement to news outlets, the city’s Department of Education (DOE) said it was confident the mandate will ultimately be upheld “once all the facts have been presented, because that is the level of protection our students and staff deserve.”
“Our current vax-or-test mandate remains in effect and we’re seeking speedy resolution by the Circuit Court next week. Over 82 percent of DOE employees have been vaccinated and we continue to urge all employees to get their shot by Sept. 27,” the agency added.
Unions have urged the city to delay or restructure the mandate, asserting it would lead to teacher shortages.
Some schools have dozens of unvaccinated staffers, Mark Cannizzaro, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, a union representing principals in the city, told reporters earlier Friday.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, has refused.
“We’ve been planning all along. We have a lot of substitutes ready, but I think the big story here is going to be that the vast majority, overwhelming majority of teachers and staff are going to come in vaccinated to serve our kids next week,” he said on a radio show Friday.
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai in 2019 was warned that describing the company’s Incognito browsing mode as “private” was problematic, yet it stayed the course because he did not want the feature “under the spotlight,” according to a new court filing.
Google spokesman José Castañeda told Reuters that the filing “mischaracterizes emails referencing unrelated second and third-hand accounts.”
The Alphabet Inc. unit’s privacy disclosures have generated regulatory and legal scrutiny in recent years amid growing public concerns about online surveillance.
Users last June alleged in a lawsuit that Google unlawfully tracked their internet use when they were browsing Incognito in its Chrome browser. Google has said it makes clear that Incognito only stops data from being saved to a user’s device and is fighting the lawsuit.
In a written update on trial preparations filed Thursday in U.S. district court, attorneys for the users said they “anticipate seeking to depose” Pichai and Google Chief Marketing Officer Lorraine Twohill.
The attorneys, citing Google documents, said Pichai “was informed in 2019 as part of a project driven by Twohill that Incognito should not be referred to as ‘private’ because that ran ‘the risk of exacerbating known misconceptions about protections Incognito mode provides.’”
The filing continued, “As part of those discussions, Pichai decided that he ‘didn’t want to put incognito under the spotlight’ and Google continued without addressing those known issues.”
Castañeda said teams “routinely discuss ways to improve the privacy controls built into our services.” Google’s attorneys said they would oppose efforts to depose Pichai and Twohill.
Last month, plaintiffs deposed Google vice president Brian Rakowski, described in the filing as “the ‘father’ of Incognito mode.” He testified that though Google states Incognito enables browsing “privately,” what users expect “may not match” up with the reality, according to the plaintiffs’ write-up.
Google’s attorneys rejected the summary, writing that Rakowski also said terms including “private,” “anonymous,” and “invisible” with proper context “can be super helpful” in explaining Incognito.
LAS VEGAS—Former UFC champion Jon Jones was jailed in Las Vegas early Friday after an incident at Caesars Palace that police said led to his arrest on charges of domestic battery and damaging a vehicle.
Details of the incident that led to Jones’ 5:45 a.m. arrest at the Las Vegas Strip resort were not immediately made public by Las Vegas police.
Jail and court records showed Jonathan Dwight Jones, 34, posted $8,000 bail and was due for an initial court appearance Saturday, with an Oct. 26 date for prosecutors to file criminal charges. The domestic battery charge is a misdemeanor. The vehicle charge is a felony, with damage reported at more than $5,000.
It was not immediately clear if Jones had an attorney.
Caesars Entertainment Inc. declined to comment, citing an active police investigation.
“JacksonWink Academy is aware of the allegations and is conducting its own review of the matter. It would be inappropriate to comment further at this time,” said James Hallinan, a spokesman for the Albuquerque, New Mexico, gym where Jones trained.
Jones lives in Albuquerque, but he attended a Thursday night UFC Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Park MGM hotel honoring his 2013 fight with Alexander Gustafsson.
Jones (26-1, 1 no-contest) had three separate stints as the UFC’s light heavyweight champion from 2011 to 2020, and he is widely considered one of the greatest fighters in MMA history.
But his UFC career has been defined more by misbehavior outside the cage than his excellence in it.
In 2012, a year after becoming the youngest champion in UFC history, Jones was arrested for DUI after crashing his Bentley into a telephone pole in upstate Binghamton, New York.
Jones then lost his title in 2015 when he was arrested and charged with a felony stemming from a hit-and-run accident in New Mexico in which he broke a pregnant driver’s arm.
Jones pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct in 2019 after an incident with a waitress at a strip club in Albuquerque, and he was arrested last year in Albuquerque on charges of aggravated driving under the influence and negligent use of a firearm.
Jones has failed several drug tests from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which runs the UFC’s antidoping program.
He was forced out of a fight with Daniel Cormier at UFC 200 in 2016 after testing positive for two banned substances that he blamed on a sexual enhancement pill.
He then tested positive for an anabolic steroid in 2017, prompting the UFC to strip his light heavyweight title for a second time. The California State Athletic Commission overturned the result of his victory over Cormier at UFC 214, and Jones received a 15-month competitive suspension.
Because of his arrests, suspensions, and various disputes with the UFC, Jones has fought only eight times in the last eight years during the ostensible prime of his career. He hasn’t fought since beating Dominick Reyes in February 2020 for his fourth consecutive victory.
Jones relinquished the light heavyweight title last year and declared his intention to move up to heavyweight. He told reporters Thursday night he wants to weigh 270 pounds when he makes his heavyweight debut, hopefully, next spring.
The U.S. Department of State said China is attempting to “divert attention from its own bad conduct” in Hong Kong by accusing the United States of interfering in city affairs. The statement comes after China published a list of people responsible for the alleged interference.
“U.S. policy toward Hong Kong has been consistent and will not waver,” a State Department spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
The United States statements and actions on the former British colony are aiming at “preserving the autonomy that Hong Kong was promised in the Joint Declaration” and “promoting accountability for those who erode the human rights and freedoms enjoyed by people in Hong Kong,” the Department said in an email on Sept. 24.
“The United States will always stand up for fundamental freedoms and the rule of law,” the statement read, adding that the two are the fundamental rights the regime promised.
In a Friday post made on China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website, the regime detailed a list of over 100 cases accusing the United States of “meddling in Hong Kong affairs” and “undermining” the city’s “prosperity and stability.” Beijing has repeatedly used the words to denounce western countries’ criticism over issues including the suppression of dissidents in Hong Kong.
The Department said “articulating policy, engaging with local counterparts, and representing national interests” were the “practice of diplomacy” and “fully consistent with international law.”
“Suggesting otherwise is simply an attempt by the PRC to divert attention from its own bad conduct and only undermines Hong Kong’s longstanding appeal as a hub of openness and free exchange,” according to the statement.
The regime’s ministry criticized Washington’s responses to Hong Kong’s sweeping national security law and other measures the communist rubber-stamp legislature has imposed on the international financial hub since early 2019.
The city’s police have arrested over 10,000 people for their roles in mass protests in mid-2019 against plans allowing extradition to mainland China.
Unlike other mainland cities, Hong Kong had once enjoyed democracy after it reverted from British to Chinese communist rule in 1997. Beijing pledged to allow the city to retain its civil liberties for 50 years in the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
After the regime ushered in a series of measures in recent years, the city has seen a rollback of its autonomy and democracy, especially following the national security legislation. Since it took effect, Hong Kong police have arrested 100 dissidents, leading to more than 60 charges, mostly against democratic politicians, activists, journalists, and students.
Hong Kong pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai is led into a police van as he heads to court to be charged under the Beijing-imposed controversial new national security law, on Dec. 12, 2020. (Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images)
The List
Beijing’s accusations range from the signing of the Hong Kong Autonomy Act in 2020 by former President Donald Trump, to President Joe Biden’s show of support for a pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily.
Trump ordered an end to Hong Kong’s special status under U.S. law to punish the communist regime’s “oppressive actions” against the financial hub.
The regime also criticized Biden for calling the closure of the Apple Daily newspaper “a sad day for media freedom” and a sign of “intensified repression by Beijing.”
The popular tabloid Apple Daily, which was frequently critical of the city’s government and Chinese Communist Party, closed in June after 500 police raided its headquarters and froze its key assets. Authorities say dozens of the paper’s articles may have violated the national security law.
Apple Daily’s founder, tycoon Jimmy Lai, is currently serving a 20-month sentence and waiting for trials on three national security charges. Under the law, Lai could face up to life in prison.
The vaguely-worded legislation punishes speech or acts deemed secessionist, subversive, terrorist, or perceived as colluding with hostile foreign political groups or individuals against China’s ruling one-party state.
Other U.S. officials named on China’s list include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and his successor Anthony Blinken.
The foreign ministry did not explain why the list was released now or whether it would take punitive action against those named on the list.
Attendees from various forces march next to a banner supporting the new national security law at the end of a flag-raising ceremony to mark the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain in Hong Kong on July 1, 2020. (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)
The ministry’s commissioner’s office spokesperson in Hong Kong labeled Washington’s policy and actions toward Hong Kong as “criminal records” in another Friday statement.
On July 16, Washington issued warnings about the deteriorating business conditions in the city after the enactment of the national security law. A week later, Washington imposed sanctions on Chinese officials over their roles in stifling democracy in the city.
In response, the regime issued another sanction list targeting former American politicians and institutions. China has required all individuals and companies in the mainland to follow sanctions the communist regime launched in an anti-foreign sanctions law passed in June.
Those who are involved in implementing foreign sanction measures against the regime could face punishments including denying visas, deportation, and freezing or seizing assets.
Facebook has known for a year and a half that researchers are right, its Instagram app hurts teens
Facebook officials had internal research in March 2020 showing that Instagram—the social media platform most used by adolescents—is harmful to teen girls’ body image and well-being but swept those findings under the rug to continue conducting business as usual, according to a Sept. 14 report in The Wall Street Journal.
Facebook’s policy of pursuing profits regardless of documented harm has sparked comparisons to Big Tobacco, which knew in the 1950s that its products were carcinogenic but publicly denied it into the 21st century. Those of us who study social media use in teens didn’t need a suppressed internal research study to know that Instagram can harm teens. Plenty of peer-reviewed research papers show the same thing.
But Instagram isn’t problematic simply because it’s popular. There are two key features of Instagram that seem to make it particularly risky. First, it allows users to follow both celebrities and peers, both of whom can present a manipulated, filtered picture of an unrealistic body along with a highly curated impression of a perfect life.
While all social media allows users to be selective in what they show the world, Instagram is notorious for its photo editing and filtering capabilities. Plus, that’s the platform popular among celebrities, models, and influencers. Facebook has been relegated to the uncool soccer moms and grandparents. For teens, this seamless integration of celebrities and retouched versions of real-life peers presents a ripe environment for upward social comparison, or comparing yourself to someone who is “better” in some respect.
Humans, as a general rule, look to others to know how to fit in and judge their own lives. Teens are especially vulnerable to these social comparisons. Just about everyone can remember worrying about fitting in while in high school. Instagram exacerbates that worry. It’s hard enough to compare yourself to a supermodel who looks fantastic (albeit filtered); it can be even worse when the filtered comparison is Natalie down the hall.
It didn’t work. Negative comparisons, which were nearly impossible to stop, still led to envy and lowered self-esteem. Even in studies in which participants knew the photos they were shown on Instagram were retouched and reshaped, adolescent girls still felt worse about their bodies after viewing them. For girls who tend to make a lot of social comparisons, these effects are even worse.
Objectification and Body Image
Instagram also is risky for teens because its emphasis on pictures of the body leads users to focus on how their bodies look to others. Our research shows that for teen girls—and increasingly teen boys—thinking about their own bodies as the object of a photo increases worrying thoughts about how they look to others, and that leads to feeling shame about their bodies. Just taking a selfie to be posted later makes them feel worse about how they look to others.
Being an object for others to view doesn’t help the “selfie generation” feel empowered and sure of themselves—it can do exactly the opposite. These aren’t insignificant health concerns, because body dissatisfaction during the teen years is a powerful and consistent predictor of later eating disorder symptoms.
Facebook has acknowledged internally what researchers have been documenting for years: Instagram can be harmful to teens. Parents can help by repeatedly talking to their teens about the difference between appearance and reality, by encouraging their teens to interact with peers face-to-face, and to use their bodies in active ways instead of focusing on the selfie.
The big question will be how Facebook handles these damaging results. History and the courts have been less than forgiving of the head-in-the-sand approach of Big Tobacco.
Since President Joe Biden took office, he and some congressional Democrats have pushed strongly for the creation of a New Deal-style initiative: the Civilian Climate Corps (CCC).
On Friday, congressional Democrats unveiled text from the more than 2,000-page reconciliation bill. Among its many appropriations, the new CCC will receive a substantial appropriation.
President, Progressives Have Long Fought for the Program
The broad strokes of the program were introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) when he unveiled his $3.5 trillion budget on the Senate floor in early 2021.
The CCC, Sanders said, would give young people the opportunity “to get decent pay and to roll up their sleeves … in order to combat climate change.” For Sanders, this program was only a part of a wide-ranging slew of policies “to combat climate change.” Since then, others have joined with Sanders in supporting the initiative.
Most significantly, the proposal got a green light from the White House. At his April address to congress, the commander-in-chief tied “meeting the climate crisis” to the creation of new jobs.
“For me, when I think climate change I think jobs,” the president explained.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) also put his weight behind the proposal, promising during a press conference to “fight to get the boldest CCC possible.”
Schumer was joined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who drafted the controversial Green New Deal. The congresswoman took to the stage to defend the CCC.
“What if [the CCC] led to tens of thousands of new trails in our national forests and park service?” she asked rhetorically. Ocasio-Cortez continued, “This isn’t something we have to imagine doing—that was the record of the original [New Deal-created] Civilian Conservation Corps in 1938.”
The program, she asserted, “is not a pipe dream, and is not some big and progressive vision that is ‘unrealistic.’” Rather, “this is what we have already done.” The New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, Ocasio-Cortez said “was the largest peacetime mobilization of young Americans in American history.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who holds considerable weight in the House progressive caucus, wants modern Democrats to challenge that ambitious record. Ocasio-Cortez argued that Democrats’ “mandate today is not just to revive some of the most ambitious programs and ideas, but so much of this is about how we go even bigger and better than we did originally.”
CCC Receives Billions in New Budget Bill
With the text of the budget finally released after weeks of negotiations between the House, Senate, and White House, the specific details of the program are clearer.
The program is delegated around $4.5 billion by the legislation, split into two separate appropriations for slightly different purposes. In fact, however, the program will indirectly receive much more, as the bill designates billions more in funding for specific projects to be undertaken by the CCC.
The first of these $2.25 billion appropriations, says the bill, is “to be used for staffing, salaries, and other workforce needs to support the development of a Civilian Climate Corps for the purposes of managing National Forest System land.” The legislation also guarantees that salaries for those who join the program will be at least double the federal poverty line.
The Secretary of Agriculture will help to manage the project.
The bill notes that “restoration” of public lands and forests is the program’s “primary purpose,” and orders the Secretary to give these initiatives priority. To help carry this out, the bill devotes billions more to specific projects.
One such project is a $10 billion appropriation to reduce the quantity of hazardous fuels in at-risk areas that are close to cities, a prescient concern for Democrats in the wake of deadly wildfires across the western U.S. The bill appropriates $4 billion more to the Secretary to be used for reducing hazardous fuels further away from major population centers.
A further $1 billion in the bill is dedicated to “vegetation management projects.” These projects, the bill notes, are restricted to National Forest System lands, woodlands protected and managed by the U.S. government. Another $500 million is dedicated to the same purpose, but specifically to be directed towards vegetation management that helps in separate watershed or water source protection plans. $500 million more is specifically dedicated to managing vegetation to reduce “uncharacteristically severe” wildfires.
The second $2.25 billion appropriation to the CCC in the bill is more streamlined. This funding, the bill says, is specifically slated for “rural and urban conservation and tree planting projects.”
This section of the bill incorporates both conservation projects and wildfire prevention projects, employing forces beyond the CCC to achieve this goal. It allots around $14 billion to this purpose, much of which can be received in grants by qualifying state, local, tribal, or private sector applicants who help in the project.
In total, the bill allots upwards of $35 billion to the CCC or adjacent projects. Its direct funding, $4.5 billion, falls short of Biden’s goal of $10 billion in funding.
Travelers on Jet Blue Flight 261 from Boston to San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Wednesday evening had a bit of a scare when fellow passenger, Khalil El Dahr, grew angry after a call he’d tried to make failed.
According to a subsequent FBI affidavit filed by a special agent, El Dahr left his seat about 45 minutes before the flight was scheduled to land in San Juan and ran toward the flight deck where he tried to force his way into the cockpit.
He was demanding to be shot in Spanish.
The affidavit said he was intercepted by a flight attendant and “corralled in the area before the galley” when a pilot opened the door to the cockpit to see what was going on in the plane.
At that moment, El Dahr grabbed the flight attendant’s “collar and tie with one hand while using his other hand to grab the overhead compartment to gain leverage to kick.”
He kicked the flight attendant in the chest.
In the meantime, El Dahr kept pulling the attendant’s tie even tighter. The attendant was having difficulty breathing.
Eventually, six or seven crew members were able to subdue the man, restraining him with flex cuffs.
However, El Dahr quickly snapped out of the first pair of cuffs which the FBI said forced the crew to resort to using multiple seatbelt extenders to form a makeshift straitjacket, while using another pair of cuffs and a flight attendant’s necktie to tie him to a seat.
He was held in the back of the plane until it landed in San Juan.
The FBI agent spoke to a second flight attendant who said El Dahr was speaking in both Spanish and Arabic. At one point, the report noted, he could be heard shouting “Allah.”
Upon landing, law enforcement boarded the plane and took over. El Dahr was charged with interfering with a flight crew, which is a felony.
#PUERTORICO: A man on board a JetBlue flight from Boston to San Juan on Wednesday allegedly assaulted crew members and tried to storm the cockpit, according to an FBI affidavit. pic.twitter.com/xizfnv7MqL
While we’ve heard quite a few stories about fights, and even some brawls, breaking out in airports and on airplanes over the last year or so, this incident is eerily reminiscent of the 9/11 hijacking of Flight 93.
A man trying to storm the cockpit while invoking Allah is very different from an individual who’s tired of wearing his mask.
The FBI had an informant on the ground on Jan. 6 before the incursion into the U.S. Capitol, according to a report, which is leading to questions about how involved the bureau was in the building breach.
The New York Times reported on Saturday it had obtained records which showed that an FBI handler had been in contact with a man reported to be affiliated with the group the Proud Boys before the building was entered by protesters.
As the Proud Boys marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6, a member of the far-right group was texting real-time updates — to his FBI handler.
The informer gave the bureau an inside view that day, according to confidential records obtained by The New York Times. https://t.co/QkBptydk2Z
Per the report, the unnamed informant was constantly texting his FBI contact throughout the morning and afternoon of Jan. 6. Those messages were to keep the agent up to date about what was happening. The informant, per the Times, was affiliated with a midwest chapter of the Proud Boys.
He said he met with other members hours before the building was entered at the nearby Washington Monument at 10 a.m. that day. The FBI’s reported mole recounted that Proud Boys members did not organize an attempt to enter the Capitol. He said, rather, that they went in when others did so as doors were opened.
The Times reported the alleged informant and others with the Proud Boys became “consumed by a herd mentality,” but had no intention to commit any violence before traveling to Washington, or once they entered the building with others.
The informant reportedly said there was a prolonged conversation among Proud Boys members about whether entering the building was even a good idea.
Ultimately, he and others did enter. The informant said he later exited the building after he was told someone had been shot.
The shooting was an apparent reference to the shooting death of protester and military veteran Ashli Babbitt. The woman was shot by U.S. Capitol Police officer Lt. Michael Byrd.
The news outlet concluded that the informant’s testimony from the day is evidence that federal officials were actively monitoring the events, and had a good understanding of what was unfolding, which is a narrative the FBI has not embraced publicly.
“Federal law enforcement had a far greater visibility into the assault on the Capitol, even as it was taking place, than was previously known,” the Times reported.
People who viewed the Times report online speculated about the FBI’s involvement in the incursion, with many concluding that Jan. 6 might have been avoided had it not been steered by the bureau.
This is smelling like the Michigan gov kidnapping case. How much was the FBI just observing vs actively encouraging and directing?
To date not a single charge of insurrection or sedition.
So the feds had people in the crowd the whole time? Surely they could have prevented any scary “insurrection” that was happening? Unless they wanted some drama obviously, then they did a great job. God bless America, eh?
The Times reported that 15 members of the Proud Boys have been charged over the events of Jan. 6. They are among hundreds of others who have been charged or jailed for alleged acts related to being in or near the Capitol.
The Times report comes as the FBI is already under fire for allegedly not acting to protect children from sexual abuse after having information that Larry Nassar, the former team doctor of the United States women’s national gymnastics team, was a sexual predator.
The bureau is also facing scrutiny over its role in an alleged plot last year to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Afghanistan’s justice system is returning to a pre-U.S. form of barbarism as suspected criminals are subject to being strung up in public spaces under the rule of the Taliban.
The Associated Press, citing a witness within the country, reported that in the major city of Herat in western Afghanistan, an alleged kidnapper was killed by gunfire and then hanged from a crane on Saturday.
A man who operates a pharmacy in the city told the AP that the Taliban was responsible for securing a man’s body to the crane and then displaying it in the city’s main square.
Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi said that four men were killed during an attempted kidnapping. He added that one of the men was hanged in the Herat main square.
The other bodies were dragged away to be displayed in other areas of the city, he said.
Such displays were once common under the Taliban’s previous rule over the country. But the 2001 U.S. ground invasion of Afghanistan put hard-line Islamists on the ropes.
Throughout the last two decades, many Afghans have enjoyed a relatively westernized system of justice. But Herat was taken by the Taliban in mid-August, as were many other areas.
With Sharia law in place across the country, or set to be enacted, public and brutal displays are resuming.
A high-ranking Taliban official and the enforcer of its view on justice told the AP on Friday that people accused of crimes will not be subject to a system of due process common in westernized countries.
Public executions, torture and amputations for shoplifters are going to be used, said Mullah Nooruddin Turabi.
Turabi carried out enforcement of the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Sharia law in the 1990s. He brushed off criticism about his use of public spaces to punish accused criminals in the past.
In the 1990s, he and others in power sometimes used a Kabul stadium for executions and amputations, the AP noted.
“Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Turabi said during an interview with the AP. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”
The man tasked with enforcing Sharia for the Taliban wants to take the country’s legal system back to where it was before 2001.
“Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security,” he said during his Friday interview. He and other Taliban leaders are currently working to adopt a policy with regard to handling public punishments.
Speaking on amputations in particular, Turabi touted them for their ability to deter crime.
The goal, per Turabi, is to bring back a system of strict punishment while keeping in place some social reforms accomplished during U.S. occupation of the country, such as having female judges.
Was the first superspreader COVID-19 event at a military athletic tournament that took place two months before the first reported cases of the virus? And was it part of a Chinese bioweapons experiment?
That’s the allegation being made by Wei Jingsheng, a former Chinese Communist Party insider who defected to the United States in the 1990s. Jinhsheng said he heard about Beijing carrying out an “unusual exercise” during the October 2019 7th CISM Military World Games in Wuhan.
“I thought the Chinese government would take this opportunity to spread the virus during the Military Games, as many foreigners would show up there,” Wei told a documentarian from Sky News, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
“[I knew] of the possibility of the Chinese government using some strange weapons, including biological weapons, because I knew they were doing experiments of that sort.”
The allegation, made during the documentary “What Really Happened In Wuhan,” would seem wild if they didn’t come from one of China’s most well-known dissidents, a man who has many connections in the country which jailed him for much of his adult life for what they deemed “counter-revolutionary activities.”
The claim was also backed up by Miles Yu, former principal China adviser to the U.S. State Department. Yu told Sky News that American, French and German athletes got sick at the games with COVID-like symptoms, but were never tested.
And then there was State Department COVID-19 investigator David Asher, who said the virus could have been circulating in the United States well before it was originally thought to be.
“We see some indications in our own data … that there was COVID circulating in the United States as early as early December, possibly earlier than that,” Asher said.
Wei also said he approached the Trump administration with this information in November of 2019, but was rebuffed.
“The long-time democracy campaigner, who has served time in prison for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’, said he made the approach as whispers of a ‘new SARS virus’ began circulating on WeChat and other Chinese social media platforms,” the Daily Mail reported.
“I felt they were not as concerned as I was, so I tried my best to provide more detail and information,” Wei said.
“They may not believe that a government of a country would do something like [cover up a virus], so I kept repeating myself in an effort … to persuade them.”
According to News.com.au, Wei wouldn’t name the Trump administration official he talked to, but said they were high-ranking.
“I’m not sure if this politician wants me to talk about him right here,” he said.
“But I want to say he is a high enough politician, high enough to be able to reach the President of the United States.”
The October date would be well before investigators believe the disease started spreading in December of 2019. It wasn’t until Dec. 31, 2019, that China acknowledged a cluster of cases in Wuhan. Furthermore, the nation denied it was contagious until late January.
Are any of Wei’s allegations true? Sure, they may seem out there — but the problem is that China has invited scrutiny of this sort through its handling of COVID-19.
Beijing punished early whistleblowers who warned about the disease, lied to the world about the gravity of the situation until it was too late and continues to thwart any real investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Thanks to that, it’s likely we’ll never get a straight answer regarding when the disease originated from China itself. Thus, when one of its exiled dissidents makes this kind of accusation regarding a disease that’s killed millions of people, we don’t have to reflexively believe it. But we do have to listen.
The FBI has been called in to investigate an alleged assault of a female soldier by a group of Afghan refugees being held at Fort Bliss, Texas.
“We can confirm a female service member supporting Operation Allies Welcome reported being assaulted on Sept. 19 by a small group of male evacuees at the Doña Ana Complex in New Mexico,” said Lt. Col. Allie Payne, director of public affairs for Fort Bliss and the 1st Armored Division.
The service member was given medical care and counseling, Payne said, according to KVIA-TV.
“We take the allegation seriously and appropriately referred the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Payne added.
Jeanette Harper of the FBI’s El Paso division said “we received the referral from Fort Bliss and our office is investigating the allegation.”
“Task Force-Bliss is also implementing additional security measures to include increased health and safety patrols, additional lighting, and enforcement of the buddy system at the Dona Ana Complex,” a statement from the fort said, according to Fox News.
“We will cooperate fully with the FBI and will continue to ensure the service member reporting this assault is fully supported.”
Republican Rep. Yvette Herrell of New Mexico called the incident a “tragic failure.”
“My prayers are with the courageous soldier and her family. This is yet another tragic failure in the vetting process for Afghan nationals,” Herrell tweeted on Friday. “The American people deserve answers.”
My prayers are with the courageous soldier and her family. This is yet another tragic failure in the vetting process for Afghan nationals. The American people deserve answers.https://t.co/UB8ehTjCwO
Sen. James Lankford and four other Republican senators have demanded details from the Biden administration on how Afghan refugees are being vetted, according to Fox News.
“The Biden Administration has yet to provide my staff, members of Congress, or the public with basic answers about its vetting procedures for Afghan parolees or demographic information about the Afghan parolee population,” a letter from the senators said.
“How many Afghan nationals are waiting on background checks at a transit site? How many Afghan nationals have been paroled into the United States?”
“What specific categories, classes, or criteria constitute the Administration’s definition of ‘vulnerable Afghans’? How many individuals who have been paroled into the United States fall under each category, class, or criteria?” the letter said.
Lankford has said he has grave concerns.
“We already have reports of some of the locations where some Afghan parolees are being held that there’s been some sexual assaults that have happened in those locations, and we’re trying to get more information about that and to find out what happened to those individuals and where things go,” he said.
The Justice Department recently announced two unrelated indictments of Afghan refugees housed at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.
Bahrullah Noori, 20, faces charges of attempting to engage in a sexual act with a minor using force against the victim, including three counts of engaging in a sexual act with a minor and one alleging the use of force.
Mohammad Haroon Imaad, 32, faces charges of assaulting his spouse by strangling and suffocating her.
There are days when one wonders why the Republican Party thinks they deserve the support of conservatives.
The Reagan revolution turned 40 this year. What do we have to show for it? Roe v. Wade hasn’t been overturned, although there’s a glimmer of hope on that front. There’s no hope on spending; Republican presidents and Congresses might slow the deluge a bit, but they’ve never managed to successfully turn off the debt spigot and have proved especially useless during the last three presidencies.
Our debt now stands at almost $29 trillion — but now the GOP is really putting their foot down on the debt ceiling. Seriously, guys, they mean it this time. It’s not like all of the other times where the Republican establishment has performatively held up passing a debt ceiling increase, only to capitulate shortly thereafter.
And, yes, anti-establishment conservatives have made inroads since 2016 and Donald Trump’s election. The establishment still remains standing, though, and it’s so thoroughly rotten that 134 GOP representatives voted to approve a defense spending bill that all but ensures women will be subject to the draft.
In fact, more Republicans voted for it than against it. The $778 billion National Defense Authorization Act for 2022 passed by a 316-113 vote on Thursday night, according to The Hill. Only 75 Republicans voted against it.
In fact, the only thing stopping the NDAA from passing smoothly was the House Freedom Caucus. The Washington Examiner noted that GOP Freedom Caucus member Rep. Chip Roy of Texas was the most vocal opponent of the bill, making a motion to adjourn the House during the debate in protest of Democratic leadership not allowing a vote on a proposed amendment to remove the draft provision. The motion forced the entire House to vote and delayed business in the lower chamber.
“I will always vote against any bill that permits the government to draft my daughter and I will not support any Republican who votes in favor of its final passage, regardless of excuse,” Roy said.
While we haven’t had a draft since the Vietnam War days, 18-year-old men still have to register with the Selective Service System. The NDAA removes the language specifying “male citizen” or “male person” when it comes to who needs to register, replacing it with “citizen” and “person,” respectively.
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First, this bill forces young women to register for the draft, which Rep. Roy has been against from the start.
That wasn’t the only woke provision of the NDAA, however. Roy’s office cataloged some of the other unpleasant changes wrought by the Democrats, including red-flag laws for summarily seizing the firearms of service members and a proposed Office of Countering Extremism which sounds every bit as Orwellian as the name implies.
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It also creates an “Office of Countering Extremism” which could expel troops who engage in so-called “extremist activities” or belong to an “extremist organization”
Given the rampant wokeism we’ve seen in Biden’s Pentagon, you know EXACTLY how this will be used. pic.twitter.com/8p84rkhE0k
There’s also language that stipulates “any new non-tactical Federal vehicle purchased by the Department of Defense for use outside of combat should, to the greatest extent practicable, be an electric or zero-emission vehicle.”
“Not later than September 30, 2022, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to Congress a plan to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the Department of Defense, including Department of Defense functions that are performed by contractors, in line with science-based emissions targets,” the NDAA reads.
It also contains a “plant-based protein pilot program” which stipulates that the term indicates “edible products made to approximate the taste and texture of livestock-based protein, or vegan or vegetarian meat alternative product made using plant and other non-livestock-based proteins that are consistent with the nutritional properties of meat products.”
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And if electric military vehicles aren’t your thing, maybe we can interest you in some fake meat?
The NDAA directs the Navy to spend time on a pilot program to offer plant-based protein options at forward operating bases. pic.twitter.com/b3MO445bJS
A woke military that drafts our daughters, wastes resources on Green New Deal garbage, holds no one accountable for Afghanistan disaster, and prioritizes playing leftist politics over destroying our enemies.
If you want to find out if your representative voted for the NDAA, you can the roll call here. Keep in mind that it’s not just the list of the usual GOP disappointments who voted yea on this one. House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California voted for it, as did House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana, Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Elise Stefanik of New York — usually names one would hope to see on the opposite side of the ledger.
Banks defended his position to the Washington Examiner by saying he didn’t want his daughters drafted either, but, you know, we’re going to keep on debating whether or not that happens.
“The NDAA is never perfect, and this is the case where the good far outweighs the bad,” Banks said. “I have daughters, I don’t want them drafted into the military. I want our military to be a volunteer force. But I think those debates are going to continue to occur even after the NDAA goes into effect.”
Not really, Rep. Banks. You just voted for an NDAA that ends that debate entirely. And, if your GOP brethren in the upper chamber have the same attitude, they’ll pass it, too.
GOP Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, meanwhile, said just because a woman is drafted doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be on the front lines.
“There are still physical requirements for certain jobs that you have to be able to perform and fulfill,” said Wenstrup, a former Army surgeon, to the Examiner. “It doesn’t mean that, you know, if there is a draft, a woman necessarily has to go be in the infantry.”
A draft implies a lack of choice in the matter, however — and whether or not a woman wants to serve in the military or whether they want to serve on the front lines has always been a choice.
For that matter, it’s been a voluntary matter for men since the Vietnam War, as well. However, the Selective Service requirements have always reflected a bedrock cultural value: that, if military conscription is required due to the exigencies of warfare, it’s a uniquely male responsibility to answer the call.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted to throw that shared value out the window.
It’s no surprise Democrats voted that way; the left currently seeks to eliminate any difference between male and female, no matter how glaringly biological or natural that difference may be. Protecting the right of women to stay out of the draft is less important than protecting the right to soy meat, as far as the Democrats are concerned. That 134 Republicans joined them in their delusions is a disgrace, however.
Congress is better in Republican hands than in Democrats, but there are days you wonder how much better.
Has the GOP earned your vote through their actions? Ask your daughter when she fills out her Selective Service card.
To WOAI-TV in San Antonio, Texas, the Israelite School of Universal and Practical Knowledge’s appearance at the Del Rio International Bridge migrant camp in order to hand out food to illegal immigrants, mostly from Haiti, was a sob story.
Headline: “EXCLUSIVE: Group of Americans go through extreme measures to help Haitian migrants.” The outlet mentioned that some people call the group controversial, but the majority of the report focused on Border Patrol turning them away at Del Rio.
The group’s 12-vehicle caravan ended up going into Mexico through Eagle Pass.
“We got together in San Antonio went to Costco and Sams, got food, water, diapers, and toiletries. We went to Del Rio, when we got there, Border Patrol told us we could only give it to a church,” group member Yatazaq Ban Yahawadah said. “We told them we did not want to do that because the people are not at a church, they are under a bridge.”
“We came around through the Mexico side, now we are in Mexico to give our brothers the resources we have for them,” he added.
The report from WOAI’s Yami Virgin again mentioned that the group was controversial, but not why. That’s somewhat important, because the ISUPK is considered an extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others.
The ISUPK is one of a number of groups that believe black people and other people of color are “true Israelites” and that Jews are imposters. Unless you live in a major city and have been subject to the group’s incessant sidewalk proselytizing, the last time you probably thought about the movement was the Nick Sandmann case, where a black Israelite’s hate-preaching was a catalyst for the events of that day.
As Breitbart noted, the SPLC — usually considered the gold standard in determining hate groups by the media despite its raging leftist bias — deems the ISUPK and similar groups to be anti-Semitic, homophobic and racist.
“The [Black Hebrew Israelite] hate groups listed by the SPLC believe in ideas of black supremacy and bigotry against Caucasians, Jews and members of the LGBTQ community. They believe that, as members of the 12 Tribes of Israel — consisting only of African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans — they are God’s ‘chosen people.’ Jews are considered ‘imposters,’” the SPLC’s write-up reads.
“Caucasians and members of the LGBTQ community are deemed ‘devils.’ Extreme Black Hebrew Israelites believe that individuals outside the movement are deserving of slavery or death. The most numerous of the BHI groups in the United States are under the banners of Israel United in Christ, the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge and Great Millstone.”
The ADL also notes the “ISUPK sells clothing under the brand UPKFRESH. Their products include a t-shirt depicting a slave ship and the Middle Passage of the slave trade with the words ‘True Holocaust.’”
They may look like street preachers dressed in outfits professional wrestlers would turn down for being too outlandish, but keep in mind this is can be an extremist ideology that spreads hate. Lest we forget, Black Hebrew Israelites were behind a 2019 anti-Semitic shooting spree in Jersey City, New Jersey, which killed four people, three of them in a kosher supermarket.
The WOAI report, meanwhile, did little but lionize the ISUPK.
Here’s another quote from Yahawadah, when asked about traveling through an area of Mexico that’s subject to a level 4 warning for violence by the State Department: “Being in a dangerous situation that is being black, Hispanic or Native American. Our lives are dangerous, we live in the most dangerous communities, we live in the worst dangerous conditions.”
There were no questions about motives involved. There’s been a border crisis going on for months now. You would think it might occur to local media to ask a black nationalist group known for hate-preaching why its members decided to show up for Haitian migrants when they hadn’t gotten involved previously.
Rest assured, if the Proud Boys showed up with supplies for anyone, no matter what their race, the headline wouldn’t be “EXCLUSIVE: Group of Americans go through extreme measures to help [insert group here].” This isn’t a complaint, mind you; that’s what media is supposed to do.
An extremist group known for aggressive proselytizing shouldn’t be given a chance to use the chaos at the border as an opportunity to spread its message under the auspices of providing food and supplies to migrants. If it is, local media shouldn’t be amplifying it. Period.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sent one of her Democratic colleagues into a meltdown on Friday after House Democrats overwhelmingly voted to pass a bill to legalize all abortion without restrictions nationwide.
Greene, of Georgia, is a pure fighter, especially with regard to protecting children. That much was obvious on the Capitol steps when she got into a verbal spat with Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan.
NPR reported 218 Democrats voted to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act. The bill is more or less the party’s answer to state laws that restrict the ability of physicians to kill children in the womb up until birth.
The bill won’t go anywhere in the Senate without 60 votes. That didn’t stop Greene from savaging Dingell for being vehemently pro-abortion, and for attempting to chastise her over decorum following the vote.
At first, Democrats disregarded Greene, reported Bryan Metzger of Business Insider, who shared video of the confrontation on Twitter.
A number of congresswomen, including Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, reportedly refused to interact with Greene amid an argument that started out with barbs about the border crisis and which party stands up for women. Omar declined to interact with the conservative firebrand, but Dingell stuck around to receive a verbal melee, Metzger’s video showed.
“Congresswoman, I wish you would stand with women,” Dingell said to Greene, who wasn’t in the mood for any lecturing from a left-wing abortion proponent.
“Stand with women? I do. Stand with motherhood, how about that?” Green fired off at Dingell. “You know, there’s unborn women, do they not have a right to life? Killing babies up until birth — are you serious right now? Why don’t you stand with women? Stand with mothers.”
this was one of several exchanges Greene had with Democrats on the steps. as they were lining up below, Greene got into a spat with another woman over who stood with women more while muttering that “Build Back Better for Women” is a “joke” pic.twitter.com/uIOBii1ya4
After Greene told her Democratic colleague she should be “ashamed” for supporting the killing of unborn children, Dingell responded, “You should be ashamed of your incivility.”
As if civility matters when lives are on the line. These people are disgusting, and Greene let them have it.
“You know what? Killing a baby up until birth is a lack of civility, it’s called murder,” Green reminded Dingell.
She added: “Hey, how about the border down there? Lack of civility — how about lack of laws?”
Dingell, the abortion proponent, then attempted to portray herself as being a steward for Christ.
“We have lots of laws we follow, and you should practice the basic thing you’re taught in church — respect your neighbor,” the Democrat stated.
“Taught in church, are you kidding me? Try being a Christian and supporting life!” Green shouted.
Greene, who regularly shares videos of her fitness regimen, then told Dingell — who appeared to stumble on a step — “Watch your step, lady, you’re going to fall down. Control yourself.”
At one point just a few years ago, seeing two members of the House shout at one another on the Capitol steps might have been viewed as beneath the office of an elected official. In this day and age, it’s refreshing.
Democrats have challenged every social and governmental more throughout the last several years. This month, they’re coming after unborn children like never before.
Greene, a first-term congresswoman and fighter, isn’t going to let them get away with it — at least not without sharing a few words.+
If you’re robbing a store with someone — of course, you should never rob a store, but let’s play with the argument here — you should have no doubt that he or she would trade you for their freedom.
You don’t have to watch dozens of hours of “Cops,” like me, in order to know that.
And yet, one member of a trio of apparent wrong-doers never got the memo.
According to KMOV-TV, the trio allegedly had made a habit of shoplifting from Hibbett’s stores in the Edwardsville, Illinois, area. It was only a matter of time before they pushed their luck too far.
That time happened on Labor Day weekend.
Employees at the Troy Road Hibbett’s location had heard about the string of thefts and were carefully watching their store, KMOV reported.
Sure enough, the trio waltzed in and allegedly stole a bunch of clothes. They thought everything was going smoothly, but police already had been called.
When the cops arrived, two of the alleged thieves immediately hopped into a gray Ford Fusion while the third thief struggled to open the door.
Instead of waiting for their comrade to situate themselves, the other two suspects decided to speed off, leaving the third suspect, later identified as 19-year old Dakayla Colemon, at the mercy of law enforcement.
Colemon tried to run away but made it only about 30 feet before she was arrested, according to KMOV. Authorities said Colemon had two other active arrest warrants in nearby counties.
She has been charged with retail theft and is being held on $30,000 bond.
That amount is not small — Colemon had to have stolen a lot in order to be considered that dangerous.
The incident was caught on video and posted on TikTok, where it had more than 38,000 likes as of Sept. 19:
As I said earlier, there is no honor among thieves. It is laughable to think someone will act virtuously while committing an illegal act.
Colemon learned the hard way that her trio was neither a friendship nor a team. It was an alliance of convenience that was quickly abandoned once it had outlived its usefulness.
All in all, this is a lesson to any stupid teenagers who decide they want to shoplift with their friends: Crime doesn’t pay, and friendships seem to wither once criminal records are involved.+
Once upon a time, not that long ago, we had something called reporters in the United States. Millennials and Gen-Z’ers may not believe this, but there were actually people employed by newspapers and television stations who would gather the news and then report on it without any overt political spin or coordinated narrative. Reporters have now largely vanished from the mainstream media landscape in favor of journalists, making it even more important to share episodes like “Why Does the IC Assessment Ignore Established Facts On COVID-19 Origins?” with people who still think outlets like CNN and the big three networks are just reporting the facts. Hans Mahncke and Jeff Carlson of “Truth Over News” are the real deal when it comes to reporting, and their continued coverage of the hunt to find the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
To be sure, our federal government doesn’t seem to be nearly as interested in where and how COVID-19 originated as Mahncke and Carlson. Having already done an episode on the two separate labs in Wuhan that could easily have been the source of the initial outbreak, they now turn their attention to the Intelligence Community assessment of COVID-19’s origins—at least the declassified portions. This is, of course, the report President Joe Biden ordered be compiled when his administration could no longer pretend an accidental lab leak wasn’t just as plausible an origin to the pandemic, if not more so, than the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus jumped from animals to humans. This assessment dropped at the tail end of our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and has received almost nothing in the way of media coverage. There have been plenty of print stories done, largely boiling down to the Intelligence Community thinking we’ll never know where it started, but televised coverage is almost nonexistent.
That’s what makes this episode important, as Mahncke and Carlson not only highlight various parts of the assessment, but give an analysis of how truthful or potentially misleading the assessment is. As Mahncke states at the outset of the episode, the IC assessment says a lot about the Biden administration’s desire to let China off the hook for unleashing the pandemic on the world, whether they intended to or not. Much of what they review seems to fall under the umbrella of plausible deniability while relying on the reader’s willful suspension of disbelief. Given how readily most of our government officials are to make a big show about vowing to get to the bottom of something, only to do little more than shake their fists and gnash their teeth, it seems unlikely that much more will come out of the Intelligence Community, which currently seems light on intelligence.
To illustrate this point, Carlson and Mahncke start out reviewing the very first paragraph of the “Key Takeaways” of the assessment, which in just a few sentences manages to be accurate, plausible, and misleading. The important thing to note is that what they consider misleading has to do with whether the virus was genetically engineered, as this term is used in the vaguest sense with no concrete definition. As Mahncke explains, Dr. Fauci has been hard to pin down, to say the least, on what he thinks qualifies genetic engineering. It’s a neat trick he’s used to try to claim the National Institute of Health never funded gain of function research (they did) and his dodginess surrounding genetic engineering gives the IC an out when making their assessment. Mahncke is not nearly so forgiving, pointing out the Wuhan Institute of Virology was genetically modifying bat viruses, and had been for more than a decade. He also explains the concept of conducting serial passage experiments, a process that is meant to alter the genes of a pathogen at an artificially increased rate of speed. This is the gain of function research Fauci insisted isn’t gain of function research, where scientists force a virus to go through multiple mutations that would typically take decades in a much shorter amount of time. Not calling this genetic engineering is the height of splitting hairs and doesn’t pass muster with Mahncke. The last sentence of the assessment’s opening paragraph claims that China had no foreknowledge of the virus before the outbreak, which Mahncke rates as poorly worded and mixed in its honesty. This claim hardly seems probable once Mahncke dismantles it with cold hard facts of information we do know—information that precedes the outbreak by a dozen years.
Carlson attacks the next portion of the assessment and the agencies’ agreement that it is as likely that the virus has natural origins as it is that it had manmade origins. Here the assessment is again splitting hairs, as Carlson points out that if exposure occurred due to contact with an infected animal, it hardly matters whether that contact happened accidentally inside a lab with poor safety controls in place or outside in a wet market. Either way, it could be considered a natural exposure because the infection came from an animal, rather than breaking a vial of the virus and inhaling it. It is yet another misleading statement meant to make it sound like the IC really did try to find the origins of this, even though they don’t seem to have tried very hard or put much logical thought into the matter. Carlson also has the receipts for their decision to call out this claim as intentionally non-specific.
Why Does the IC Assessment Ignore Established Facts On COVID-19 Origins? | Truth Over News [Full Episode]
Carlson moves onto the bullet points of the “Key Takeaways” and quickly blows up the idea that it’s most likely the SARS-CoV-2 virus had natural origins, dismissing the claim as illogical and inaccurate. He presents documented evidence contradicting the IC’s reasoning and their seeming desire to continue providing cover for China, in addition to highlighting that we’ve still not found the “missing link” animal that allowed COVID-19 to jump to humans if it did have a purely natural origin completely unrelated to any lab experiments. He reminds the viewer of the SARS outbreak in 2003, nearly 20 years ago, when we were able to determine the originating animal in just a couple of months. Why, with all the medical advances that have taken place since then, are we still unable to find not only the “bridge” animal but figure out exactly how this virus evolved to bind more perfectly to human cells than any animal cell we’ve tested, including the presumptive pangolin progenitor? It also has such a higher kill rate than other SARS viruses we’ve encountered that it seems even more unlikely to have developed without any human intervention.
Mahncke tackles more of the bullet points, assessing the claim that the virus probably escaped a laboratory after an accidental infection as accurate, even if only one IC agency found that to be the most likely origin. It’s astounding to anyone capable of deductive reasoning to think that just one agency came to this conclusion, but it’s fairly evident under our current administration that China must be protected from blame at all costs, even if it requires ignoring the documented safety hazards and risky nature of working with bat viruses at both labs operating in Wuhan. Even more unbelievable is that three additional IC agencies think both a lab leak and natural origins are equally possible. It is again a sign that when it comes to COVID-19, our Intelligence Community appears to have strapped on its dunce cap.
The final claim of the “Key Takeaways” is that there’s just no way to find out more about COVID’s origins and is assessed by Carlson and Mahncke as both inaccurate and misdirection. There are plenty of other scientists to ask questions about what they know, particularly in the West, including Anthony Fauci. Surely Fauci would be willing to turn over any and all information they have on the virus, wouldn’t he? At the same time, it’s ridiculous at this point to expect China to give any more information than they already have on just how this pandemic started, and it shouldn’t be necessary given how many independent researchers have been able to dig up information on their own.
This episode is crucial to view and share as we move ever closer to two years since this virus first appeared, particularly with the number of governments continuing to exploit the pandemic to wrestle freedom from their citizenry. The number of Americans who still believe the government has their best interests at heart when it comes to fighting COVID is truly frightening. Maybe if some of them watch this episode of “Truth Over Facts,” they’ll realize our current administration appears to care more about protecting China than protecting us.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used its gatekeeper role over the immense economic power of China, and its political influence campaigns abroad, to silence global media and influence nations and international organizations globally, on the human rights atrocity of forced organ harvesting. The summit, held between Sept. 17 and Sept. 26, sheds light on not only this, but on what one participant calls a “diplomacy of silence.”
Despite incontrovertible evidence, Beijing denies that it is currently conducting forced organ harvesting and has gotten the World Health Organization (WHO) to support the CCP’s denials. But the WHO assessment is faulty. According to Lord Hunt in the United Kingdom, “it was revealed by the UK government in 2019 that the World Health Organization’s assessment is based on China’s own self-assessment and that the WHO has not carried out its own assessment of [the] Chinese organ transplant system.”
Organizers of the World Summit demonstrate that CCP pressure has decreased media coverage of forced organ harvesting in China, leading nations and international organizations with little incentive to take the costly steps necessary to address the problem.
“Many members of the news media have failed to report truthfully on this atrocity but bowed to CCP pressure and published paid propaganda instead,” the organizers wrote on the summit website. “Societies around the world are kept ignorant of the dangers of becoming complicit with forced organ harvesting crimes.”
The founder of the nonprofit group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) and host of the summit, Dr. Torsten Trey, stated on Sept. 17 that the summit looks “into the role of the news media and the issue of censorship. By default, the first task of the news media is to report facts and truths, however, another important aspect of the media is to connect people. Over the past fifteen years [since the New York Times broke the story of forced organ harvesting in China], the mainstream media has failed to connect the people in the free world with the victims of forced organ harvesting in China. This separation between the readers and the victims is another, often neglected aspect of censorship.”
Torsten Trey, the executive director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, speaks at an event in Taipei on Feb. 27, 2013. (Chen Po-chou/Epoch Times)
Trey noted that the World Summit is an attempt to bridge the divide between citizens and victims of forced organ harvesting.
Dr. Weldon Gilcrease, director of Oncology at the University of Utah School of Medicine, told the summit that the extensive evidence of forced organ harvesting has gone unrecognized by “most of the medical community, and indeed most of the world.”
When Gilcrease attempted at his own university to stop training Chinese doctors in transplants, arguing that they would likely use the knowledge to murder unwilling donors, his administration opposed him, saying that “there’s no doubt that forced organ harvesting is happening, but that taking a stance against a large, strong country such as China could be dangerous both to our institution, as well as the undergraduate and graduate schools that we serve at our university.” He was told that “if we said anything [about these atrocities], China would simply send all of its students to Texas.”
Several other summit participants called for an end to the international training of doctors from China in transplant techniques. Dr. Andre Gattolin, a senator from France and co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), criticized “developed countries which, in the name of sacrosanct medical and health cooperation, have proceeded without precaution to transfers of skills and technologies which have led to the shameful abuses observed today in China.”
Gattolin noted that France has “widely taken part in the training of numerous Chinese surgeons in the very delicate technique of organ transplantation.” As a result, “our trust—granted too naively—has been betrayed. We failed to demand a right of supervision over what might have resulted, and those who were tricked in the name of sharing knowledge and a certain scientific humanitarianism still refuse to acknowledge their share of responsibility.”
Carlos Iglesias Jimenez, an international human rights lawyer from Spain, said at the summit that Western governments and international organizations have not been tough enough to confront the CCP and condemn forced organ harvesting.
“We have many examples of this, the CCP has infiltrated so many international organizations: the United Nations Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, the United Nations itself, managing to ensure that everything goes unnoticed, that everything is concealed, that these events can never be generally and publicly known by society and the whole world. And they are succeeding with the complicit silence of Western governments and international institutions and international organizations,” he stated.
According to retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general Robert Spalding, the CCP’s use of carrots and sticks against international democratic processes and deliberations on forced organ harvesting amount to “political warfare.” He told the conference on Sept. 19 that political warfare, in the form of influence through economic elites, is used to immobilize democracies to these atrocities.
Spalding said, “Political warfare is used to desensitize, to deflect any criticism on understanding of things like the genocide of the Uyghur population, the lockdown and control of the people of Hong Kong, the mass incarceration and organ harvesting of the Falun Gong, and the outright oppression of … certain elements of the Chinese population, particularly those that … the Chinese Communist Party fears.”
Retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general Robert Spalding in Washington on May 29, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)
Françoise Hostalier, a member of the French Parliament, explained that the failure to acknowledge that Chinese leaders are operating on discrepant moral and ethical principles is because “China is an unavoidable economic partner, which is increasingly successful in many scientific fields, and which is bringing more and more territories and countries under its domination. There is a great risk that our researchers, doctors, laboratories, industrialists, and students, through scientific or economic exchanges, will find themselves complicit in the inhuman and criminal practices of their Chinese counterparts, which are contrary to all ethics, but without being aware of it.”
Hermann Tertsch, a member of the European Parliament from Spain, criticized the mainstream media for failing in its duty to cover the crimes of the CCP. “The criteria of the media world, which has hegemony over the world’s communication, are criteria that have been increasingly defined in one direction over the last 50 years, and it is in this direction that the crimes committed by the Chinese dictatorship are treated in such a benevolent way.”
Tertsch said that images critical of the CCP “have been disappearing from the networks, not only in the Chinese networks where nothing can be found about that tragedy of 32 years ago [the Tiananmen Square massacre], [but] also in the Western media, by Chinese desire or by the desire of so many of China’s partners, as we have among those who applaud in Davos, with those who applaud Xi Jinping, the great giants of the big takers of the big technology companies, of the big networks, we all know their names.”
He continued by saying that we are indulgent of CCP crimes because “they manufacture a lot there, because they have many economic relations, because they admire the model, because they want to apply a similar model.”
Democracies in the West could hold the CCP accountable, according to Tertsch, but “they prefer a big globalist regime where every person is anonymous and interchangeable, and we can take organs from one person and give them to a higher bidder or to someone who suits us for some reason.”
Economic interests, according to Tertsch, “lead these Western elites to be complicit with the Chinese Communist Party … to hide the monstrosity of the transplants, which are taking away, we do not know how many thousands of political prisoners, of common prisoners, of people from the Falun Gong movement, of dissidents.”
The world has a responsibility to face squarely the atrocity that is forced organ harvesting. That it is mostly imposed on highly vulnerable populations in China, namely the Falun Gong and potentially the Uyghurs as well, and that these populations have been targeted for cultural eradication, brings forced organ harvesting to the level of a means of genocide, per the U.N. definition. As forced organ harvesting is also a commercial medical procedure, those who support human rights face an entirely new type of crime against humanity: medical genocide for profit. The mainstream media must do a better job of covering this issue, or it loses any claim to be an unbiased conscience of the community.
Californians’ recent increase in claims for unemployment insurance represented 60 percent of the increase for the entire United States.
According to the report (pdf) this week from the U.S. Department of Labor on unemployment insurance claims for the week ending Sept. 18, claims across the U.S. totaled 306,209, up 40,307 from the previous week.
According to same report, claims in California were up 24,221 from the previous week.
According to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the overall population of California, at 39.5 million, is only 11.9 percent of the entire U.S. population of 331.5 million.
That means the increase in claims filed by Californians from the previous week is five times their proportion of the overall U.S. population (60 percent of the increase versus 12 percent).
The 24,000 increase is 60 percent of the 40,000 increase in claims for the entire U.S.
Looking at absolute numbers rather than the change, total claims in California for unemployment insurance for the week ending August 18 totaled 75,817.
The approximately 75,000 claims in California represent about 25 percent of the 300,000 claims for all of the US.
This points to possibly less hiring during the California recall election, which completed on Sept. 14.
It also may point to a number of school districts in California allowing their teachers more time to decide whether to retire.
The proportion of Californians filing for unemployment insurance claims is two times their proportion of the overall U.S. population (25 percent versus 12 percent).
The most recent data from the State of California’s Employment Development Department showed a strong economy four weeks before the recall election. The most recent state-level unemployment report addressed data from a survey taken during the week including Aug. 11, when the unemployment rate fell to 7.5 percent from 7.6 percent the previous month.
Now that the recall election has been decided and policy makers can get back to work, the economy in California as measured by claims for unemployment insurance may start to look more like the overall U.S. economy. Time will tell.
Former assistant principal sounded alarm over school’s failure to report violent threats
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.—A Florida educator has filed a lawsuit against Lee County schools after being fired last week for sounding the alarm that her school was not reporting violent threats, which is required by state law.
The former assistant principal also contended as part of her lawsuit that she was discriminated against on the basis of her ethnicity and health issues and wants to be compensated with back pay, front pay, insurance costs, benefits, and damages.
Peggy Slichter, who has spent two decades as an educator, said that the school she worked for, Manatee Elementary, failed to report several student-involved “violent and disruptive incidents” that, by Florida statute, are supposed to be reported regularly.
A week ago, Slichter had told local Fort Myers television station WINK News that she had serious concerns about the district’s safety reporting and had been fired for pushing for state guidelines to be followed, the outlet reported. After that interview, Slichter was released from her job as assistant principal at Manatee Elementary School.
She said she has evidence compiled with reports of several violent and disruptive incidents involving students during the 2020-2021 school year. She claims most of the reports “never left the school building,” and she said she knew this because she had “access to the database.”
WINK News reporter Peter Fleischer confirmed to the Epoch Times that he saw Slichter’s binder while he was at her home interviewing her on Wednesday.
“There were a lot of documents in that binder,” he said via telephone on Thursday.
However, Fleischer and FOX-4 News reported that they could not verify the authenticity of the reports because the Lee County School District denied a public records request, saying the “reports are not public information by law.”
Slichter’s attorney, Ben Yormak, confirmed to The Epoch Times that the binder is real and contains numerous incidents that have gone unreported.
The Lee County School District declined to answer questions due to the litigation and an ongoing internal investigation. A response to the case has not yet been filed and a court date has not been assigned. It has until next month to file a response.
The former assistant principal said she is not waiting for Lee County to conclude their in investigation and she has sent a letter to the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) asking for “Whistleblower protection and an investigation into non-reporting of SESIR incidents,” referring to the School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting System.
The Epoch Times reached out to the FDOE to confirm her request, but they did not reply before press time.
SESIR collects data on incidents of crime, violence, and disruptive behaviors, ranging from verbal threats to aggravated assault, that occur 24-hours and 365 days per year. The incidents can occur on school buses, school grounds and any school-sponsored event on or off campus. Per statute, these incidents are reported by each school to its district office. The district then provides this data to the FDOE.
The SESIR system was created in 1995 to help schools track incidents and “analyze patterns of violent, criminal or disruptive activity.” After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, a public safety commission asked the FDOE to implement stricter reporting standards. The focus of the program is for there to be “complete and objective data from which to design interventions to improve the learning environment.” The data for the 2020-2021 school year have not yet been released.
Florida statutes also provide for consequences for not reporting, or not reporting properly, to the state. The statute charges each school district with making the school superintendent of each district responsible for the incident reporting to ensure a safe school environment. If non-compliance is determined, then the superintendent or employee of the district’s salary will be withheld. In addition, any member of a district school board who is in violation of the provision is subject to suspension and/or removal.
Slichter told Fort Myers FOX News-4 on Wednesday that she has two motives for suing the school board: to get “justice for herself” for wrongful termination by the School District for coming forward with her concerns, and more importantly, she said, to make sure violent threats are properly reported to keep schools safe.
Yormak, who filed the lawsuit, said his client is being penalized for being honest. He has since cut off all media requests for interviews with her.
“Ultimately, harm is being brought to children,” he told The Epoch Times on Thursday. “I know no school wants to be painted as a bad school, but parents and law enforcement need this information so they can do their jobs.”
When asked why the school had not made the reports, Yormak said he thinks they wanted to make it “appear they were more favorable” than they are. “Just like when kids fight, they label it as ‘peer conflict.’”
As for the termination of his client, he said that it was “inappropriate to have an educator fired for seeking compliance with the law. This is somebody who should be getting a pat on the back, if not a promotion.”
Part 3 of the 3-part series ‘China’s Web of Geopolitical and Economic Goals and Objectives’
Since 2013, the Chinese communists under the leadership of Xi Jinping have been diligently pursuing two strategic initiatives focused on building a worldwide colonial empire and restoring China to world leadership: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as “One Belt, One Road”) and Made in China 2025.
In the wake of the economic devastation wrought on the world economy by the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi announced on Sept. 21 at the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly a third grandiose program—the so-called “Global Development Initiative (GDI)” that is intended to “steer global development toward a new stage of balanced, coordinated and inclusive growth.”
According to China Daily, Xi’s new initiative involves six areas: “prioritizing development, a people-centered approach, benefits for all, innovation-driven development, harmony between man and nature, and a commitment to results-oriented actions.” Apparently, the only standard Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda phrase missing from Xi’s announcement was the euphemism “toward a shared future,” which underscores all ChiCom “altruism” that has been trumpeted in recent months by the CCP’s media.
If Xi was truly serious about GDI and his vision for the future, he would have reined in the myriad of secondary initiatives and goals that the CCP apparatchiks have been relentlessly pursuing at the world’s expense over the past several years. A number of these were previously summarized in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.
But maybe Xi merely “forgot” to mention that GDI, BRI, and those secondary initiatives and goals are meant to result in the world bowing to CCP leadership in all spheres of human endeavors because that is the ultimate objective of the sticky Spider Dragon web of ChiCom “benevolence” being offered to the world.
This third part of the series completes the exposure of the CCP’s secondary initiatives and goals and lays bare the ChiComs’ real intentions: to control all aspects of human endeavors. The scope and diabolical synergy across those initiatives is breathtaking.
Conquer Space
The goal is to dominate space in every way, but especially in military and economic domains. The Chinese missions to Mars and the moon are window dressing used to advertise ChiCom scientific prowess and leadership in advanced space technologies, as well as to masquerade the weaponization of space by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), as noted here.
A Long March-2F carrier rocket, carrying the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft and a crew of three astronauts to China’s new space station, lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi desert, in northwest China on June 17, 2021. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
Win Without Fighting
The ChiComs seek to achieve all of their objectives, ultimately leading to economic and military global dominance, without the need for kinetic warfare. Rather, they exploit political and psychological warfare to achieve a fait accompli in the minds of their adversaries, mainly the United States and its allies.
Exploit the United Front Work Department to Win Overseas Friends
The United Front Work Department provides cover for intelligence agents (spies) operating under the Ministry of State Security and has tentacles reaching into the Confucius Institutes, Thousand Talents program, Chinese news services, Overseas Chinese Affairs Offices, and the Cyberspace Administration of China aimed at influencing foreign opinion and winning friends for ChiCom policies.
Oust the US From the Middle East
This objective is a “two-fer” for Beijing: destroy U.S. influence in the Middle East and gain access to massive supplies of oil and gas. Energy-poor China is investing billions under their BRI to develop the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor consisting of highways, rail lines, and pipelines from the port of Gwadar on the Indian Ocean to Xinjiang (East Turkestan). This corridor will be the transmission belt to China for Middle East oil, including oil from Iran, with whom the ChiComs have also established a strategic relationship, as noted here.
Exploit Merchant Seamen to Control the World’s Shipping
The goal here is to dramatically expand the number of qualified and experienced merchant seamen and subsidize their employment by other nations’ shipping industries in order to monitor, surveil, and influence shipping operations around the world.
Implement Global Ocean Governance
The CCP objective here is to substitute China’s standards, technology, and protocols for the international conventions such as UNCLOS that presently determine conduct, responsibilities, and maritime law on the seas of the world. The effort also involves developing a network of surveillance satellites capable of monitoring sea-going traffic around the world, as well as convincing other nations to use the Beidou Navigation Satellite System in lieu of other commercial satellite navigation systems.
A boy looks at the BeiDou Satellite Navigation System at an exhibition at the National Museum of China in Beijing on Feb. 27, 2019. (Wamg Zhao/AFP via Getty Images)
Collect and Exploit the World’s DNA
U.S. government advisers warned that the Chinese regime has been collecting genetic data in order to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and this effort could “potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply,” according to a Reuters report.
Dominate the Indo-Pacific Region
This goal is to expand Chinese military bases throughout the region in order to counteract U.S. geopolitical dominance, as well as to place additional pressures on key U.S. allies in the region, including India, Australia, and Japan (which together with the United States comprise the Quad).
Replace US Brands With Chinese Labels
The ChiComs seek to displace U.S. brand names with Chinese labels. While this might seem to be simply standard competition, the issue is much more complex and important, as popular brands provide cultural and psychological influences that can be exploited because each one is linked with the country of origin.
Become the Dominant Producer of Industrial Goods in the World
Acknowledging the great strides made in recent decades toward this goal, Beijing’s mouthpiece People’s Daily crowed that “China is the world’s largest producer of over 220 types of industrial products.” Production leadership translates to geopolitical influence and leverage—the underlying objective.
Replace Western-Style Democracy With Chinese ‘Whole Democracy’
This is a ChiCom psychological play to leverage the West’s support for democracy, but with “Chinese characteristics” controlled by the CCP. The word “whole” implies that traditional Western democracy is somehow incomplete and deficient, and that the ChiCom version is better.
Control All Data and Information
The objective here is to limit the exchange of data and information among citizens and entities to that which is approved by the state—and only the state! In other words, George Orwell’s “1984” writ large on the rest of the world but with Chinese characteristics.
Convert the South China Sea Into a ‘Chinese Lake’
Beijing’s goal is to seize control of natural resources in the area and to simultaneously intimidate China’s neighbors. Chinese efforts involve sovereignty disputes and the building of artificial islands controlled by the People’s Liberation Army.
Chinese dredgers work on the construction of artificial islands on and around Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea on May 2, 2015. (U.S. Navy)
Promote ‘Common Prosperity’ Through Total Control of the Private Sector
Common prosperity is another one of those meaningless Marxist euphemisms that sound good as they roll off the tongue but whose meaning is murky and obfuscated. The CCP has been using it to describe their domestic efforts to deliver improved living standards through the “wise leadership” of ChiCom collectivism.
Exploit the Natural Resources in the Deep Seabed
China has a stranglehold on rare earth element (REE) production and seeks to dominate new REE sources, including those in the deep seabed. Control of REE production provides considerable economic and geopolitical leverage with other industrial nations through “supply chain disruption,” particularly the REE-poor European Union nations.
Subvert International Green Advocates While Masking Domestic Economic Expansion
This goal is about reducing U.S. competitiveness while increasing China’s competitive advantage and expanding the world’s dependency on Chinese manufacturing and production—in this case for “green products” such as solar panels, electric vehicles, and batteries. Only the Western greenies believe ChiCom propaganda that China will achieve its publicly stated goal of “net zero emissions” by 2060. The rest of us know that it’s just another feint in the CCP’s scheming to achieve world economic dominance.
Achieve Information Dominance Around the World
China has invested enormous resources to gain total information dominance in the international arena in order to improve decision-making related to the achievement of all of its goals and objectives. Information dominance involves consuming and understanding all relevant data and information in order to support decision-making. This secondary objective is highly synergistic with all of Beijing’s other secondary objectives.
Foment Discord in the US
Fomenting discord and division in the United States—China’s main rival on the world stage—has been an ongoing ChiCom objective for decades, as reported here and here. Pitting Americans against each other, exploiting economic disparities and “unfairness,” and promoting cultural Marxism throughout American society have been continuing prongs in the relentless ChiCom attack on America.
Build the Infrastructure of a ChiCom World Empire Through Property Acquisition Overseas
Beijing has been making strategic investments in overseas property for years for a variety of purposes, including providing security for the BRI investments, constructing bases for China’s military and navy, acquiring natural resources for future exploitation, and intimidating and pressuring other nations to accommodate Chinese interests. All of those acquisitions over time will form the core infrastructure and network for a ChiCom “colonial world empire.”
A general view of the Trieste Old Port is seen in Trieste, Italy, on April 2, 2019. The historic city of Trieste is preparing to open its new port to China, with Italy becoming the first Group-of-Seven nation to sign on to China’s BRI infrastructure project. (Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images)
Implement the Dual Circulation Model
The objective is to make the Chinese economy less dependent on foreign advanced technologies and supply chains. Chinese companies would become independent of “foreign know-how” while creating domestically produced Chinese products that would be in demand around the world.
Monopolize and Control the World’s Energy Supply
The ChiComs understand that controlling the energy supplies of the future provides them with geopolitical leverage to achieve other objectives. That is why they are exploiting their competitive advantages to capture the energy production market around the world. Controlling the world’s energy resources means controlling the economies of the world.
Dominate the Small Nuclear Reactor Marketplace
Despite all the caterwauling about “green energy,” the only real energy production technology capable of achieving the carbon dioxide reductions desired by green energy advocates is nuclear power (refer to heat exchange ratio comparisons among green energy technologies and the laws of thermodynamics, as well as the German experience with wind and solar as described here). China is moving rapidly to corner the market on exportable nuclear energy capabilities that could be feasibly budgeted by many nations.
Control and Manipulate the World’s Strategic Commodities
Beijing has been successfully acquiring control of strategic commodities for years while building up strategic reserves as both an inflation hedge and also as a means of market manipulation to influence targeted countries. A strategic commodity is a raw material or agricultural product that is considered critical to a nation’s economy such that the economy would suffer significantly if that commodity’s trade and supply is interrupted in any way.
Control Foreign Narratives Through the Use of Artificial Intelligence and Fake Social Media
Beijing has been using aggressive information warfare tactics to influence foreign leaders, diplomats, and other key decision-makers in order to achieve CCP strategic goals and objectives. Part of their information warfare campaign involves the exploitation of social media and artificial intelligence technologies to create fake accounts, bots, and social networks aimed at influencing foreign decision-makers.
Conclusion
This series summarized 52 interlocking initiatives and goals being pursued by the CCP around the world. The ever-expanding Spider Dragon’s web aims to ultimately control and direct all human endeavors: economic, geopolitical, financial, legal, medical, security, travel, individual expression, culture, psychological, ideological, and much more. “Chinese benevolence” and “Chinese altruism”—as expressed by Xi Jinping and the CCP cadres—are oxymorons that camouflage their real objectives. Unbeknownst to many people, the world is meant to pay handsomely for that “benevolence” at the expense of personal and economic freedoms.
I seem to have been fortunate enough to stumble upon the latest vaccine shaming “copy and paste” post some people have decided to share on social media. If you’re vaccinated, good for you. If you’re not vaccinated, good for you. I honestly don’t care what you do with your body because the only person I have any control over is myself.
That being said, I’m honestly tired of staying silent while everybody else, including Joe Biden, go off on their tangents.
You’re vaccinated, and you don’t know what’s in it? You don’t know what’s in hot dogs or treatments for cancer, AIDS, MS, etc.? You don’t know what’s in Tylenol and Ibuprofen and tattoo ink and shampoo and your food? Well, the great thing about living in the information technology age is a lot of that information is available right at your fingertips, presuming of course it hasn’t been censored. We live in a time where we have the ability to know a lot of things that we didn’t know before. There may be a lot of things you don’t know right now, but you have the ability and opportunity to educate yourself. If you decide not to take the time, that’s your business. But that also makes you incredibly lazy and ignorant.
Life is short. And it passes quickly and can change on a dime. I believe all of us still have a lot of things we want to do in this life and experiences we want to share. Places we want to go. People we want to see.
If you seriously think the answer is shaming people who HAVE done their research into getting injected with something that isn’t even a vaccine is going to allow you to get your life back, you’re wrong.
The problem is, we’ve been putting our lives on hold for almost 19 months now. We’ve listened to the science. We kept our kids home from school for a year. We shut down businesses, some forever. We closed our churches, our parks, our gyms, our hiking trails, our beaches, pretty much everything. Obesity of U.S. children increased among 5- through 11-year-olds from 36.2 percent to 45.7 percent. Where’s the outcry over that? How about the excess consumption of processed sugars like high-fructose corn syrup? Where’s your passport for being allowed to be a parent or a human being for that matter? Maybe it’s time for you to remedy that for your fellow man.
And yet some still keep believing the next hurdle you jump over will get you back to your normal lives. But the goalposts keeps moving!
Guess what? You can’t comply your way back to freedom. This will never end if we keep submitting to the latest and greatest “scientific suggestion” that’s being forced on us. Label me a conspiracy theorist? I don’t care. The stats are in my favor as I’m currently at about 50-0 as far as how things are going down. If anything, I identify as a walking spoiler alert.
Personally, I’m appalled and offended that certain people in certain occupations are having to choose between getting injected with an experimental gene therapy (yes, that’s what your “vaccine” is, read the FDA “approval”), or lose their jobs, livelihoods and ability to support their families. It’s abhorrent to think in order to have a place in society, we’d have to inject ourselves with this and show proof to anyone and everyone. I’m sure the Germans in the 1930s allowed fear and division to make them think what was being done to the Jews was fair and justified as well. It’s taken almost 90 years for history to repeat itself. The Nuremberg Code is still in effect and these people enforcing these mandates are in violation of it.
Are these hospitals seriously going to fire nurses and doctors for NOT getting a vaccine in the middle of a pandemic? That’ll be a sight to see. It may resemble our exit from Afghanistan! These medical professionals worked through COVID for 18 months on the frontlines and were last year’s heroes and are now deemed expendable because they don’t want to inject themselves with an experimental vaccine. How about teachers? Are we going to shut down schools again? Parents will LOVE that. Or maybe we should eliminate the teaching certification so any random person can teach our kids? In Oregon you no longer need to show proficiency in reading and math. Will that become the new standard?
I advise you all to read The Thirty Tyrants. There is a ton of corruption in this world and in our government. Our Founding Fathers NEVER meant for our representatives to make lifelong careers in Washington, DC. Some of these younger representatives show promise but if they’re there too long, it’s only a matter of time before their soul and morals obtain a price tag and they’ll be bought and sold to the Devil himself.
How is it okay for these politicians to mandate how we live our lives and lock us down and torment our kids while they go out to expensive dinners indoors unmasked nor socially distanced at The French Laundry? How is it okay to have a 60th birthday party with 600 guests when my father’s funeral was limited to 10 people? How is it acceptable to enforce mask mandates and no social gatherings and be caught at a backyard BBQ doing exactly what was mandated NOT to do? How is it acceptable to say we can’t travel while politicians are off vacationing abroad? How is it okay to close hair salons and most of us went without getting a haircut for a year when you parade maskless inside a salon you had opened especially for you?
I also advise you all to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Turn off the news, the television and the radio. FOLLOW THE MONEY. There’s a medicine that costs 12 cents that could eradicate this virus but instead the $300 billion option is being forced on us. Stop shaming people for the decisions that they make. Stop buying in to this ridiculous rhetoric. This won’t end until we say it ends. People all over the world are starting uprisings because they have had ENOUGH.
I’ve been affected by loss from COVID. I’m not denying the reality or severity of the virus. But Fauci is not my God. Bill Gates’ software and computers get viruses all the time! What is he doing working on and funding vaccines? Ultimately, the only person who knows how many days I have left on this earth is Jesus Christ, and that’s who I’m choosing to put my faith in. Not Fauci, not Pfizer, not Moderna, or whomever else is trying to dictate how I live my life. I do not consent. I will not comply.
For those doctors and nurses who have blatantly stated they won’t treat people who aren’t vaccinated, for the nurse who posted on social media recently that they’ll mess with your ventilator if you’re not vaccinated, I’m sorry, didn’t you all take an OATH when you became licensed? It’s your duty to do your job no matter what state or condition a person is in. Those lives lost are on YOUR hands, not the unvaccinated. And for those people who say the unvaccinated deserve to die? You’re no better than the dictators and tyrants. And even with your vaccine you can still get and spread the virus so YOU also should have to submit to regular tests.
I woke up about 18 months ago. Waking up is painful and disillusioning. But honestly, walking around awake in a world that’s still asleep is more painful and creates a righteous anger inside of you. I pray every day that darkness comes to light, that the truth comes out, and most importantly that those who have committed these crimes against humanity be held accountable.
Hardly a day goes by when we are not assailed by claims of doom and gloom over “climate change,” with some well-known politicians warning us that our world will cease to exist as we know it by 2035 (a short 14 years from now!).
Just a few weeks ago, representatives of the government blamed the catastrophic flooding in New York and New Jersey in the aftermath of Ida on “climate change,” as did another member who earlier blamed another natural weather phenomenon on “climate change.” Apparently, neither understands the difference between “weather” (the cause of fires in California, hurricanes like Ida, tornadoes, etc.) and “climate” (longer-term swings in temperature, precipitation, etc.).
The fact is that, statistically, such “weather” events (e.g., tornadoes) are no more frequent or intense than they have been in the past. Accordingly, you should be excused for asking about the bases of these extravagant claims.
Do the claimants have a magical crystal ball with which they can see the future more clearly than the rest of us, or is it simply the blind leading the blind with some of the blind being more vocal than others? After all, paleontologists and earth scientists will tell you that Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial and it has changed drastically and cyclically during the approximately 2.5-million-year history of the human species.
However, at issue is a more subtle phenomenon related to changes induced by the human species themselves. Humankind has had that capacity for less than 300 years (since the start of the Industrial Revolution, from the mid-1700s).
But, you may say, 300 years is just a “blink of an eye” within typically climatic (not weather) cycles that occur over thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years. For example, 300 years of CO2-producing industrialization represents just 0.3 percent of a 100,000-year ice-age cycle.
To provide the reader with some idea of the complexity of the climate issue, it is necessary to review a few basic facts upon which we can all agree. The major natural climate cycle is the ice ages (Milankovitch cycles) that are due to variations in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit about the sun and which now appear every 100,000 years. Earth’s eccentricity, currently, is near its least elliptic (most circular) and is very slowly decreasing, in a cycle that spans about 100,000 years.
However, variation in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit is considered to be a relatively minor contributor to long-term climate change. There are other factors that need to be considered, including the obliquity (the angle Earth’s axis is tilted with respect to Earth’s orbital plane) and the direction that Earth’s axis of rotation is pointed (“axial precession”).
For about a million years, the obliquity has varied between 22.1o and 24.5o perpendicular to Earth’s orbital plane. That is important because it determines the seasons, and those seasonal swings in temperature can be large (e.g., 80oF in Winnipeg, Manitoba). Currently, the angle (23.4o) is about midway between the extremes and is very slowly decreasing in a cycle of about 41,000 years.
As the angle decreases, the seasons become milder with increasingly warmer winters and cooler summers. Clearly, obliquity is an important contributor to “climate change”, but it is natural and is not induced by human activity.
Earth wobbles on its axis as it rotates (“axial precession”) due to the gravitational influences of the sun and the moon resulting in Earth bulging at the equator, which affects the ocean tides, for example. The axial precession has a cycle of about 25,772 years. This phenomenon also impacts the long-term cycles of the climate by making seasonal contrasts more extreme or less extreme in opposite hemispheres.
While a discussion of this topic is fascinating in its own right, my purpose of introducing it is to show that Earth’s climate is a superposition of at least three natural cycles related to the mechanics of the solar system. Because these cycles have different phases, it is possible that they could constructively or destructively interfere, resulting in extremes of temperature that have nothing to do with humans.
Now, superimposed upon these mechanical cycles, we have the impact of the biosphere (sans humans) with its own impact on the climate, including the CO2/O2 cycle of photosynthesis, water respiration, solar energy reflectance, turbulent atmosphere, ocean currents, variations in solar output, and a myriad of other factors.
My point is that the climate is an exceedingly complex physico-chemical system, and we must ask the question: Do climate models faithfully include each of these phenomena, in a deterministic manner with sufficient detail that they can be described by the relevant constitutive equations and natural law constraints in a form that renders the predictions reliable (see below)? Or are we again being led by the blind?
To be clear, my goal is not to pass judgment on any specific climate model, for that would entail a much deeper analysis than that which I present here. I simply wish to make the reader aware of the stringent conditions that must be met when modeling complex physico-chemical systems, such as our climate, the results of which may impact how future multi-trillion-dollar investments are made.
Hopefully, this discourse will prompt people to ask the right questions before approving such expenditures.
At the outset, it is important for the reader to note that science does not advance by consensus (universal agreement). If everyone agrees on something, it may simply mean that they are all wrong. Such is the case before all revolutionary changes in science (e.g., Einstein’s relativity revolution and Planck’s quantum revolution).
Accordingly, when I hear climate change proponents claim that 97 percent of scientists agree that human-induced climate change is real, I cannot help but think back to Albert Einstein and the other scientific revolutionaries and wonder what they might have thought of that pronouncement!
Likewise, science is based upon proof at the minute level of detail and not upon “belief,” which has no place in the scientific lexicon. When I hear someone proclaim “I believe in climate change,” I shudder and want to respond: “Well, prove it to me.”
Two great philosophies exist with respect to prediction: empiricism, which is the philosophy that everything that we can ever know we must have experienced; and determinism, which posits that we can predict the future from the past upon the basis of the known physical laws (“Laws of Nature”). Thus, all scientists collect data that are converted into knowledge, and that knowledge is eventually used to formulate the Laws of Nature that, unlike the Laws of Man, are inviolate and are true under all circumstances everywhere in the universe.
Indeed, I like to define “science” as the process of transitioning from empiricism (what we observe) to determinism (what we know and can predict) upon the formulation of the Natural Laws. Thus, the Natural Laws represent the condensation of all scientific experience so that when we invoke such a law it contains knowledge extending back thousands of years, to before Aristotle and Archimedes.
Impeding the transition from empiricism to determinism is “complexity.” Volumes have been written on complexity, and space does not allow even a cursory review of the subject here.
“Complexity” is like driving on a highway on a foggy night. The fog obscures your vision and allows you to see just a short distance along your path. Now you switch on your high beams, and lo and behold, you can see much farther. Thus, you have used an instrument (the high beams of your automobile) to allow you to see farther and with greater clarity.
So it is in science; in fact, it is fair to say that the digital computer (our “high beams”) has allowed us to advance science more over the past four decades than science had advanced throughout previous history. In other words, the computer has greatly extended our intellects, which is the role of models!
The development of models in human intellectual pursuits is a very complex subject that extends well beyond this op-ed, but an excellent, somewhat technical review is given by Frigg and Hartmann [1]. I will focus on deterministic models, as their predictive powers are so much greater than those of empirical models since “prediction” is the single most important attribute that climate models claim to possess.
All deterministic models have a common structure, either explicitly or implicitly. All deterministic models must have a theoretical basis that is, itself, based upon observation. These observations may be presented as postulates or assumptions, with postulates being based directly on observation.
Thus, it is important to note that a theory can be no more valid than the postulates and assumptions upon which it is based. Also, the postulates must not presuppose the output of the model; that is, the postulates must not accept as an empirical fact that human-induced global warming is occurring.
Thus, if one starts with a postulate that states that the climate is changing and that humans are responsible for that change, the chances are that the model will predict exactly that, but the prediction will be invalid because of the input of even unrecognized bias.
The prediction environment is also problematic, because what is sought is a reliable difference between two large, fluctuating numbers: the climate as we now know it (including human impact) and the unknown climate that might have existed were there no human impact. We can measure how the climate is changing in current time using a variety of techniques, but how do we measure the climate as it might have existed over the same period sans human impact? The short answer is that we cannot!
Unfortunately, only the former is commonly reported in newspapers, giving the impression to non-experts that it is all due to human impact. It is not, and the human impact component is normally only minor, but nevertheless, it is an important component. The headlines would not be as dramatic or fear-inducing if the readers were reminded that the human component is the difference between what we observe and what we model in the absence of human impact, and that is normally small.
Thus, we are concerned with changes in temperature due to human impact of a few tenths of a degree Celsius on a background that fluctuates several tens of degrees Celsius daily to monthly (due to the weather) and even more (typically 30 to 45oC) over the seasons of the year.
That is not to dismiss the possible seriousness of human-induced climate change if, in fact, it is actually occurring at the rate claimed by the doomsayers. That is the still unanswered challenge.
There is no question that climate change modeling exists at the very edge of feasible modeling, and it is for this reason that the nature of the models employed must be critically examined. You see, part of the problem is that the art and science of modeling is seldom taught in universities; somehow, students are expected to know how to model complex physico-chemical systems as though it was part of the human genome.
The author became so concerned with the lack of modeling skills among graduate students that he, while a Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, taught a course titled “Theories and Models in Science and Engineering.” I don’t recall anyone involved in climate change taking the course.
I began this op-ed with the question “Can We Really Model Climate Change?” and I will end with a considered opinion. The answer is a qualified “yes,” but only, in my humble opinion, if the modelers adhere to certain rules. The modelers must:
Carefully describe the theoretical bases of the model, clearly state all postulates and assumptions, and demonstrate that they do not reflect any preconceived bias toward a certain result.
List and describe the constitutive equations and constraints, demonstrate that all equations are independent, and demonstrate that there are a sufficient number of equations to cover all unknowns.
Refrain from introducing “ad hoc” factors (“crook’s constant” in my student days) to make the model “work.”
Ensure that any calibrating data are known from independent experiment and are known to be true within well-established bounds.
Carefully define “success,” and ensure that the scientific method of prediction and assessment is strictly adhered to, including the rejection of the model if only one incorrect prediction is made that cannot be corrected by valid reassessment of model parameters and input data.
I emphasize that the “rules” of modeling outlined above have been established by numerous scientific philosophers over thousands of years of collective work and have been instilled into the transition from empiricism to determinism that I call “science.”
As the saying goes, “The devil is in the details.” The emphasis on the natural laws renders these rules in compliance with previous scientific experience and must be recognized in any attempt to model complex physico-chemical systems in a deterministic manner, including (and especially) Earth’s climate. To ignore them is to do so at your (and our) peril.
R. Frigg and S. Hartmann, “Models in Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
On Friday, the findings of the audit conducted by the Arizona state Senate investigating the results of the 2020 presidential election were revealed.
CEO Doug Logan of Cyber Ninjas, the cybersecurity firm commissioned by Senate Republicans to assist in conducting the audit, noted that 23,344 mail-in ballots were reportedly sent to the wrong person in his presentation during the Livestream of the Arizona election audit results.
The slideshow detailed that those ballots sent to a different address in Maricopa County revealed “no one with the same last name shows as living at the address.”
In addition, Cyber Ninjas alleged, “2,382 voters voted in person even though they show … as having moved out of Maricopa County.”
The group’s data also showed that another 2,081 voters who moved out of state in the month prior to the election were given a “full ballot” with local and state level races as opposed to just the option to vote in the presidential election.
The months-long contentious audit has left Americans curious about the results, although the overall results presented by Cyber Ninjas confirmed that President Joe Biden won the state of Arizona.
However, the audit reportedly revealed numerous disparities and security issues in the election system. Arizona Republicans will likely continue to push for election integrity measures following the results of the audit being announced.
Many Americans across the country have had their suspicions regarding the level of election integrity present during last November’s election. Some think there were vast issues with the way voting was handled, while others say the problems were minuscule.
However, when it comes to Maricopa County, auditors of the 2020 election in the state of Arizona presented an eye-opening finding during a Friday Livestream: There were hundreds of potential dead voters.
Doug Logan, the CEO of cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, a group commissioned by the Arizona state Senate, reported that 282 “potentially deceased people” were discovered as having voted in the November election.
But according to the auditors, that’s not all.
The Cyber Ninjas team also reportedly found that up to 5,047 people voted in more than one county in Arizona, with approximately 5,295 compromised or doubled instances of voting.
The auditors noted 198 individuals registered to vote after the Oct. 15 registration deadline and went on to vote in the election.
Even when voter ID was used for protection, Logan noted, mistakes were made — 186 people who potentially had duplicate voter IDs submitted a vote in the election.
Maricopa County is one of the largest voting districts in Arizona. Millions of people cast their ballots.
While these reported mistakes may be in the hundreds, or even the thousands, all of the errors presented are inexcusable.
If these audit findings are indeed accurate, someone needs to answer for the discrepancies — America deserves election integrity.
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, an expert hired by the Arizona Senate to audit the mail-in ballot envelope images from November’s general election, told Senate leadership on Friday that his team’s review found thousands of duplicate ballots, as well as over 1,700 with no signatures.
Ayyadurai, who holds a Ph.D. in systems engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that there were 34,448 duplicate ballot envelopes from 17,126 unique voters.
Dr. Shiva On The Case Reporting That There Was Duplicate Ballots Found In The Maricopa Audit pic.twitter.com/cOhW0eukpj
The above graphic was shared by Logan during the hearing.
Throughout the entire audit, The Western Journal has provided extensive, sometimes exclusive, coverage of the Maricopa County election audit.
In July, The Western Journal conducted an exclusive interview with Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, which included a number of exclusive revelations.
In the months following the tense 2020 presidential election, Americans have been keeping an eye on the Arizona state Senate-conducted election audit.
On Friday afternoon, the findings presented by auditors during a Livestream event showed just how messy the election reportedly got in Maricopa County.
According to the audit team, the county initially sent 26,965 ballots to duplication. Cyber Ninjas, the digital security company which took part in conducting the audit, found that ballots seemingly appeared out of thin air.
The forensic audit counted 29,557 duplicate ballots, according to a presentation submitted by auditors. However, the county’s self-reported numbers were a few thousand below that number.
Maricopa County only reported 27,896 of these duplicate ballots.
How were there reportedly thousands of ballots worth of discrepancies?
Maricopa County, and the rest of the nation, are waiting anxiously to see what these alleged discrepancies mean for voter integrity across the country.
There were many shocking revelations forwarded on Friday during the Arizona Senate Republicans’ hearing on the Maricopa County 2020 election audit results.
Among the findings were that a number of the ballots appear to be digitally altered or “photoshopped,” although investigators have yet to officially confirm this.
The allegedly digitally altered ballots were highlighted by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, an expert in pattern recognition enlisted in the audit investigation by the Arizona Senate.
Ayyadurai revealed that, during the audit, election officials discovered a number of ballots were given “verified and approved” stamps despite signatures not being present on the ballots.
Curiously, in some instances, these “verified and approved” stamps were found behind graphics that were initially printed on the ballots, according to a presentation displayed by Ayyadurai.
This has led the auditors to believe that the ballots were “photoshopped.”
Also, Ayyadurai revealed that only 10 percent of the total ballots — roughly 1.8 million — even received a “verified and approved” stamp.
Most of those votes that did get the aforementioned stamp were actually received after election day, the auditors reported.
The Western Journal is following the Arizona audit findings closely as they are revealed during Friday’s hearing.
If you would like to know more, be sure to stay tuned in to The Western Journal’s coverage.
On Friday, Arizona state Republicans announced the findings of the Arizona Senate audit of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County.
Among the audit’s many findings was that over 17,000 total duplicate ballots — meaning ballots submitted by individuals who voted more than once in the election — were found.
Dr. Shiva’s team identified 17,322 duplicate ballots — this finding is NOT in the audit report
As much was revealed by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, an expert in pattern recognition and classification of diverse signals and signatures who has four degrees from M.I.T.
The Arizona Republicans conducting the audit enlisted Ayyadurai and his team of experts to aid in the audit by investigating mail-in ballot envelopes used in the election.
The team reported it found 17,322 duplicate ballots in the election.
As noted by Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake on Twitter, Maricopa County itself had reported no duplicate ballots.
In what may be the most amusing development of the week, aside from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crying on the House floor over American funding of Israeli defense capabilities (no tears over Haitian refugees, however), it turns out that Democratic political operatives think as little of Hunter Biden as you do.
According to the U.K. Daily Mail, citing a report from Insider, new emails between the younger Biden and two Democratic Party donors reveal that Hunter demanded $2 million in exchange for helping to unfreeze $30 billion in Libyan assets.
These assets had been frozen by the Obama administration during the rule of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.
At the time, Joe Biden was serving as vice president of the United States with Hunter not far behind — a fact that is turning out to be the worst -kept secret in Democratic politics in spite of rousing efforts by the free press to keep it under wraps for their guy.
When will the media and Big Tech apologize for censoring the CONFIRMED Hunter Biden laptop story?
There are several things we learn from these emails that Americans aren’t supposed to know.
First, we learn what his business associates believed Hunter brought to the table (which, as it turns out, was not his high intelligence quotient, industriousness or sparkling smile).
As put by Sam Jauhari, one of the mid-level Democratic donors with whom Hunter was engaging in higher-level chicanery, Hunter was well-connected to the people who could unfreeze the Libyan assets — namely Barack Obama, Joe Biden and then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
“Since he travels with dad he is connected everywhere in Europe and Asia where [Gadhafi] and [the Libyan Investment Authority] had money frozen,” Jauhari wrote in an email dated Jan. 28, 2015.
He also argued that Hunter could provide valuable access to leaders in the Chinese government, which at the time was blocking $15 billion in Libyan assets at the behest of the Obama administration and with the intent to bolster its influence in Africa.
Second, we learn the risks posed by throwing your lot in with that of Hunter Biden.
“His negatives,” Jauhari continued, “are that he is alcoholic, drug addict – kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches.”
While it may be unwise to trust a man without vices, it takes a certain measure of courage to partner with one whose entire life is like the pictures from “The Hangover” credits.
Reportedly, 5 percent of any Libyan assets managed to be unfrozen would go to Jauhari and his fellow Democratic benefactor, Sheikh Mohammed al-Rahbani, both of whom were in league with the post-Gadhafi Libyan government.
For Hunter, the justification was the aforementioned $2 million, which, according to sources for Insider, was disguised in the emails as “$2 per year retainer +++ success fees” in an attempt to conceal the gravity of the correspondence.
The emails also show that, by February 2016, at least one member of the Obama administration was directly involved.
John Sandweg, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, emailed Jauhari and al-Rahbani to brief them on his communications with Hunter.
“I spoke with HB’s team yesterday,” Sandweg explained. “They are interested in the project, but emphasized that for them to get involved, the team (lobbyists, lawyers and PR) would need to be a small group of folks they have a tight relationship with.”
With Joe Biden considering a run for the presidency at the time, Sandweg reiterated the Biden camp’s preference for secrecy: “They do not want a large group involved and they only want people with whom they have a close relationship with due to the sensitivities surrounding their involvement.”
While Jauhari ultimately hired neither Hunter nor Sandweg to assist in freeing the Libyan funds, these emails contribute to a litany of uncovered correspondence that continues to expose the Biden family for what it well appears to be.
Corrupt. Opportunistic. Non-transparent with the American public it supposedly spent the past half-century sacrificing in service of.
WATCH: Jen Psaki ignores question about Politico confirming reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. pic.twitter.com/JekOdrZO9j
Most important, the Biden entourage is friend to the farthest reaches of the American political left, which explains our establishment media continuing to abstain from investigating a story that, if it pertained to the Trump administration, might carry award potential.
The penalty for lying to Congress is up to five years in prison.
And, according to a recent report, President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was guilty of as much in December 2017.
This revelation came out thanks to the indictment of Michael A. Sussmann, a partner at the law firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
As The Washington Post reported, special counsel John Durham indicted Sussmann on the charge of making false statements to the FBI regarding the motives of his clients when they planted the rumor that the Trump campaign had a secret server it was using to communicate with Russia’s Alfa Bank.
These claims were later investigated as part of the long-running Trump-Russia investigation that ended with the ruling that there had been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
This initial rumor involving Alfa Bank originated with the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. It was then obtained by the Clinton campaign, who sent the false allegations forward to the FBI.
Here’s where the story ties back to Sullivan.
In December 2017, Sullivan told Congress that he had no idea that Fusion was involved in the Alfa Bank opposition research and “denied knowing anything about Fusion in 2016 or who was conducting the opposition research for the campaign,” according to Paul Sperry of Real Clear Investigations.
However, in Sussmann’s indictment, it was revealed that he, along with the cyber experts recruited to prove the Trump-Russia connection, “coordinated with representatives and agents of the Clinton campaign.”
Sperry further alleged that “sources close to the case confirmed” that Sullivan was among those campaign officials.
“They say [Sullivan] was briefed on the development of the opposition-research materials tying Trump to Alfa Bank, and was aware of the participants in the project,” he wrote.
In other words, Sullivan was a key player in the plot to spread a wild conspiracy theory involving Trump and Alfa Bank, a conspiracy theory he knew to be forwarded by an opposition research firm.
The very same conspiracy theory, in fact, that the Clinton campaign later fed to the FBI.
According to the report, Sullivan knew about the biased source of this information, despite telling Congress otherwise.
Left-wing protesters gave former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton an icy reception Friday as she visited a university in Northern Ireland to collect the title of chancellor.
The BBC reported Clinton showed up at Queen’s University in Belfast where she collected a historic title: the school’s first female chancellor.
Clinton, who the U.K. Daily Mail reported had just collected an honorary doctorate in civil law at Oxford University in England, said during remarks that Queen’s University is “special” and that she was excited to help “tell the university’s exciting story.”
Apparently, the school’s administrators think highly of failed 2016 presidential candidate and former first lady. But not everyone was pleased to see Clinton pay a visit to campus or collect such a high honor.
A large group of very vocal leftist demonstrators gave her an earful as she walked around the university.
Clinton was called a “war criminal,” a “f***ing scumbag” and a child killer as she was followed and hectored throughout her visit of the school’s grounds, according to a video posted on YouTube on Friday.
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
“Hillary Clinton is a war criminal!” one man yelled repeatedly at Clinton as she smiled and exchanged pleasantries with others on the other side of a barrier.
She never looked at those who were doing the yelling. Still, it’s difficult to imagine she didn’t hear their words.
With passion, one person yelled out: “You’re not welcome in Belfast! Go away, you war criminal scumbag!”
Another man asked loudly, “How many kids have you killed today?”
Yet another angry demonstrator called Clinton “imperialist scum” and “Yankee” while demanding she “go home!”
Chants of, “Hillary, Hillary Hillary, out, out out!” were repeated throughout the four-minute video posted online.
It isn’t immediately clear which if any particular group organized the protest. But it’s absolutely clear that the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee has courted enemies across the globe.
One man who addressed a crowd on the video shared online accused Clinton of being responsible for “over 400 drone strikes across multiple nations which overwhelmingly killed civilians and even children.”
The man also blasted Clinton for labeling black men “superpredators when she helped lobby for the 1994 [U.S. crime bill].”
University faculty likely thought Friday would be a celebratory event that would put them on the map globally, but it ended up being a humiliating spectacle.
Clinton might be well-loved by snooty liberal academics, but it’s clear that people from all walks of life and with different political views hold her in complete contempt.
A photographer who captured images of Border Patrol agents on horseback near an influx of Haitians who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border said he didn’t see the agents whip anyone.
“Some of the Haitian men started running, trying to go around the horses,” photographer Paul Ratje told local station KTSM, explaining the situation. “I’ve never seen them whip anyone,” he said. “He was swinging it, but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
The images of agents on horseback drew criticism from Democrats, pro-immigration activists, and White House officials this week, with some claiming that the agents were whipping the Haitians. However, a union that represents Border Patrol agents said that claim is false, while some officials said the agents were merely controlling the horses with their reins.
President Joe Biden, during a news conference Friday, promised an investigation into the incident and declared that the agents’ actions were “wrong” and “will pay.” Biden didn’t make any reference to the pushback against the claims that agents were whipping illegal immigrants.
“I promise you, those people will pay,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous. It’s wrong.”
Thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly Haitians, live in a primitive, makeshift camp under the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande between the U.S. and Mexico while waiting to be detained and processed by Border Patrol, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
A top Border Patrol union official, Brandon Judd, told The Epoch Times this week that agents were not whipping their reins at the illegal aliens.
“Agents have to keep the migrants away from the horses for their own protection. And so they will use the reins, to twirl the reins, so that they will stay away from the horses. But they do not use those reins to lash out, to try to strike people. Those agents did not use those reins in any way, shape, or form to try to strike anybody,” he said, adding that horses are used as a “deterrent technique” to prevent illegals from entering the country.
Regarding comments made by White House officials, Judd said Border Patrol officials feel abandoned in the wake of a burgeoning crisis.
In recent weeks, more than 15,000 Haitian illegal aliens camped underneath an international bridge spanning Del Rio, Texas, and Mexico, prompting humanitarian concerns.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday said that horse patrols around the border will be suspended following the images having gone viral.
“Which the president feels, we all feel, was inhumane, immoral, ineffective, wasn’t operationally working. And because of the disfunction of it, we have led to a very broken system that we’re dealing with today,” she said in a comment at the White House.
Gina Raimondo says ‘robust commercial engagement’ with Communist regime is ‘just an economic fact’
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo called Friday for closer business ties with China even as Beijing increases its military muster.
“It’s just an economic fact” that the United States must trade with China, Raimondo told the Wall Street Journal. “I actually think robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions.”
Raimondo also said that climate-change cooperation with China may prove “fruitful” for the United States. Biden climate czar John Kerry, whom Chinese officials in September relegated to a Zoom conference as they met in person with Taliban leaders, has made similar comments. As commerce secretary, Raimondo plays a vital role in managing international trade, including with Chinese companies often flagged for national security concerns.
National security experts panned Raimondo’s call as out of touch with reality.
“The Commerce Department hasn’t adjusted to a world where China is a serious rival to the U.S. and is heading to a slow-motion clash with Congress,” said Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Raimondo’s call for increased cooperation with China comes as the Communist regime increases its aggressive military posturing. China on Thursday sent another 24 warplanes into Taiwanese airspace, one of the largest incursions in two years. Beijing has also significantly altered its messaging on Taiwan during the Biden administration. Chinese state media in September threatened “military measures” after reports broke that the United States would recognize the island democracy as “Taiwan” instead of “Taipei.”
Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou’s release a major priority for Beijing
The Biden administration is preparing to release the chief financial officer of Chinese spyware company Huawei in a deal brokered with Beijing, the Wall Street Journalreported Friday.
The Department of Justice negotiated the deal to release Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese national who was arrested by Canadian authorities upon American request in 2018. Federal courts charged Meng with financial fraud and trade espionage, which carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
China, however, continues to imprison two Canadian nationals—former diplomat Michael Kovrig and consultant Michael Spavor—whom Chinese authorities detained only days after Meng’s arrest in 2018. Experts have speculated that Beijing used the two Canadians as a potential bargaining chip for Meng’s release, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has so far ruled out any potential exchange involving Meng and the two citizens. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo called China’s charges against Kovrig and Spavor “groundless” and “politically motivated.”
Meng was at the helm of Huawei, which has formed deep ties with the Chinese military and developed surveillance tools potentially used to spy on Uyghur Muslims, as it exploded in growth during the 2010s. Beijing summoned its American and Canadian ambassadors after Meng’s arrest, calling the charges “extremely vicious” and assuring “serious consequences” if Meng were not released.
The nation has been waiting for months to see what findings would come out of the Arizona audit of the 2020 election.
On Friday afternoon, the results were presented.
According to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, the founder of EchoMail, the software team in charge of looking for just the signatures themselves, there were significant discrepancies in the signature fields of ballots submitted in Maricopa County.
Ayyadurai highlighted the findings during a Livestream of the audit results.
“EchoMail was commissioned to identify [the] presence of Blanks, Scribbles, Signatures in Signature Region, NOT to perform Signature Verification/Matchmaking,” a presentation shared by Ayyadurai noted.
“If Scribbles ALONE were considered ‘Bad Signatures,’ then EchoMail ITSELF identified 335% more ‘Bad Signatures’ than Maricopa did from its ENTIRE Signature Verification process.”
The EchoMail founder noted this report does not even include the “blank” signatures that Maricopa County counted. These findings were reportedly only taking into account the signatures which were considered “scribbles.”
According to auditors, there are significant discrepancies between Maricopa County’s initial results of the 2020 election and what audit findings revealed, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry appeared to be indifferent to the plight of Uyghurs in China when he said “life is always full of tough choices” in a recent interview with Bloomberg.
Kerry was asked, “Clearly a priority of the Biden administration is really addressing climate, but it’s not the only priority. There are other things as well, such as the Uyghur situation in the West. What is the process by which one trades off climate against human rights?”
In response, Kerry said: “Life is always full of tough choices in the relationship between nations.”
To back up his argument, Kerry pointed to former President Ronald Reagan—who according to Kerry “thought the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire”—but went to Iceland to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavík Summit in October 1986.
The meeting ultimately resulted in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States.
“The point I’m making is that, even as there were egregious human rights issues, which Ronald Reagan called them out on, we have to find a way forward to make the world safer, to protect our countries, and act in our interests,” Kerry continued.
“We can do and must do the same thing now,” he added. “Yes, we have issues, a number of different issues [with China], but first and foremost, this planet must be protected.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is committing genocide against Uyghurs in China’s far-western Xinjiang region, subjecting them to forced sterilization, forced abortion, torture, forced labor, and the removal of children from their families. Additionally, the communist regime has detained more than one million Uyghurs in internment camps.
Uyghur and Kazakhstan national Gulbakhar Jalilova, 54, a former detainee, told The Epoch Times in 2018 that detained Uyghurs were psychologically and physically tortured, poisoned, and even killed by injection of unknown drugs.
Also in 2018, another former Uyghur detainee, a Kazakhstan national aged 54, who spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, said young girls were being raped inside these camps and were given pills to stop them from becoming pregnant.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has since issued a statement criticizing Kerry’s remarks.
“Special Envoy John Kerry’s ghoulish response dismissing genocide is divorced from American values and interests, and I strongly urge him to immediately retract it,” McCaul stated.
He added: “The United States should never ignore atrocities and genocide in exchange for commitments made by the CCP on climate, especially when the CCP has a proven track record of ignoring their international commitments.
“I call on Secretary Blinken to provide a full reporting of exactly what commitments Special Envoy Kerry is making to China on behalf of the United States.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called Kerry’s remarks “horrific” in a Twitter post.
“Biden Dems: We care about $$ much more than human rights, slavery or Chinese concentration camps,” Cruz wrote.
The Munich-based World Uyghur Congress did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this month, Kerry traveled to China seeking Beijing’s cooperation on climate change. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi used his meeting with Kerry to demand Washington “pay attention to and pro-actively respond to China’s ‘two lists’ and ‘three bottom lines.’”
One of the lists asked the United States to correct its “wrongdoings,” including revoking its sanctions on CCP officials, which were announced by the United States in response to widely reported humanrightsabuses.
U.S.-based advocacy group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) is calling on the United Nations to take action against China’s state-sanctioned practice of killing prisoners of conscience to supply organs for its lucrative transplant market.
“The failure of the United Nations to address and thoroughly investigate the forced organ harvesting from living people in China is an unacceptable omission that needs to be resolved,” said Dr. Torsten Trey, founder and executive director of DAFOH, in a Sept. 23 press release (pdf).
The 76th session of the U.N. General Assembly began on Sept. 17 in New York City, as world leaders and foreign ministers gather to discuss issues such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.
DAFOH stated that China’s horrific practice should be on the agenda of the world body. It also called on participants of the U.N. summit to “treat this issue like any other crimes against humanity.”
“After more than two decades of forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience, DAFOH believes the UN has fallen short in taking the lead in stopping these crimes against humanity,” according to the press release.
China is one of the top destinations for those in need of vital organs as its transplant industry boasts an extraordinarily short waiting time. To explain such a phenomenon, the communist regime has claimed that there are many voluntary donors in China while locals have a low demand for transplant organs. Beijing has also said it relies on its national organ donation system to procure organs.
In 2019, evidence surfaced that Beijing was killing innocent people to drive its transplant market. That year, a London-based people’s tribunal published a report concluding that forced organ harvesting was happening on a “significant scale” in China, with Falun Gong practitioners being the main source of organs.
Adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice also known as Falun Dafa, have been targets of persecution by the Chinese regime since 1999. Several years later, the Chinese regime allegedly began harvesting organs from detained Falun Gong adherents.
China’s public transplant data has also been debunked, according to a 2016 report by David Matas, a human rights lawyer; David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific; and Ethan Gutmann, a U.S. investigative journalist. The report estimated that Beijing carried out between 60,000 and 100,000 organ transplants a year, as opposed to 10,000 claimed by Beijing.
The report concluded that most of the organs came from Falun Gong adherents, while the remaining originated from other prisoners of conscience—House Christians, Uyghur Muslims, and Tibetans.
“Given the scope of China’s organ harvesting crimes with an unknown number of victims and the nature of the crime itself, a commercialized murder for transplants, condemning this inhumane practice remains an unfulfilled task for the largest organization in the world,” Trey added.
The United Nations, the Office of Spokesperson for the U.N. Secretary-General, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
In June, OHCHR special rapporteurs and several other human rights experts said they were “extremely alarmed by reports of alleged ‘organ harvesting’ targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims, and Christians, in detention in China.”
They called on China to “promptly respond to the allegations of ‘organ harvesting’ and to allow independent monitoring by international human rights mechanisms.”
China’s forced organ harvesting is now being discussed at the World Summit on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting, which began on Sept. 17 and resumed on Sept. 24, ending on Sept. 26. DAFOH is one of five NGOs sponsoring the online event.
Controversial left-wing activist the Rev. Al Sharpton has joined a chorus of people from across the political spectrum who are decrying President Joe Biden over broken campaign promises and chaotic policy.
Facing multiple crises both foreign and domestic, Biden is entrenched against conservative and independent Americans who perhaps hoped his calls for unity following the 2020 election would bring the country together.
Instead of pursuing unity, Biden has catered to the far left of his party as the country has faced destabilization at home and abroad. Aside from the border crisis, the country left Afghanistan last month with the stinging feeling of defeat.
In addition to those crises, prices for basic commodities are up for Americans of all stripes.
Biden is also facing hurdles with Democrats in Congress over the price of a $3.5 trillion spending proposal and he spent part of Friday threatening his country’s own border patrol agents:
“Those people will pay… there will be consequences” said President Joe Biden on Friday of mounted Border Patrol agents photographed confronting Haitian migrants. pic.twitter.com/cLMliFfJi9
If Biden was under the impression he still had the blind support of every loyal Democratic black voter, Sharpton on Thursday let it be known publicly that they, too, intend to hold the president to account.
Sharpton actually accused Biden of double-crossing minority voters who supported him last November in large numbers.
“[Biden] said on election night: Black America, you had my back, I’ll have yours,” Sharpton told The Washington Post on Thursday . “Well, we’re being stabbed in the back, Mr. President. We need you to stop the stabbing — from Haiti to Harlem.”
“He said on election night: Black America, you had my back, I’ll have yours,” Al Sharpton said in a Thursday phone interview. “Well, we’re being stabbed in the back, Mr. President. We need you to stop the stabbing — from Haiti to Harlem.”https://t.co/7e26CJ1JRY@washingtonpost
Sharpton, who visited the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis in Del Rio, Texas, on Thursday to call for an end to deportations of Haitian migrants, told the Post Biden could rectify his betrayal of black America by offering those Haitians residency.
The Post reported Sharpton said Biden faces a “defining moment,” and still has the opportunity to “rise to the occasion.”
That, Sharpton said, or the president could turn the knife and let down “those that helped you get there.”
Sharpton actually took to social media Thursday to unleash on the Biden administration to his 666,000 Twitter followers in a message directed at the Department of Homeland Security.
“The treatment of Haitians in Texas is unacceptable and a moral outrage,” Sharpton wrote. “DHS must meet immediately. This must be stopped!!!”
The treatment of Haitians in Texas is unacceptable and a moral outrage. DHS must meet immediately. This must be stopped!!!
The controversial political figure spoke briefly in Del Rio on Thursday, but his remarks — at least at one point — were drowned out by hecklers.
Sharpton and those hecklers do share some overlapping anger.
Biden, during the 2020 campaign, was accused of taking black votes for granted, and at times appeared as though he thought he was entitled to them.
Sharpton appears to have something in common with a majority of the country right now, according to polling: He has a bone to pick with the White House.
The tragic mess on the Texas border and the huge influx of Haitians (FYI: who aren’t fleeing Haiti; they left Haiti quite a while ago for Latin America) has created a dangerous and unhygienic situation that has been compared to the third world.
Events are moving so fast, it’s impossible for us to track them all in a newsletter, but here are some of the most recent reports from Fox News’ Bill Melugin.
Melugin is doing a great job of covering this story that the White House is outright lying about while much of the mainstream media studiously ignores it.
One of the more striking revelations is that despite the White House’s toothless claims that the border is closed and every illegal crosser will be sent home, Melugin reports that they’re actually being given “requests” (not orders) to appear at an ICE office within the next 60 days.
I’m sure they’ll all comply with those requests.
When called out in the Senate for his disastrous handling of the border, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas got snippy, and instead of answering the question, he snapped that he works 18 hours a day (imagine how bad the crisis would be if he worked 24/7 at it!).
His latest move that suggests a sleep-deprived mind is to take the mounted Border Patrol agents off their already impossible duty and put them on desk jobs, despite the woeful lack of personnel we’re already suffering and the fact that the wild accusation against them is both bogus and idiotic.
The left needs a constant stream of fake news to make their opponents look racist because otherwise, Americans might focus on real news and realize these people should never be trusted with any public office above the rank of assistant dog catcher.
The latest example is the continuing brouhaha over photos they claim showed the Border Patrol whipping Haitian illegal immigrants when those were actually their leather reins flying.
They don’t carry whips, and they didn’t strike anyone with their reins, which they spin to keep people back for their own safety and to prevent anyone from grabbing the reins and taking control of their horses.
This is standard procedure for cops on horseback.
But never mind that: Leftists who know even less about cowboy skills than they do about math skills are continuing their outrage fest even after the “whipping migrants” narrative was debunked all the way to the bunkhouse.
Leave it to Rep. Maxine Waters to have the craziest take on the story, not only accusing the agents of using (nonexistent) whips on migrants but saying, “What we witnessed was worse than what we witnessed in slavery.”
“I’m unhappy, and I’m not just unhappy with the cowboys who were running down Haitians and using their reins to whip them. I’m unhappy with this administration,” Rep. Maxine Waters says at a news conference on the situation at the U.S. southern border. https://t.co/tUeqoESHTPpic.twitter.com/BuWTMs8ilf
That’s as offensive as downplaying the Holocaust by claiming your political opponent is “literally Hitler,” which is also something the left does regularly. But supposedly more responsible officials were almost as bad.
Even the president and vice president, desperate for any distraction from their cascade of tragic disasters, pointed fingers at the Border Patrol cavalry, with Biden calling the (false) accusation disturbing, Jen Psaki declaring it “obviously horrific” and Kamala Harris saying it’s “horrible” and demanding a “thorough investigation.”
Uh, Vice President Harris? If you really want a thorough investigation of what’s happening on the border, might I suggest you start by actually going there?
Hero flight attendants fought off an enraged passenger who attempted to storm the cockpit of a JetBlue flight out of Boston this week — at one point being heard saying “Allah” — in a brutal clash that has once again raised questions about airline safety.
That passenger on JetBlue Flight 261 heading to San Juan, Puerto Rico, Wednesday night “had to be physically restrained by flight crew members … during the passenger’s attempt to gain access to the flight deck,” an FBI agent states in his affidavit.
The suspect, Khalil El Dahr, “became angry” after a phone call he tried to make was unsuccessful, the affidavit states.
Soon after, he “rushed toward the flight deck yelling to be shot,” the FBI agent writes. “Six or seven” flight crew members then took him on until they could subdue him.
At “one point during the incident, they were able to understand El Dahr said ‘Allah’ in a raised tone,” the agent reports.
El Dahr faces felony charges of interfering with a flight crew, Special Agent William Lopez of the FBI’s San Juan Division said in the affidavit.
Retired FAA special agent Brian Sullivan, who warned of a possible terrorist attack in the run-up to the 9/11 hijackings out of Logan International Airport in Boston, said Friday this is a worrisome confrontation.
“There’s been a lot of air rage incidents of late. The frequency of these can mask attempts to test the system,” Sullivan told the Herald. “Sometimes those who test the system can ask to be shot in an attempt to see if they can draw out a Federal Air Marshal.”
He added the “last line of defense is passengers and crew” and that’s exactly what transpired more than an hour out of San Juan that night.
“They didn’t just ‘see something, say something,’ in this instance they did something,” Sullivan said.
The FBI’s report tells a harrowing story of flight attendants who were punched in the chest and grabbed by the tie to the point of nearly blacking out. That agent, the affidavit states, is assigned to the bureau’s counter-terrorism squad.
Once a flight crew officer “opened the cockpit door,” the agent writes, El Dahr noticed that and “grabbed the FA (flight attendant) by their collar and tie with one hand while using his other hand to grab the overhead compartment to gain leverage to kick.”
The flight attendant was “kicked in the chest” and the suspect was also squeezing the other attendant’s tie so tightly the FBI agent wrote, “it prevented the JetBlue FA from breathing.”
The flight attendants teamed up using the tie, seat belts and a pair of “flex cuffs” an off-duty flight attendant offered up to restrain El Dahr, records state. But, the agent adds, he broke the cuffs and freed himself, forcing the crew members to double-up their efforts.
“A second pair was fastened along with 4 seat belt extenders to secure” him in a seat in the back row, the affidavit adds.
Sullivan questioned why the flight deck officer exposed the open cockpit.
“Why did he jeopardize the cockpit by opening the cockpit door?” Sullivan said. “By coming out, he endangered the cockpit.”
He added this “clearly demonstrates the need for the secondary cockpit barrier as advocated by the Airline Pilots Association.”
Reports of unruly passengers on U.S. airlines have taken off this year — spiking by 500% thanks largely to passengers who refused to wear masks on flights during the pandemic, the New York Post reports quoting an FAA study.
A Cuomo brother has been accused of sexual harassment.
This time, however, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo isn’t the one under the gun.
Instead, in a Friday Op-Ed for The New York Times, veteran television journalist Shelley Ross revealed that Chris Cuomo — CNN anchor and brother of Andrew Cuomo — was the one who sexually harassed her.
Apparently, it runs in the family.
Ross was Cuomo’s boss at ABC News “nearly two decades ago” and, at a 2005 going-away party for an ABC colleague, she said he groped her.
“… [H]e walked toward me and greeted me with a strong bear hug while lowering one hand to firmly grab and squeeze the cheek of my buttock,” Ross wrote.
“‘I can do this now that you’re no longer my boss,’ he said to me with a kind of cocky arrogance. ‘No you can’t,’ I said, pushing him off me at the chest while stepping back, revealing my husband who had seen the entire episode at close range. We quickly left.”
It wasn’t too long after that Ross received an email from Cuomo with the subject line “Now that I think of it … I am ashamed.”
In the email, Cuomo profusely apologizes and attempts to play off the incident by painting it as merely a consequence of how happy he was to see Ross. Cuomo doesn’t take accountability for his actions; he merely creates excuses.
“though my hearty greeting was a function of being glad to see you,” he wrote, “christian slater got arrested for a (kind of) similar act (though bourne of an alleged negative intent, unlike my own) … and as a husband i can empathize with not liking to see my wife patted as such …”
“so pass along my apology to your very good and noble husband … and i apologize to you as well, for even putting you in such a position … next time, i will remember the lesson, no matter how happy i am to see you …”
You would think if Cuomo really cared so much, he wouldn’t be offering up so many excuses.
Also, if he cared so much, he’d probably be using proper punctuation and capitalization.
Ross sensed as much, noting in her Op-Ed that she’s “always seen” his written apology as “an attempt to provide himself with legal and moral coverage to evade accountability.”
Former NBA megastar and TNT basketball analyst Shaquille O’Neal has always stood out in the world of celebrities and beloved athletes, and not just because he’s over 7 feet tall.
In the mid-1990s, my family couldn’t, or wouldn’t, buy me the latest pair of Michael Jordan’s expensive Air Jordan shoes from Nike. My mother said O’Neal’s much more affordable Shaq Attaq shoe from Reebok would be sufficient.
Turns out, Mom was right. I wore them with pride.
Shaq has always had an underlying quality of humility and charm to accompany his on-the-court greatness. Since retiring from the game in 2011, he’s become a cultural phenomenon, a top basketball commentator and the face of numerous products that I might consider buying, thanks to the spokesman.
But don’t you dare call the four-time NBA champ a “celebrity.”
O’Neal despises celebrity culture, he told the New York Post this week. The Post reported after speaking with O’Neal that if there is one piece of his long legacy he hopes will endure, it is that he has tried to be kind and not a loudmouth star.
He also had some harsh words for the people mainstream culture touts as being normal.
“These celebrities are going freaking crazy and I don’t want to be one,” he said, apparently coming to the same conclusion as so many normal, everyday people about our morally bankrupt culture and those who influence it.
“I don’t want to be in that category. Celebrities are crazy, they really are. Don’t call me that anymore,” O’Neal said. “These people are out of their freaking mind with how they treat people, what they do, what they say.”
“That’s never been me. I never want to be looked at like that,” he said.
“I denounce my celebrity-ness today. I’m done with it,” O’Neal added while discussing a new venture with Kellogg’s to give up to 60,000 kids across the country sports equipment, playing venues and uniforms so they can have their own shot at athletic success.
The former Lakers star said he sees himself as a “regular person.”
“All my life, everyone probably gets stereotyped, but us celebrities, we get stereotyped because most of these celebrities are out of their mind,” he said. “I don’t do that. I’m a regular person that listened, followed his dreams and made it.”
O’Neal also said he’s still in touch with his roots. Raised in the most humbling of settings before spending decades in the spotlight, somehow, he still gets it.
“I came from nothing … but, just because I made it doesn’t mean I’m bigger than you, smarter than you — just because I have more money doesn’t mean I’m better than you,” he said, according to the Post. “I’ve never been that way and I never will be that way. So I don’t want to be in that category of people.”
This isn’t the first time this year that the big man has come out swinging against elitism. In June, he appeared to challenge “woke” Lakers star LeBron James, who had complained about the supposedly grueling NBA schedule despite earning a whopping $39 million to play a game last year.
“When you’re living in a world where people, 40 million people have been laid off and I’m making $200 million, you won’t get no complaining from me,” O’Neal told CNBC.
“If I gotta play back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back, and I’m making all that money, I just gotta do what the job entitles me to do,” he said.
Hopefully, O’Neal’s denunciation of the culture of pampered fame doesn’t mean we will be seeing less of him.
I’m, for one, am not ready to open up social media or turn on the TV and not see the NBA legend. Our toxic culture needs more people like the big man whose heart and determination to win and treat others with respect always meant more than his free throw shooting percentage.
Out of nostalgia, I’m half-tempted right now to start searching Mom’s attic for those 1995 Shaq Attaq shoes.
Beijing Biden is letting China back into U.S. federal infrastructure after Trump banned their drones.
Despite the Trump administration blacklisting DJI – a controversial Chinese technology company – several branches of the federal government under have purchased drones from the firm under President Joe Biden.
DJI Innovations – formerly Da Jiang Innovations Science – currently leads the world’s market drone market, first catching the attention of U.S. intelligence officials in 2015. The organization has admitted complying with Beijing’s data requests, leading the U.S. Army to ban their use in 2017, citing cyber vulnerabilities.
The office of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles sent a memo stating officials have “moderate confidence” DJI’s commercial drones and software are “providing US critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.”
Now, America is buying these drones again, giving the Chinese Communist Party yet another entry into U.S. federal infrastructure.
The purchases follow the appointment of two high-profile Biden campaign officials who previously worked for a consulting firm lobbying for DJI: Senior Spokesman for Biden Inaugural Committee Matt Hill, and Director of State Communication Meira Bernstein.
Following stints at the Global Strategy Group, Hill began serving as the Senior Associate Communications Director, and Bernstein is now Deputy Assistant Secretary for Media Operations at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Deleted client lists from the Global Strategy Group’s website reveal the firm working on behalf of DJI.
CLIENT LIST.
As Axios notes, the Secret Service bought eight DJI drones on July 26th, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) purchased 19 drones a few days earlier.
In contrast, under the Trump administration, the DHS – the Secret Service’s parent agency – asserted that DJI was “providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.”
The New York Timesreported on a 2016 DJI press briefing in China where company spokesman Zhang Fanxi described how DJI “is complying with requests from the Chinese government to hand over data”:
